Buck the System

And other secrets of J. Cole's unorthodox path to rap's top tier.
j. cole leans against a staircase with a lynx sitting next to him
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You can tell how famous someone is by the number of people assembled in a room, setting things up, ready to spring into action at the exact moment of their arrival. J. Cole has about 12 waiting for him at a studio on the Friday of NBA All-Star Weekend in Charlotte, North Carolina. While he's over at Spectrum Center, finalizing details for his halftime performance on Sunday night, his team has turned a mellow lounge space into a West Elm-decorated war room, preparing to film a few interviews for a documentary he's working on.

A makeup artist gently cleans her brushes, somewhere someone is audibly losing at Ping-Pong, a cameraman angles a tripod to J. Cole height, several people are typing. He enters imperceptibly, all Gumby limbs and soft energy, setting off a slow ripple of awareness as people realize he's there. He makes his way around the room, shaking hands, slapping palms, clapping backs, bumping chests. He pauses and asks if anybody ordered him lunch. Sandwiches freeze on their journey to mouths. Everyone avoids eye contact for a tremulous second, hoping he doesn't notice how the room smells overwhelmingly of french fries, because no, nobody ordered J. Cole lunch.

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It's all good, he says, as someone insists he eat the chicken sandwich belonging to the unlucky bastard who's stepped out to find a phone charger. Someone puts his otherwise decorative Jordans to their intended athletic use, running to get a menu for him.

All-Star Weekend is a big bang-level collision of NBA and hip-hop celebrity, resulting in a supernova of spectacle and professional obligations. Some people thrive—attending every event from the big game to a runway show for celebrity babies. But for Cole, it's a weekend dense with the aspects of fame that make him uncomfortable. The day before, he made the nearly three-hour drive from his couch, his wife, and their toddler son in Raleigh to fulfill the duties required of a local hero performing at a major event in his home state.

He sighs. “Everybody hits me up. I got people texting me, like, ‘Bro, I can't believe you're performing the All-Star Game halftime show. Ain't that so crazy?’ In my mind, I'm just like, ‘Bro, this feels like a job—you know what I mean?’ ” J. Cole is social, for sure—he's loved going out ever since going out meant chasing girls at the skating rink. But he's notoriously introverted when it comes to events like this. “I don't like center-of-attention-type moments,” he says. “Like the camera, mad people, the world watching the arena, and I have to do something right.”

His lunch finally in front of him, Cole propels his long dreads out of the way and takes a huge bite of his burger. He's projecting some old anxieties, he explains. In 2012 he played in the All-Star Weekend's celebrity game and avoided the spotlight for most of his time on the court. “It's funny. I had Kevin Hart close to me, and I noticed he was like purposely trying to get in the camera. He wasn't as big as he is now. He had this energy that like, ‘You're gonna see me.’ Me on the other hand, nah…,” he trails off, wiping ketchup off a single lock that didn't make it to safety. “It feels like an invasion of privacy.”

Cole grew up in Fayetteville, North Carolina—about an hour south of his current home base of Raleigh.

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J. Cole might be a famous musician, but in some ways he tries to live life like he's not. Home is in North Carolina, where he can play basketball at a local gym for hours without being disturbed. Fans and gossip blogs didn't know he was married until director Ryan Coogler accidentally revealed it in an interview. This reticence for attention can be read as a specific kind of obstinacy. He's famously uncompromising when it comes to his success. He achieves it on his terms: He doesn't work with a lot of other artists, he doesn't drop a lot of singles, he doesn't do a lot of press. He favors fan-centric releases, like surprise listening parties or Apple Music pre-order pages that spring up just before an album is available, over advance announcements (and did so long before it was the prevailing business model). And he doesn't fulfill the traditional expectations of a career in music, eschewing showier displays of status. He tried stardom the conventional way, retreated, retooled, and then achieved real success by trying it again.

