J cole immortal all 4 your eyez
There’s no fun to be had here no guest spots, no radio hits, and no quotable lines at all, only the sound of tepid, pseudo-jazz beats for 44 excruciatingly long minutes.
Cole has made comfort food for rockists and rap traditionalists alike. So, in pandering to an audience that would prefer to write off Lil Uzi Vert because he doesn’t pay attention to the pantheon of hip-hop tradition, J. In a year when Kendrick Lamar has decided to make unnecessary appearances his shtick, it’s a shame he couldn’t grace 4 Your Eyez Only with a few bars. Cole’s voice flat, anaemic, and riddled with platitudes. Not that there’s inherently anything wrong with not providing features on a mainstream rap album, but it certainly helps to make up for a lack of strengths when monotony is broken up by any other voice. It’s painfully unimaginative, and rarely helped by the complete lack of features. He’s abandoned some of the more radio-appropriate techniques of Born Sinner and 2014 Forrest Hill Drive and instead embraced that most frustrating of beat-making, the Q-Tip simulacrum without the soul to boot. Cole gets some good assists from Nico Segal and Boi-1da throughout, but for the most part, he’s mining the same jazz and trap tropes that he’s accustomed to. That’s without studying the production closely, which is also, incidentally, not interesting. And when he’s not doing that, he’s being busted for not selling drugs in North Carolina, declaring that he’ll be, ‘ … movin' back to Southside / So much for integration.’ Lyrically, he does little, and with narrative, even less, approaching the To Pimp a Butterfly model without the certain degree of intelligence that J. On “Foldin’ Clothes,” he’s doing what he needs to do to get out of the friendzone and earn his much deserved sex. On “Deja vu,” he’s a good guy in the friendzone. Here, it opens up sophomoric pity for a character whose ambitions are decidedly one-dimensional. If you’ve heard Future’s DS2, or Kanye West’s “Real Friends,” or Chief Keef’s Nobody, or Kendrick Lamar’s “u,” you’ve heard the narrative articulated far better and with far greater nuance. Consider the opening salvo of “For Whom the Bell Tolls ” far from being a Metallica cover (because that actually might be interesting to listen to), Cole mopes about, ‘ Tired of feeling low even when I'm high,’ asking rhetorically whether or not he would be better off dead. The problem with that is that Cole is good at talking a lot of sh it but not really delivering, choosing to verbalize frustrations without actually making them interesting to listen to. Cole is a technically skilled, if not soulless, rapper, who can write lyrical circles around Lil Yachty (or whoever). On 4 Your Eyez Only, he’s not even thought about addressing the serious shortcomings of this approach, and has instead chosen to double-down on the rhetoric real-rap rapping for real-rap lovers who really only like the really-real rappers. Sure, he’s a throwback and he’s as predictable, but he sure, ‘ ain't sayin' sh it,’ like those, ‘ amateur eight week rappers,’ that, ‘ the streets don't fu ck with.’ No, he’s more than that: he’s a walking miasma of boredom and overt seriousness whose only quotable strength is going double platinum with no featurez. Cole has assimilated it as his core identity. It’s a marketing technique favoured mostly by rock bands that are distinctly out-of-time and out-of-touch, not unsurprising as much as nostalgic and particular.
He is, without wanting to be dismissive, safe jazzy, rhyming, loving, and respectful, pieced together without even the slightest attention paid towards trends or radio acceptability. Cole is given in rap circles that stems mostly from a conservative, button-down aesthetic that stylistically sits somewhere between De-La Soul and rock acceptability (think Eminem, Immortal Technique, etc.). There’s a very understandable welcoming that J. Review Summary: Double platinum with no featurez.