And when he rattles off rhetorical questions (“Have you ever seen a nigga that was Black on the moon?/Have you ever seen your brother go to prison as you cry?/Have you ever seen a motherfucking ribbon in the sky?”) he’s working in a long tradition of rappers and writers knocking a grave present against against its opposite. He equivocates-“crime pays like a part-time job” is the sort of evocative, economical phrase that has eluded Cole so often in the past. infomercials, figuring he needs to put some weight on. It’s details like that last one that set “Immortal” apart from so much of Cole’s early work: you can see the speaker bathed in the artificial light of 3 a.m. The song’s narrator feeds baggies through a burglar bar, watches Bic lighters wave under spoons, wakes up early to hit the Bowflex. He also comes to life on “Immortal,” which sounds as if someone played Cole an unheard 2Pac song from the Makaveli sessions and then dared him to recreate it from memory. 2” is about his wife and newborn child), and the title track, which closes the album with a missive for those young girls, is anchored by his personal anxieties, making for some of Cole’s most affecting writing to date. Cole is himself a new father (“She’s Mine, Pt.

The album is peppered with references to his murder, and a testimony from a young girl in Fayetteville, which appears at two points on “Ville Mentality,” echoes the reality faced by McMillan’s own daughter. Cole frequently invokes other points of view, including that of his late friend James McMillan, Jr., who was killed at 22.

The SWAT experience, recounted on “Neighbors,” the best song from Cole’s fourth album, 4 Your Eyez Only, is a grim perversion of those dreams, and it anchors a record that wrestles with the fragility of life and the importance of family ties.įor long stretches, Eyez is a rumination on death. On his last solo effort-which was named after the Fayetteville house-he rapped about his adolescent fantasies of white picket fences surrounded by trees, by quiet. It wasn’t the native North Carolinian’s only property holding: he’d previously purchased his childhood home, at 2014 Forest Hills Drive in Fayetteville, with plans to turn it into a rent-free safe haven for single mothers.

J cole deja vu music video