Elite, the album’s co-executive producer, in a recent interview with Complex.Īnd yet these songs are among his most naked and revealing, especially the title track, one of the most moving songs of this, or any, year. This is part of the album’s emotional strategy: “4 Your Eyez Only” is delivered “largely from a perspective that is not J. Cole sings, Pharrell-like, on “Ville Mentality,” a bruised lamentation that gives way to a young girl speaking about the death of her father and the ripple effect it causes at home - pain that is intergenerational and intractable. “How long can I survive with this mentality?” Mr. It traces an arc from sociopolitical resentment to personal growth. This is an album about unvarnished anxiety and uncomplicated love. Cole, doing the least, it turns out, equates to achieving the most. There’s an extraordinary sense of calm pervading this album, one of the year’s most finely drawn.įor Mr. It is spartan but sumptuous, emotionally acute but plain-spoken. His bracing new album, “4 Your Eyez Only,” is his first that feels as if it were made without the slightest concession to what’s happening elsewhere in the genre. He is a rap star without rap-star trappings, a parallel-universe champion. As the genre has become smoother, more rigorously structured and more digital, he has become raspier, looser and more organic. In one of hip-hop’s most populist periods, he is a divider - a loyalist to out-of-fashion values and a conscientious objector to dominant trends.
That assertion is a celebration of his creativity, but also a proxy for his burden.
Cole’s vision is singular, his work not a by-committee agglomeration: He managed to take their honor while playing by his rules. The phrase became a rallying cry and eventually a meme. Cole’s three major label albums to date has gone platinum, but as his online defenders will never fail to remind you, the most recent one, “2014 Forest Hills Drive,” went “platinum with no features” - that is, with no other big-name guests.
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