The beginning of J. Cole’s second-best project, Friday Night Lights, ends with the strangest of weird flexes: “I gotta make a move, I gotta do this now/ If they don’t know your dreams, then they can’t shoot them down.”
It’s framed with all the climactic gravity of Robert Downey, Jr. saying, “I’m Iron Man,” but its literal meaning is decidedly less heroic: If you don’t want to be discouraged from pursuing your dreams, hide them. Hide them. You’re not supposed to say that. Maybe ever, but especially out loud. On paper and in reality, it’s the anti-Just Do It — a sentiment that would make Kobe Bryant cringe. But Cole’s never been about grandiosity. His own self-mythology is just as much about what he could overcome as what he couldn’t. If Kanye found bravery in bravado, J. Cole found clarity in humility.
That lucidity is the soul of his best album, 2014 Forest Hills Drive. It’s named for the childhood home where Cole decided to pursue a rap career, and it represents the triumph of those ambitions, both creatively and commercially. (This is where the meme about Cole going “platinum with no features” began.) Released 10 years ago today, the LP is the moment you either got J. Cole or you didn’t. It’s Cole at his most virtuosic. But more importantly, it’s young Jermaine at his most nakedly human.
Continuing the chronicles of a man who’s not afraid to tell you that he cries sometimes, 2014 Forest Hills Drive is a field report broadcasted from the land of promises actualized and unfulfilled — a purgatorial plain for dead homies, new aspirations, and flickering dreams. For “January 28,” Cole collapses the distance between teenage bliss and the short life-spans so-often prescribed to young Black men: “We used to play before your coffin was made/ Just got the call nigga got caught with a stray.” The couplet is tragic, yet too common to be truly jarring, with Cole speaking to legions of young Black folks who’ve seen birthday Instagram posts turn into cyber memorials. It’s a condolence from the homie Cole, a 6’3″ spitter who transmuted hoop dreams to platinum record ambitions. You knew him — or someone like him. He could be quiet, but once that microphone came out…
In between rhyme sessions,though, he was the son of a loving mother battling drug addiction. A confused high schooler in a world without his own moral translucence. When he wasn’t sifting through bars, he was sorting through the same weighty existential dilemmas of any teen: the homework he didn’t want to do — and the women he did. He meets one of them in “Wet Dreamz,” wherein he describes those anxious, lusty, awkward moments conjoined with his first sexual encounter. Floating over a misty soul beat, Cole unspools a tale of school boy flirtation and impending ecstasy, shifting between notes exchanged and the training logistics of a young virgin trying to lose his innocence. A cynical person will have jokes, but Cole’s confessional hook, along with wide-eyed details and a surprise happy ending, render it all a touching micro-fairytale in a land without a whole lot of them. Maybe you didn’t use porn as training materials for losing your V-card. Maybe you did. But with tender sensitivity, Cole reminds you of a time you hadn’t never done “it” before, either.
Whether he’s contemplating a pivot from scholar to low-level weed dealer (“03 Adolescence”) or lamenting a lack of Black figures to look up to (“No Role Modelz”), Cole distills mini vignettes with raw feeling, meticulous detail, and tidy rhyme schemes that only enhance the connectivity of the sprawling emotions. Simultaneously, his anthem-making skills coalesce into something grand. A collage of insistent piano keys, wailing yelps, “Apparently” is a spiritual love letter to his mother, his lover, and fans still naive enough to believe he’s their savior. It’s the type of song you might hear a Black grandma humming to herself as she waters her plants; it just came on the radio and it stuck.
“Love Yourz” is a “grass is always greener” soundtrack that energizes the concept with a half-sung chorus that feels as warm and down-home as a meandering conversation with your grandpa. “No Role Modelz” is a call-and-response miracle that’s since been interpolated by newish spitters like GloRilla and Megan Thee Stallion. He begins it with a homage to The Fresh Prince Of Bel-Air‘s Uncle Phil, a metaphorical father figure for everyone, but especially a Black boys who never had one. “R.I.P. Uncle Phil” is basically Cole’s version of, “MJ gone — our nigga dead!” There’s some cringe respectability politics here, but that only reinforces the accessibility of it all; Cole graduated from high school a decade before a world of problematic and unproblematic faves. It’s folksy — everyman rap at the intersection of hard-lessons and harder ones yet to be received. It’s swirled together more by earnestness and execution more than pretension.
Unlike his debut LP, or flawed concept projects like KOD and 4 Your Eyez Only, 2014 Forest Hills Drive isn’t weighed down by clumsy attempts at commercial crossovers, overwrought metaphors, or convoluted freestyles. Aside from hazy, modernized boom bap and rhyme pyrotechnics, it’s grounded in pathos — of Cole, his hometown of Fayetteville, NC, and his whole generation. It’s underscored by a fundamental acknowledgement: Cole isn’t perfect, and you can’t be either. “And life can’t be no fairy tale, no once upon a time/ But I be goddamned if a nigga don’t be tryin’,” he raps on “Love Yourz.”
But Cole’s not equipped for heroics. Or, at least all the time. Most of us aren’t. He’s grown enough to accept he might be less than that. From semi-disappointing albums (Cole World: The Sideline Story, KOD), to his increasingly wise-looking decision to bow out of the Great Rap War, J. Cole is used to the concept of letting people down. 2014 Forest Hills Drive does the best job of lifting them up.
A deluxe 10th anniversary reissue of 2014 Forest Hills Drive is out today at 2 p.m. ET via J. Cole’s Inevitable.Live site. The same site will debut the first installment of a two-part podcast about the album today at 6 p.m. ET.