For someone so notoriously reserved, Cole's willingness to submit to three days of privacy invasion might seem to signal some evolution in his relationship to fame, but that's not quite it, he corrects me. It's not fame he's embracing, just a new sense of openness. “I'm trying not to be as stubborn about it all,” he explains.

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It's like this, he says, quickly spinning a parable so I can understand him. Recently he got some time to travel with his family. They went to Maui. He really wanted to just chill, but the others wanted to do the only thing you're truly supposed to do when you're a tourist in Maui: take the road to Hana to see a majestic waterfall. “I never wanna do excursions. It feels like work. It's like, I ain't trying to get up at 6 A.M., take the three-hour drive to where we're going hiking.” Years ago, he might have insisted on hanging back and going to the beach alone. But he realized, “I got somebody I care about saying, ‘Come on, like, we need to do this.’ ” So he did. “I realize, like, memories come from getting out of my comfort zone—great memories.”

Now, at 34, one might say, J. Cole is undertaking the professional equivalent of a journey up the road to Hana. Appearing here at the All-Star Game is just one move in a course correction he seems to be making (and making very much on his own terms). He's suddenly collaborating with other artists, especially those on his own Dreamville label; he's forming new connections to the SoundCloud set that once confused him; he's more active on Twitter; he even recently bought a place in New York City.

“I've reached a point in my life,” he tells me, “where I'm like, ‘How long am I gonna be doing this for?’ I'm starting to realize like, oh shit—let's say I stopped this year. I would feel like I missed out on certain experiences, you know? Working with certain artists, being more collaborative, making more friends out of peers, making certain memories that I feel like if I don't, I'm gonna regret it one day.”


J. Cole in the poster-lined basement of the Sheltuh, his Raleigh, North Carolina, studio.

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So if this were Cole's last year making music, how would he feel? (Don't worry, he assures me, he's not quite ready to stop—even if fans have a trick-knee-before-it-rains feeling that his next album might be his last.) Put simply, J. Cole is one of the most popular rap artists of this generation. His two early mixtapes, The Warm Up and Friday Night Lights, are considered classics. He's released five albums, all of them platinum-certified chartbusters. Three of these went platinum with no features—as in, without the help of appearances by other artists. To J. Cole diehards, this is a point of pride they love to recite in response to a mention of “Drake” or “Kendrick” or any other name in the “generation's best rapper” debate. So much so that the phrase “J. Cole went platinum with no features” has become a persistent slogan, like something advertising execs dreamed up around a conference table. “I was loving it,” he says. “I was like, ‘Word up—this is funny as hell.’ But the second or third time, I was like, ‘All right, it's almost embarrassing now.’ Like, ‘All right, man, y'all gonna make me put a feature on the album just so this shit can stop.’ ”

There's a shadow version of that phrase, too, though: J. Cole went platinum with no Grammys. It's always a little surprising to remember that. Especially since his well-received last album, KOD, broke multiple streaming records on Spotify and Apple Music.

Cole has stopped letting it bother him. In fact, he's found a way to be grateful that his nomination in 2012 for best new artist didn't result in a win (which he desperately wanted at the time). “It would've been disastrous for me, because subconsciously it would've been sending me a signal of like ‘Okay, I am supposed to be this guy.’ But I would've been the dude that had that one great album and then fizzled out.”

He describes his evolution in thinking with the sort of emotional intelligence associated with people who discuss how often they meditate. “I'm not supposed to have a Grammy, you know what I mean?” he says. “At least not right now, and maybe never. And if that happens, then that's just how it was supposed to be.”

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Cole has this way of talking to people. When it's time to really talk, like mind-meld talk, he'll gently touch a knee, a forearm, a shoulder. He has a habit of grasping at his chest and then taking those same hands and gesturing emphatically toward my heart, like he's trying to inject what he means right into me. He asks questions and then follow-up questions. (Coincidentally, or prophetically, one of his early rap monikers was Therapist.) After a while, he rises to pull on a black hoodie and drifts into another corner of the room, where he sits in the middle of the group and slouches low in a leather chair. All the bodies in the room gradually shift so their knees are pointing in his direction, like a school of fish instinctively swimming toward the same point. He grabs an acoustic guitar that's usually decorative and starts to strum. Even while still, he looks pensive, like he's solving all the problems all the time—it's his heavy brow. It gives him resting worry face.

