Listening to a J. Cole album can feel like listening to a very intense young lawyer attempt to win a difficult case. Throughout his career, Cole’s raps have often been self-serious and polemical, with their success depending on the overall strength of his argumentation above all else. And while many of his individual claims can be convincing, you often get to the end of a song and think something like: Wait, did he really just argue that corporations take taxes and use them to buy and spread guns? Few artists stake so much on their ability to persuade an audience of their worldview, particularly when that worldview is so absolutist. You do not listen to J. Cole to enjoy his wit or his stories, but to partake in his wisdom, which often involves an element of moral panic: On his new addiction-themed album, KOD, he loves to suggest that people should abstain from things—smoking, drinking, online dating. Sometimes, he’s persuasive, but just as often, he simply seems self-righteous.
For a talented technical rapper with reverence for hip-hop’s history, Cole has never really been playful. (His previous album, 4 Your Eyez Only, was all about death.) Aside from his weakness for corny punchlines, his verses are frequently free of the word games that his top-tier peers revel in. But even so, Cole is capable of making a strong case for his beliefs. When he does, it’s thanks to the emotional appeals he embeds in certain songs. On “FRIENDS,” he confesses to his dependence on weed before calling out specific friends who abuse drugs; in asking them to stop, he mostly ditches his sanctimony. On another standout, “Kevin’s Heart,” Cole uses the pint-sized comedian’s very public infidelities to reflect on the challenge of monogamy: “My phone be blowing up/Temptations on my line/I stare at the screen a while before I press decline.” Cole is most effective when he keeps things personal rather than turning up his nose at the choices of others.
Other songs work because of the North Carolina rapper’s technical ability and skill behind the boards. Previously, when Cole has wanted to make a statement, he’s asked all collaborators to leave the room. The new album, like his would-be magnum opus, 2014 Forest Hills Drive, is absent of other artists (save kiLL edward, a mysterious guest whose voice, when sped up, sounds like J. Cole’s), and Cole produced much of it himself. “ATM” and the title track are potent reminders of the way he can rip up a song with his flow alone. Cole is friends with Kendrick Lamar, and KOD, with its stripped-down production, snare-drum flows, and focus on virtue and vice, can feel like a pale shadow of DAMN. Unlike the Pulitzer winner, Cole is far more predictable and accessible.
Cole simplifies lust on “Photograph,” where he again reminds us that his ideal woman is a holy Madonna who is sexy but never shows too much skin. He’s thoughtlessly proud on “The Cut Off,” in which he commends himself for his generosity after talking about how tempted he is to become violent. And on “BRACKETS,” he boils down a complicated topic in order to make a difficult argument work. The song ends with the story of a mother who loses her son. On the day of her son’s funeral, she remembers she has to pay her taxes, which she believes indirectly funded his death. Much like DAMN., the song uses the cyclical nature of time to make a point—that taxes are evil. But unlike Kendrick, Cole jury-rigs the narrative to make his case. Specious as they may be, songs like “BRACKETS” help us understand Cole’s appeal: He unites his audience against bogeymen like taxes, or the government, or white teachers in black schools, or a new generation of rappers. If you agree that those things are unequivocally Bad, you might be willing to listen when he tells you what not to do.
The most personal song on KOD is about his mother, Kay, and it combines the emotional appeal and evocative detail of the album’s best tracks with the selfishness of its worst. On “Once an Addict (Interlude),” Cole recalls his mom drinking too much after his stepfather had a child by another woman—even pinpointing the Marvin Gaye and Al Green songs she was listening to at the time—as he regrets his own callous reaction (“Why she always using me for a crutch?”). But while those elements make the song powerful, Cole expresses a surprising lack of empathy for his mother’s troubles, even with the benefit of hindsight, and is hamstrung by clumsy lines (“Maybe things get better with time, I heard it heals”). Listeners are asked to think about the rapper’s pain, rather than his mother’s.
Kay has encouraged her younger son to use her struggles as a warning to others, which he has done in the past. But there’s more to her story. She worked hard raising two sons by herself, working as a mail carrier to the point where her feet ached. One of those sons became a successful rapper, bought her a house, granted her the opportunity to stop carrying mail and to pursue acting, to meet Barack Obama and Afeni Shakur. In its haste to show the ugliness of her addiction KOD’s portrait of her glosses over any and all explanatory or redemptive details. It misses many other things too, when it conflates healthy and abusive self-medication, or refuses to make a distinction between marijuana, alcohol, and harder drugs. Because Cole is so often trying to convince us, he frequently only tells one side of the story, concealing the full picture in order to win an argument that nobody started.
