On the surface, J. Cole can seem like the most down-to-earth rapper around, someone who is not swept up by money, women or cars, and who is always trying to be the better man. At least, that is how he likes to present himself: as an entirely ordinary man from North Carolina.
So when he lowers a car from the ceiling at Royal Arena, it is an old Honda Civic.
That is one way of taking humility to new heights.
If there isn’t outright megalomania lurking beneath the surface, then J. Cole is at the very least rap’s great humblebragger, with the peculiar flaw of giving too much of his big heart — as he puts it himself on ’The Cut Off’.
J. Cole has often been described as one of rap’s ’big three.’ If Kendrick Lamar is the political artist and Drake the commercial superstar, then Cole is the thoughtful storyteller, the one who meets his audience at eye level.
When the other two were locked in a bitter feud, J. Cole wanted no part of it — though not before releasing a song about it, only to regret it and pull it down again. He ultimately decided he was above that sort of thing.
Monday night’s concert began up in the stands, just a few feet from where I was standing in a haze of strawberry-scented e-cigarette smoke. There J. Cole opened with ’39 Intro,’ in which he arrives in the afterlife, and even God is left slack-jawed that none other than J. Cole has arrived.
And though he soon after stood center stage amid a grotesque set design on the main stage, where a replica of the town hall from Cole’s hometown in North Carolina materialized before our open eyes, and a somewhat flamboyant attitude would have been both fitting and expected, he was instead utterly relaxed and in constant dialogue with individual members of the crowd, for instance a guy from Raleigh, North Carolina.
Intimacy and aggression
Tonight, he seemed intent on making all of us feel as if we were from Fayetteville too, which he was thus bringing out into the world with him — when the town hall was built, it was also a center of the slave trade, so it is a contested symbol that serves as the backdrop to the show.
But Cole is not political enough for that to amount to much. Or rather, he turns the anger inward, with an almost conversational way of rapping in which intimacy can suddenly turn into aggression. You could hear every emotion in his flow, and that even elevated the songs that are not particularly good.
An hour and a half into the concert, we saw on the screen that there was a live band too, unforgivably hidden away deep inside the set. Cole’s songs have a melodic warmth and are often carried by piano, bass and drums. There could well have been more band and less theatrical gimmickry.
On the concert’s final number, ’Quik Stop,’ he told the story of a fan he meets at a gas station. Cole reenacts the dialogue:
»Bro, you the GOAT«, says the fan, and Cole is reluctant to take the words to heart.
Or is he?
His latest album, ’The Fall-Off,’ from February, was supposed to be his last, but that too looks like a stunt.
Because the 41-year-old rapper looked like anything but a man preparing for retirement — or the afterlife.
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