Review Summary: Should Delete Now.
For about a decade now, J Cole has been allowed to exist in this liminal space wherein he is considered one of the greats despite merely having only one more-than-good album under his belt in that timeframe with
2014 Forest Hills Drive. Other than that, his reputation has managed to skirt by on the backs of brilliant guest verses, while his albums rattled off a series of broken promises that true greatness was still on the way. Tomorrow never came though.
4 Your Eyez Only managed to make waves with a song proclaiming the joys of laundry, and
KOD provided enough fodder for an additional dorm room bong hit to accompany a spirited viewing of Christopher Nolan’s Inception. If you can tell me a single song off of
The Off-Season without looking, I will call you a liar. Still, I approached each album with clear eyes and open ears due to the popular sentiment that he is some sort of hip-hop sage that is among the best out there in rap’s current landscape, hoping against hope that the potential gold would finally be realized. Each time I was met with a lump of Cole.
Might Delete Later comes off the heels of an electrifying callout verse from Kendrick Lamar, in which he denied Cole’s claim of there being a Big Three in hip-hop (Cole, Kendrick, and Drake), championing himself at the top, and it provides the clearest opportunity for Cole to distinguish himself in rap’s current hierarchy. To be clear, he does, but that position is d
amn sure not at the top.
It’s frankly shocking how unserious and indifferent Jermaine is throughout a dozen tracks, with bars and punchlines that scan like parody. One need not look further than the opener, “Pricey”, for Cole to proclaim he “Climbed up out the trenches as a shorty with intentions/to switch my whip as much as Rick and Morty switch dimensions.” In the second verse, he once again comes through with his trademark empty promise of greatness, “Breakin news, I’ve officially entered my prime/which is real interesting, this is the point where a rapper would typically start to decline.” This is after saying he’s “David Chapelle on his latest Netflix/Go ‘head try to cancel my sh
it.” Save your eyerolls for when he meets his Farrakhan shoutout quota, lest they roll out of your skull. Please keep in mind this is only the first track.
If we zoom out, it’s clear that Jermaine has been spending a little too much time with Drake and learned all the wrong lessons. “H.Y.B.” -which stands for “Hide Your B
itch” and, yes, that is a play on the ancient “Hide Your Kids/Hide Your Wife” meme- finds Cole borrowing Aubrey’s penchant of culture vulturing to briefly pretend that he’s Bri’ish, roight with a bonafide drill song. He says the quiet part out loud when he says “I keep forgetting I’m J Cole.” Bas and Central Cee make an appearance to lend credibility but I can’t tell you if that worked or not because I am frankly too awestruck by Jermaine delivering a strong contender for worst bar of all time:
A-B-C-D-E-F-G-H-I-J-K-M-N-O-P/that’s little me in the classroom askin’, “what’s L?”
Candidly, I have no idea what to say about that.
Song by song, verse by verse, bar by bar, you can feel the image of J Cole as hip-hop’s intellectual prophet to be stripped away and reveal himself as a bumbling idiot. He is the rap game Jordan Peterson. Cole went platinum with no features, yeah, just as Peterson wrote “12 Rules for Life'' solo. The comparisons don’t stop there, as Cole adds another tired form of bigotry in transphobia to match his past ableism (“I’m artistic, you n**** is autistic, r*tarded”) and homophobia (“My verbal AK slay f*ggots/okay, f*ggot? uh/Don’t be so sensitive”) when he bravely defies intolerant left:
They plead the fifth, I’m seeing hints of a trans fella
In cancel culture’s vicinity, he’s no killer, trust me
Beneath his chosen identity, there is still a pussy, period.
Which, while obviously clunky and stupid, is a bit rich considering he briefly identifies as a gangster on “3001” when he raps “thought I used superglue n—-, how this gun stick to my hand. Don’t worry though, he walks it back with the very next line, “I don’t even tote no pistol, but that *** sounded so hard.” Did it? It’s impossible not to get bogged down by the blackhole of these lyrics because there is a new embarrassment everywhere you look. Still on the same song, we get:
You know my zone, I live here at the top
Right now, I’m home alone, Macaulay cot
I keep the shotty cocked in ‘case somebody plot to rob me of this godly spot
Jermaine monstrous
Like that n—- off Jumanji, they know how he rock
But really, everything on the album leads up to the explicit response to Kendrick’s callout with the album’s closer. “7 Minutes” finds Cole bookending the album with another cartoon reference by saying that Kendrick “fell off like the Simpsons,” before such career-ending lines as “your first sh
it is classic” and “your arms might be too short.” To quote the name of the release that Jermaine admits was “massive,” ….Damn. Of course, there is more to the track but can we honestly hold it with any bit of respectability when he says
To Pimp A Butterfly, one of the most revered albums of all-time, “put n—-s to sleep, but they gassed it”? All of this is, of course, over what sounds like a beat fit for youtube highlight reel of some upcoming draft prospect. Please forgive me for laughing when Stone Temple Pilots are namedropped before the track ends with yet another promise of Cole totally having better material on the way (“I’m fully loaded, n—---, I can drop two classics right now”). Sure, buddy. Let’s maybe start with one. My girlfriend lives in Canada too.
Might Delete Later is a miscalculation at every level and may prove in time to be his version of Chance the Rapper’s
The Big Day. When the stage was set and the lights were bright, it will be remembered that Cole sunk into a dozen tracks of empty posturing and punchlines that border on character-suicide. It’s not hard to imagine these lyrics plastered over the image of him on his bike joining the likes of Donnie Darko as shorthand for “I’m 14 and this is deep”-style insults. At the time of writing,
Might Delete Later was released thirteen hours ago. J Cole may want to consider “later” to be “right now.”
