In the past decade, Cole has grown from a bright, pop-bound neophyte to a moody ascetic. He’s as fame-hungry as any major label musician, but he’s achieved his commercial success despite his rebellion against certain aesthetic cues. He’s one of the best-selling rappers of his generation. Cole, you’d never guess how dynamic and large his profile has grown. Hearing only the most static and inflexible criticism of J. He outearns it, but he may never outlive it. Cole is pretentious and boring has become the rapper’s critical albatross. I might observe as much about Drake or any number of nonetheless popular rappers, but no matter: J. He raps about laundry and taxes, and his insights are far more banal than his fans loudly insist. For years, hypebeasts have heckled Cole and answered the rapper’s overzealous fandom with a simple, immortal critique: J. Supposedly, he’s musically stale, lyrically clumsy, and personally tepid a self-righteous square who cultivates the most pedantic rap fandom since Eminem’s. To the rapper’s many detractors, Cole represents an expansive corniness. Cole makes the god-fearing alarmist Kendrick Lamar sound like a goddamned hedonist. Cole’s sermonizing is unrelenting and, in so many instances, unwelcome. “I’m aggravated without it / My saddest days are without it.” The song is called “Friends,” and it is about them. The cover bears a disclaimer: “This album is in no way intended to glorify addiction.” The songs aren’t all about substance use, but drug culture and addiction do seem to be the rapper’s biggest hang-ups. The album art, illustrated by Kamau Haroon, depicts several young children, and Cole himself, consuming various drugs: weed, cocaine, Xanax, lean. Released on 4/20, KOD is Cole’s extended rumination on addiction, among other vices. His latest album, KOD, fashions the rapper’s moralistic contempt-which has long figured into his music-into a feature-length treatise. “That shit these rappers kick is nothing like real life / You made a milli off of serving hard white? Yeah, right / My mama tell you what addiction to that pipe feel like / Stupid niggas!” More than any other song, “Breakdown”-an otherwise late and inconspicuous track on the rapper’s worst album-prefigured Cole’s current direction.
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“Breakdown” is a spiteful record, though Cole reserves no spite for his mother instead, he rants against the culture that mythologizes her consumption. In one of Cole’s very best songs, “Breakdown,” from the North Carolina rapper’s 2011 debut album, Cole World: The Sideline Story, he describes a childhood wrecked by his father’s absence and his mother’s abandon. He’s reluctant to discuss her struggles in interviews, but he’s expounded rather passionately in his music. In a tweet last year, Hamad refuted a retelling of the story in which it was suggested Cole intervened after Diddy attempted to pour a drink on Kendrick due to a disagreement about his infamous verse on Big Sean’s “Control.” “I’m not gonna go into detail, but it’s definitely not what people are saying,” he added on Say Less, before offering a few more details that break down how it “was never a real issue.J.
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“The Puff story… I just remember hearing about it and laughing,” he said at the 12-minute mark, “’Cause I was there.” “I bought that n***a album in seventh grade and played it so much / You would’ve thought my favorite rapper was Puff.” With their altercation once again on people’s minds because of the track, IB opened up about the situation just a little more. “My last scrap was with Puff Daddy, who would’ve thought it?” Cole raps on the track. The long-rumored fight altercation between Cole and Diddy was finally confirmed by the former rapper himself on his The Off-Season highlight “Let Go My Hand,” which features an outro from Diddy. Cole’s manager and Dreamville Records co-founder Ibrahim “IB” Hamad sat down for a lengthy interview on the Say Less podcast, and during the chat he gave a few more details about what really went down between Cole, Diddy, and Kendrick Lamar in 2013.