ALBUM REVIEWS
For over a decade, J. Cole has rapped as the enlightened everyman, navigating issues of race, class, and gender like a thoughtful jock. His latest release, The Off-Season, finds him pondering inventive gun violence prevention measures one moment, and lobbing sexist locker-room insults the next (“Check your genitalia, pussy-niggas bleedin’ on yourself,” he raps on “95.South”). Still, the album is generally absent the overt social critiques that have built his reputation as a rapper of substance.
Last summer, on “Snow on tha Bluff,” his last lengthy engagement with ideas of Black liberation, he began by disputing that reputation: “Niggas be thinkin’ I’m deep, intelligent, fooled by my college degree/My IQ is average, there’s a young lady out there, she way smarter than me.” From there, the song becomes a well-intentioned but wildly insecure and paternalistic confrontation of the rapper Noname, likely a response to tweets in which she questioned her peers’ participation in the moment’s anti-racist movement. Noname, who has spent the last couple of years publicly learning and sharing anti-capitalist, anti-racist, and anti-imperialst ideas, responded with “Song 33,” a one-minute eviceration of his tone-policing with reminders of the tragedies people across the country were rectifying. After, in a series of tweets, Cole reiterated his incapacity to act as a thought leader: “a nigga like me just be rapping,” he relented.
His next songs came and went with much less fanfare, a two-track EP announced as the first singles from his upcoming album, The Fall Off. Instead came The Off-Season. The album was preceded by a short documentary on the rapper’s mindstate while making the music. The film isn’t particularly revelatory, but indicates that Cole was prioritizing the technical proficiency of The Off-Season’s songs over the construction of an arc between them. “Let me try to reach new heights from a skill level standpoint,” he says in the doc. In turn, the album is as highly proficient and non-revealing as the documentary foreshadows. Over a tight twelve tracks of nimble songwriting and outstanding composition, J. Cole continues to muse on the themes weaved throughout his discography: life and death, success and lack thereof, the divine and the mortal. He does this with personal and interpersonal anecdotes that are interesting but safe, as he leans into his passion for rap and sport and away from his predilection for social commentary.
Musicality drives The Off-Season, where Cole croons, hollers, and spits through a tangle of satisfying melodies and complex rhyme schemes. In standouts like “Amari,” “My.Life,” and “100.Mil,’ ” there’s drama and power as he alternates between agile rapping and serious singing. He harmonizes with fellow Fayetteville, North Carolina native Morray on “My.Life,” and enlists Dreamville veteran Bas — an impressive rhymer himself — as a singer in two places, where his performances are careful and calming. Dead center, “100.Mil’ ” feels like the thesis of Cole’s efforts here. He dances through a handful of flows in just one verse, sounding like he’s bounding through drills on the court. “How come a nigga ain’t enter his prime? Still gettin’ better after all this time,” he boasts. He’s right. Cole has become a top-tier composer, marrying rhythmic acuity with lyrical dynamism.
There are quick, vivid bursts of imagery scattered throughout The Off-Season, moments in which he tells stories without laboring over them. On “Close,” Cole bobs and weaves in and out of vignettes of his life and that of a friend who is ultimately slain, returning to the titular word as like a home base. He gives visceral exposition on “Interlude,” where he raps about EMTs carrying a woman’s child away from her “like surrogate mothers” in the unbearable southern summer heat. Together, Cole’s tales paint a picture of himself as a survivor who has traded in remorse for gratitude. He refers to his fear of death in the past tense on “Let.Go.My.Hand,” says, “I’m thankful ’cause I made it past my thirties, no one murdered me,” on “Pride.is.the.Devil,” and sets out to celebrate the life of a dead friend on “The.Climb.Back.” Making it out of Fayetteville used to torment Cole; now it gives his life a sense of meaning. “That’s why when niggas throw a shot or two online, I pay no mind to their benign gestures,” he raps on “Applying.Pressure.”
