The rapper J. Cole’s music has always been possessed by dreams—having them, chasing them, realizing them, and realizing how many get snuffed out. He is a sentimentalist and reluctant success story who surveys the wreckage of his old neighborhood, and others like it, even as he pushes on to greater heights. His songs have long balanced wishful thinking with an encroaching pessimism—the toxicity of a world that crushes idealists. (Even now, as an accomplished thirty-six-year-old rapper, he is still trying to achieve things that others might see as completely delusional: after suggesting that he intended to try out for the N.B.A. and then receiving an invitation from the Detroit Pistons on social media, in August, Cole made his professional début for the Rwanda-based Patriots Basketball Club, in the Basketball Africa League, last Sunday.) For his entire career, Cole has been trying to figure out how to realize his own potential without losing sight of all the wasted lives left behind in the streets where he’s from.
As an aspiring rapper and ball player, Cole moved from Fayetteville, North Carolina, to New York City, where he shopped his demo and tried to walk onto the St. John’s University basketball team. Basketball didn’t pan out, but rap did: after initially getting rejected, Cole became the first signee to Jay-Z’s Roc Nation label, in 2009. His early mixtapes, “The Warm Up” and “Friday Night Lights,” built upon a basketball theme to tell an underdog story, that of a small-market prospect trying to make it to the major leagues. With the release of the albums “Born Sinner” and “2014 Forest Hills Drive,” Cole rose to rap’s highest commercial reaches, becoming a peer of next-gen rap stars Drake and Kendrick Lamar, but his songs were marred by a monotonous approach and a limited perspective. “4 Your Eyez Only,” from 2016, found the rapper experimenting with character study, giving his music more dimension. On his subsequent album, “KOD,” he pantomimed the feel of the SoundCloud rap scene and adopted an alter ego. These moves were successful to an extent, but it seemed as if he was grasping at straws, seeking a work-around for the hard labor of self-actualization.
Cole’s sixth album, “The Off-Season,” is filled with songs that convey triumph and relief. “I’m thankful ’cause I made it past my thirties, no one murdered me / Still remember vividly the nigga that pulled a gun on me / I’m petrified, but moving like I got no sense of urgency,” he raps on “Pride Is the Devil.” The lyric is representative of his state throughout—locked inside the frames of various flashbacks, reanalyzing close calls. Like Lamar, Cole presents himself as a philosopher trying to keep his head down as bullets whiz past, even though navigating the crossfire can be deadlier than choosing a side. He describes pulling a trigger for the first time, as a child, as a Faustian bargain, and invokes chalk outlines as a constant omen of long odds. The tracks that Cole fills with big-money rapper talk are subverted by more introspective ones rehashing the deadly daily gamble of the life that he avoided. “Thank God, we survived around where the terrorists hovered / Though traumatized, wouldn’t trade it for nothin’ / Through hard times, it was there I discovered / A hustle, and makin’ the best out the struggle,” he says.
To capture the extreme adversity of his upbringing, Cole returns to his favorite metaphor of the aspiring athlete—a decision that suits the album’s histrionics and fanfare. The dual connotations of “baller”—someone who plays ball and someone who has made it big—are constantly intersecting on “The Off-Season.” Cole invokes the swagger and competitive fire of pro basketball, using it as a barometer for prosperity. On songs such as “100 Mil’,” he speaks of his fortune like it’s a supermax contract, the accrued earnings of a franchise player, and champions the core tenets of Jordan philosophy—never get outworked, never forget a slight, and never neglect the sportsman’s twin roles of participant and performer.
Many verses grapple with what Cole owes himself versus what he owes his audience—it feels like the first time that he has significantly questioned his reputation. Cole has been hailed as a paragon of the self-made artist (immortalized as going “platinum with no features”), but here he outsources a captivating range of beats from known commodities such as Timbaland, Boi-1da, Jake One, T-Minus, and DJ Dahi. The varied soundscape lets him test a wider range of flows, like a creative freak athlete letting loose the full length and limberness of his body at a dunk contest. Rap, in its own way, is a competitive sport. Every step taken is one along a professional path carved out by rappers such as Cole’s mentor, Jay-Z, with the goal to cement one’s status as a legend of the game. Cole reinforces his case with some of his flashiest lyricism, adapting the language of the ESPN talking heads: he’s the GOAT, on rap Mt. Rushmore. Yet, despite the bluster, the violent scenes of Cole’s youth are more evocative than any of the victory celebrations—hinting at which of the two is more present in his mind—and the comfort that money affords Cole is usually revealed to be a remedy for trauma.
The success of Cole’s early music was how it dramatized the pursuit of success. He was a hood bystander who’d escaped for the greener pastures of the big-city university, only to defer that track to chase a rap dream. Failure meant returning to his small town empty-handed and saddled with debt. These stakes gave his raps a propulsive boost, with Cole seeking his ambitions in real time through his music. But, as Cole became successful, his raps grew myopic and a bit whiny. On “The Off-Season,” he taps into survivor’s remorse. By taking an inquisitive position and reliving every dodged bullet that could’ve put his dream on ice, he not only restores gravity to his raps, he grants himself command of his narrative. His verses have loosened. His grasp of melody has tightened. His songs uncoil instead of taking predictable linear paths, and his writing is performed as an act of soul-searching. When Cole repeats the phrase “made it out, it gotta mean something,” it’s as if he’s carrying the weight of his city’s deferred dreams. Much like the athletes whom he seeks to emulate, Cole becomes a vicarious bearer of hope.