He's interrupted by a phone call, Colin Kaepernick on FaceTime. He greets Kaepernick with big, warm congratulations. News had just broken a few hours ago that Kaepernick had agreed to settle his lawsuit against the NFL—for a payday some sources estimate could be as high as $100 million.

“You're buying me dinner when I'm in New York,” Cole says with a laugh. After about ten minutes of him mm-hmm-ing while the two presumably discuss the headlines, Cole hangs up. They've been cut short by a bad connection. The room around him starts debating Kaepernick's choice to settle rather than go to court. Was he selling out, or was he being smart? Did the NFL get off easy? “Listen, justice was served,” Cole says, noting the wisdom in Kaepernick's move. “This man got his money, know what I mean? Plus,” Cole speculates, “he'll probably play again.”

Maybe it's the nonchalant way he's plucking guitar strings while he talks, but Cole's presence has the same effect as strong indica. Everyone's relaxed and in a heady space, trying to draw profound conclusions from pop culture. It feels like a glimpse of how Cole must have held court in his dorm room at St. John's University in Queens: a little self-serious, a little goofy, reasonably asserting that he's right—every sapiosexual's wet dream, basically.


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The next afternoon, Cole and other Dreamville artists are hosting a brunch in support of the label, and by 4 P.M. the event has reached full-day party—the tequila near the ice luge is running dangerously low. It's cold for Charlotte, even for February, and I find myself huddled over a fire pit next to Amin El-Hassan, the cousin of Cole's manager, Ibrahim “Ib” Hamad. They've all been friends since Cole and Ib were both at St. John's, where Cole was studying when he recorded his first mixtape, The Come-Up, in 2007. Ib helped send copies to music blogs, radio stations, record labels, and his cousin Amin, who had started working for the Phoenix Suns and who decided to place Cole's CD on the chair of every player on the roster.

According to Amin, the plan to get the music out worked. Amar'e Stoudemire loved what he heard and wanted to sign Cole to his label, Hypocalypto. Amin couldn't believe it. He called Ib to deliver the news that he thought would make Cole's career. Amin laughs now, acknowledging that his intervention really wasn't needed: “Ib said, ‘Oh, thanks, man, but we've got some bigger fish to fry.’ ”

The bigger fish was Jay-Z, who signed Cole to Roc Nation in 2009, making him Patient Zero for the nascent label. Jay-Z's endorsement, it seemed, all but guaranteed success. But Cole realized he wasn't going to put out an album immediately. He had to wait. The label, it seemed, had its formula: single, radio play, album. Cole couldn't release an album until he had a single. “I'd never thought about a single before—I didn't even care,” he says. “I kinda wanted my first album to be, like, an undeniable classic, and I didn't care if it sold.” Trying to jump-start the process, he brought the label “Who Dat,” he says, laughing at himself as he recalls how he thought that that was a single: “The hook is who dat, who dat. There's zero melody. No radio station can play that.” While he figured out what a J. Cole radio single sounded like, he was antsy and worried he'd lose the growing fan base he'd built. So he put out another mixtape, Friday Night Lights.

Finally, after two years at Roc Nation, he made “Work Out,” a single he felt had his “DNA all over it,” and was good enough, by the label's standards, to put out his first album, Cole World: The Sideline Story, in 2011. He wanted his next album, 2013's Born Sinner, to be as successful, so he stuck to the same model.

It was never the label he was rebelling against, exactly. It was a type of thinking that put him in a “cloudy” place, unable to record the classic album he wanted to: What do people want? What does a superstar look like? What music does a superstar make? Basically, run-of-the-mill, mid-20s-identity-formation stuff.