But with The Off-Season, Cole has made an album nearly devoid of spaces for the kind of rigorous critique that “Snow on tha Bluff” warranted, because he doesn’t offer thoughts that are new, challenging, or socio-politically charged. The rapper, who admittedly “hasn’t done a lot of reading” instead talks about what he knows best — his own life — with undeniable acumen as a lyricist. There is an uncomfortable finger-wagging at broke people hating on millionaires on “Applying.Pressure,” but he does so in the context of the jealousy he once harbored. The album’s biggest revelation comes with “Let.Go.My.Hand.” where J. Cole admits that he once had a physical altercation with Diddy, as was rumoured. The idea of any tension between them is quickly rectified when Diddy shows up on the outro.
After a year of social and political upheaval, it’s notable that Cole retreated into himself, setting out to be the greatest rapper and a professional baller rather than a voice of reason. That’s not a bad thing, per se — maybe it leaves space for listeners to engage more deeply with performers who have stronger ideas about race, class, and society, like a Noname. But when Cole raps that he “can’t let the fame scare me off from speaking candidly,” on “Punchin’.The.Clock,” it feels like it might have.
ALBUM REVIEWS
Nicky Wire is mad as hell – and he ain’t gonna take it anymore. “It’s OK to not be OK / Live your best life / Be kind / Have some empathy / Speak truth to power…” No, it’s not an update on Baz Luhrman’s ‘Everybody’s Free’, but a snarky diatribe – set to a stomping PiL battle march – spitting back at the false empathy in social media’s conveyor belt of empty platitudes, leading us to “an aesthetic so bland” and “a cul-de-sac of a non-descript nowhere land”. PARKLIFE!…Nope.
The opening title track of Manic Street Preachers’ 15th album ‘Critical Thinking’ finds the motor-mouthed, sabre-rattling bassist and lyricist Wire aghast and rudderless in a fractured world. The storied, once sloganeering generation terrorists and NME Godlike Genius alumni who barked “You love us” and “I am an arch-i-tect” have come to realise there’s no absolute design for life, but that’s no reason to give up the fight on one of their own. Take ‘Decline & Fall’ – a slab of textbook ‘Everything Must Go‘-sized bittersweet euphoria where frontman James Dean Bradfield sings for the tiny victories won in a waning world: “Society used to be my worst enemy, now I want to build a small one for you and me”.
‘Hiding In Plain Sight’ is another Wire-fronted gem, with analogue-feel ‘80s indie to heighten his reckoning with the man in the mirror: “I wanna be in love with the man I used to be, in a decade I felt free”. ‘Dear Stephen’, meanwhile, sees Bradfield conjure the fretwork of Johnny Marr and sing of Wire’s forever-delayed reply to a postcard he once received from Morrissey when he couldn’t make a Smiths gig as a teen. He longs for the more pure connection he once felt with the controversial quiff-Grinch in his adolescence as he paraphrases the man himself: “It’s so easy to hate, it takes guts to be kind”.
Hope shot through yearning and doubt ring out on the early R.E.M.-indebted nostalgia anthem ‘Brush Strokes Of Reunion’ and the celebration of pure truth in nature on ‘People Ruin Paintings’. Elsewhere, the Bradfield-penned ‘Being Baptised’ more explicitly finds answers among Wire’s questioning: “I can walk in the room and bring the sunshine with me, bring the darkness down on this town.”
Sonically, ‘Critical Thinking’ has touches of the European modernist propulsion of 2014 renaissance record ‘Futurology’ and the graceful ABBA pop flourishes of 2021 predecessor ‘The Ultra Vivid Lament’. But its uplifting warmth met with provocative spikiness feels like an album written staring up at the posters of their teenage art-pop and indie heroes – meant for the crackle of a record or the buzz of a cassette. In that comfort, they find the ammo to protest how only the Manics can: “A single bird sings a sweet old song / A fitting sound for a world so wrong”, as they put it on ‘Late Day Peaks’.
Book-ended with another Wire rallying cry in the aptly-named ‘OneManMilitia’, ‘Critical Thinking’ ends with the acceptance that “I don’t know what I am for, but I know I am against”. Met with the void, the Manics battle on to fill it with beauty and rage.
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