I'm gonna be upfront about this one: this is my second 4/10. The reason I want to be upfront is because it's a 4/10 for entirely different reasons than Encore was. Encore, for its numerous faults, had intrigue in its spectacular badness. This was just a tedious listen from start to finish.
J. Cole is in that dead zone of rap where he's not fun enough to be Migos, but he's not smart enough to be Kendrick Lamar. So he kinds of shoots between them to consistently mediocre results. It gets even more tedious when he brings these clear insecurities into his music, which you'd think wouldn't be the case, except he brings out his insecurities in such a self-serving, self-aggrandizing way. So to really get down to the meat of why this album sucks, we gotta talk about that ending track.
No, not "Window Pain", which is the official outro of this album and is one of the more tolerable songs on here. I'm talking about "1985", which serves as an "intro" to his upcoming project The Fall Off. It's like a Marvel post-credits scene set to music, but don't tell that to J. Cole, who is so unbelievably above it all that he can't fathom being tied in to such commercialism. Watch as he derides young new trap artists! Well, really, he's "teaching them a lesson". Yes, wise old sage J. Cole, who is so above trap artists that he uses trap beats on more than one occasion. I mean, mask off right there. This is what I mean by splitting the difference. If you try to please everyone, you end up pleasing no one. Kendrick never felt he had to talk down to the youth of America. I'm not sure why J. Cole does, but this ending/"intro" is easily the most infuriating song on this numb, tired album.
That's another thing: J. Cole just sounds tired. If he's going to sell himself as old and wise in comparison to the younger artists, then he's at least got "old" nailed down. This album is unbelievably boring to listen to. If you're going to make an album, make it worth caring about. There's maybe two songs on here worth a damn because they don't sound like J. Cole is completely phoning it in. But to have him drone on for an entire album is too much to ask an audience to tolerate. So while this gets the same rating as an album like Encore, let it be known that I respect Encore way more for going balls-out in its absurd stupidity than this droning, pointless mess. Point Eminem. J. Cole better wake up or he's going to go on hiatus and then find out when he comes back that nobody really misses him.
4/10
Best Tracks: "BRACKETS", "Window Pain (Outro)"
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