Cole can recall the exact catalyst for the change—he could pull it out of the closet, actually. It's the Versace sweater he's talked about before, often, the way people talk about an ex who hurt them so badly it reset the course of their life. It was the 2013 BET Awards, he had a stylist, the stylist brought out The Sweater: a baroque, gauche black pullover printed with huge interlocking gold medallions. It was gaudy enough to cause a crisis of self. He wanted to wear something else, but everyone in the room said, “ ‘Nah, I think you need to do this,’ ” Cole recalls. “I remember it like, ‘Nah, bro, you gotta step it up a level, you gotta own some superstar shit,’ almost with the implication that I could be further along if I just looked like a star. This is what the people want to see.”

Two other artists got that exact memo, too. All three of them showed up on the red carpet wearing the sweater, styled the exact same way—thick, ropy gold chains, black jeans, black shoes. Cole also added his own flair—sunglasses and a soul patch. It was Us Weekly's “Who Wore It Best?” column happening in red-carpet real time, except, well, there were really no winners. “Man, look, no disrespect to French, but I feel like this some shit French Montana would have on. I'm like looking in the mirror like, ‘Who the fuck is this?’ ”

He realized he'd lost touch with who he was: Jermaine Cole from Fayetteville, who'd always wanted to make music. Except for the brief moments when he'd wanted to be an archaeologist as a kid, or maybe play in the NBA. He'd been running headlong at his goal since college (but really since he was 12). Now he was depressed, and the confidence he'd always had was shaken. Luckily, he had two albums that made him successful enough to pause, relax a little, turn inward, and figure out how to change everything he was doing.

He rented a house in L.A. He learned to meditate. He recorded 2014 Forest Hills Drive, an album that was a reaction to everything he disliked about making the first two albums, really. He didn't record a single, he didn't have any features, he hosted a listening event for fans at his childhood home, revealing the address the day of. He was risking a ton to do it his way and was pretty sure it might be the last album he ever made, but it turned out to be bigger than anybody expected. By 2015, when he was done touring for the album, he was visible enough to disappear into the oak trees of Raleigh for a while.

For the first time since he used to mainline The Boondocks in his dorm room in college, Cole had time to sit on a couch and binge-watch TV. He watched all of Narcos and, he admits, unsure if I'd ever heard of it, Odd Mom Out. I had. (We agreed that Jill Kargman is hilarious and the show should never have been canceled.) He ditched the architectural red-carpet facial hair and grew a shaggy retirement beard, let his dreadlocks hit shoulder-length. He played in basketball rec leagues, four or five games a week. He got married, built a crib, recorded 4 Your Eyez Only, and didn't really promote it. The album went platinum anyway.

These days, he says, people ask him all the time whether being a father has changed him. The question has prompted some reflection, Cole admits. “For a while, I felt a little weird about it. Like, nah. I felt, ‘Did I miss something?’ 'Cause I didn't feel the change that people talk about. And then I figured out what it was,” he says. “I changed my life in order to get ready to have a family and to have a son. I literally changed my life, where I was living, the things that I was doing. I changed. So because of that, when my son came, I was ready. I already made room.”


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Part of what people like about J. Cole—and part of what other people like to joke about when they talk about J. Cole—is how he's always sort of been Dad. He's the kind of guy who'll offer unsolicited advice to young artists via social media or, when it comes to his music, will veer into socially conscious “rap lite.” For fans, it's what they connect to; for critics, it's ammunition. “Listen,” he says, shrugging it off, “you got people that fuck with me, fuck with what I'm saying, agree. And then you have people that don't fuck with me.”

Liking J. Cole has always been sort of polarizing—it's sport to be a fan or a detractor. His lyrics are thoughtful or boring, his earnestness is relatable or corny. The fact that he wore an orange prison jumpsuit during his tour for 4 Your Eyez Only is either poignant or reaching. He's hot because he seems like he'd use knowledge of both Tantric sex and the lyrics to Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) as seduction tools, or he's hot despite that appearance. If you're a stan, a song like “Wet Dreamz” is a vulnerable, nostalgic song about losing your virginity. If you're not, the lyrics feel so much like doodles in a Lisa Frank notebook, you want to listen to them in the fetal position.

We're in his trailer outside the arena where he's set to perform tonight. He's just rehearsed his ten-minute medley about five times, each run-through providing evidence for exactly why people do “fuck with” him. In addition to his own hits, the set includes the verse Cole supplied for the 21 Savage track “A Lot.” The fact that “A Lot” is such a big hit among pretty much everyone—SoundCloud kids and conscious rap fans alike—is part of why 2019 already feels like a new moment for Cole.

He'll have to adjust some of the lyrics in the show so that they meet FCC standards, and he admits he's a little worried about messing up the words, but he feels good about the rehearsal.

A question I keep asking, in various ways, over the course of the weekend is whether he's annoyed that people call his music heavy-handed. I don't get a real answer. I ask again, subbing in different adjectives to get my point across: “boring,” “preachy,” “too earnest.”

“So. People don't actually say that, by the way,” he finally says, a tiny bit suspicious of what I'm driving at. He pauses.

“Oh,” he says, suddenly full of recognition. “I just figured out what you're asking about: ‘finger wagging.’ I know exactly which review you're talking about.”

Critics have taken particular aim at the last song on his 2018 album, KOD, “1985 (Intro to ‘The Fall Off’),” which seemed to chastise younger SoundCloud rappers. (In the song, Cole didn't name names, but it sounded like he had specific targets.)

Cole is frustrated that that song was misunderstood. “ ‘Bother’ is a strong word, but it's more like I observed that, like, so many people don't even understand nuance,” he says. “If the first time you heard me was [2011's] ‘Nobody's Perfect’ with Missy Elliot, and then you just casually follow along, I can't expect you to know the nuances of my tone and my intentions.” He stands up to put food in the microwave, which promptly blows a fuse. The whole trailer goes dark. Cole sits back down and switches on the flashlight of his iPhone. He won't let the power outage interrupt his point.

“They say, ‘Oh, finger wagging,’ because they think I'm like, ‘You little rapper,’ ” he says, imitating a schoolmarm, waving a ruler. “But I'll play that for somebody that's a deeply invested or deeply rooted hip-hop fan, or somebody that just knows me, or knows the climate of what's going on, and they hear that and they go, ‘Whoa, I see what you just did there. Bro, do you know what you just did? You just put your arm around this dude and walked him. Instead of attacking him, you put your arm around him on some little-bro shit.’ ”

Not long ago, Cole tried to put his arm around one of his biggest detractors, Lil Pump, another one of the face-tatted enfants terribles to emerge from the SoundCloud birth canal recently. In April 2017, Lil Pump released a song called “Fuck J. Cole,” with Smokepurpp. “I see now that it was marketing genius,” explains Cole. “Disrespecting somebody with a bigger platform, who hasn't yet been disrespected in that way so it seems kind of taboo, would get huge attention. Like, if I go out and scream ‘Fuck Oprah,’ I would get so much attention off it, it would be crazy.”

Pump and Cole met at a festival last spring, and they got along. Cole thought Pump was incredibly smart and extended an invitation to do an hour-long interview to talk it all out. “Honestly, my intention was to show the world how smart he was and to have a conversation that kind of reveals who this kid is,” Cole says. “I don't think that was the outcome, because I think he put a wall up. It doesn't change the fact that he is a smart kid.”


The makeshift vocal booth in Cole's studio also houses his record collection.

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Exactly 1,000—no more, no less—of J. Cole's biggest fans are lined up in the cargo level of the Spectrum Center. It's about 20 minutes before Cole's halftime show, but they've been waiting for five hours to be on the court while J. Cole performs for ten minutes. It took a ton of coordination to get everyone to North Carolina, to the arena, into the line, but having fans here was important to Cole, who didn't want to rap to corporate suites or to suits with floor seats—he wanted it to feel like a real performance. Or as Karma, the Uber driver who dropped me at the stadium, summed it up: “He raps for fans. Not awards.” (“Her name was really Karma? Tight,” Cole says when I relay the story.)

It's mellow backstage. Even the Hornets mascot is taking a break from his hype-man duties: He's posted up on a chair reading, through his costumed hornet head, Ta-Nehisi Coates's Between the World and Me. Two teen girls in line immediately identify me as an outsider, despite the talent badge that grants me access, and one snidely says, “Talent? What's your talent?”

When he takes the stage, Cole's performance is the sort of subtle, carefully considered show you'd expect if you've ever seen him live. Even at halftime of an exhibition basketball game, Cole is a magnetic entertainer. He seems to know when a song needs to come from his head versus his heart versus his sacral chakra, so the audience can feel it there, too. And he raps standing in fourth position—tonight in a vintage Hornets jacket and light-wash jeans, swaying like a ballet-trained stoner. His movements are elegantly lazy, but his tongue is not. He hit all of the triplets. If he was worried about missing words, he didn't need to be.

Later that night, away from the television cameras, a different Cole took the stage across town at The Fillmore. It was the J. Cole who's willing to try new things, playing a late-night concert with his Dreamville artists in front of a packed house of fans. Cole treats the night like a happening—there's no set list, audience members can request songs, Ib is just going to play whatever track he wants to, and everyone has to join in. There were a lot of forgotten lyrics.

As Cole describes it, what happened onstage at The Fillmore was similar to the recent recording sessions for Revenge of the Dreamers 3, the compilation project that's been capturing his creative energy of late. Cole invited members of the Dreamville roster to record with him, cordially requesting the presence of artists via Instagram post. (He did forget some people, he admits sheepishly.) They spent ten days in an Atlanta recording complex, swapping ideas, getting into rap battles, collaborating, and churning out 127 songs that will be whittled down into an album.

“It was like Disneyland or some shit,” Cole says. He'd be in one room laying down a track, singer Ari Lennox would be in another working with a group of mostly female singers and musicians, Saba would be in his own space. At one point, Cole got a text: “Come to room 222.”

“I ran in,” he recalls excitedly. “The room was thick with smoke, and Buddy, this rapper from Compton, played me this song that felt like a Pharcyde song.”

That experience, he says, has opened him up a lot. Cole realized that there was this perception of him that he didn't really like anymore: “I've been so secluded within myself that people think I don't like anybody, that I won't work with anybody. It's a reputation that's been extending to my artists, too.”

So, feeling guilty—and feeling eager to try new things—he's changing his approach a bit. “I don't even know how this shit works all the way anymore, the game,” he says. “And if I don't know, I've got to learn.” It's why he put out “Middle Child,” the first single he's released outside of his usual album cycle in years. And he might even—maybe!—have some actual features in the future. He dials it back a bit. “Well, I don't have any right now that I really want to boast about,” he tells me. “Not saying it's impossible. It's just about getting out of my comfort zone,” he says cautiously.

Onstage at The Fillmore, Cole has just forgotten most of the words to an early song he recorded, and Wale, who surprised the audience by joining in, picks up the slack on Cole's verse. Cole laughs it off. It doesn't matter; everyone performing—Bas, J.I.D., Lennox—keeps forgetting lyrics due to some combination of joy, alcohol, and general rustiness (they haven't performed some of these songs in a long time).

There are moments when Cole stops the show to try to turn the chaos back to order, but there were other moments when, his toe edging beyond his comfort zone, he just says fuck it and gives in to whatever is going to happen.

Earlier, when Cole told me the story about the hike in Maui—about waking up early and forcing himself to do something he normally wouldn't—I had wanted to know whether it was all worth it. “Oh, it was incredible,” he said. “Amazing. And it wasn't just the waterfall.” Cole described a walk through a forest where he encountered some enormous exotic trees that made these huge nuts—“they're like coconuts but not coconuts,” he explained, still surprised at everything new, everything he'd almost missed.

Allison P. Davis is a feature writer at The Cut.

A version of this story originally appeared in the April 2019 issue with the title "Buck the System."

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