The Fall Off album review: J Cole doesn’t want the throne; he wants to destroy it and no one can stop him | Music News
The Falloff album Review: In a world that is constantly looking for summaries, shorter videos, crisper ideas, and a life ruled by brevity, it’s refreshing to see or hear a man who doesn’t care about any of that. American rapper J Cole dropped his new album, The Fall Off, and it is a recap of the kind of life he has led since he decided to leave his humble town of Fayetteville, North Carolina, for the big bright lights of New York City. It’s deeply personal, and the structure is well thought out. Each song somehow manages to retain an identity of its own while successfully fitting into the grand scheme of things.
It is a double album, with the two different parts named Disc 29 and Disc 39. The first is from the perspective of a 29-year-old, and the second (rather self-explanatory) is from the point of view of 39-year-old Cole. You can see how the tone and the mood of the album change as he grows proverbially older through the album. The brazen voice of rebellion seems to slowly calm down and learn how to keep its calm, while still reminding people about the strength it holds.
From the get-go, tracks like “Two Six” and “Safety” showcase the kind of duality J Cole has always possessed. The former is a high-octane ‘brag’ song, while the latter seems to ease you into Cole’s success. Cole uses the character of a friend, who is wondering whether the rapper is now too big to stay in touch with the people who supported him in the early days. The premise of the question suggests that Cole is successful, but not in a way that comes off like every other song in every other mumble rapper’s discography. It’s genuine because it’s connected to a real relationship, and the classic boom-bap-type beat, with raw percussion, goes in line with the message. It’s raw and real and without any frills, just like your relationship with a childhood friend.
He even goes ahead and apologises to a real-life friend he once had for discriminating against him as an uninformed teenager. That angry teenager, who knows he has made mistakes, raps with angst and guilt across the next few songs (take ‘Run a Train’s chorus for example). He addresses his altercations with rappers from his hometown who want to look for a problem with him, no matter what. Cole tries to express the fact that even though he doesn’t want to get involved with beefs or fights, people keep trying to pull him back in. But unlike Michael Corleone in Godfather 3, Cole’s grip on the instrumental and his focus on storytelling rather than forced punchlines prove that he is ready for a fight if it gets to that.
Over the next few songs, Cole deals with topics like police brutality and racial profiling, but the moment he starts sounding like he’s preaching, he switches it up with a track like “The Let Out”. The treatment of the song, filled with melodic choruses and electric guitar, sounds like something Dr. Dre and Eminem would come up with in the early 2000s. He is singing his way through the story like Marshall, and it’s beautiful.
As you enter Disc 39, you realise that J Cole isn’t necessarily trying to suppress some of his teenage-like instincts. There are still tracks like “The Fall Off is Inevitable,” where he breaks you down with a story that is going in reverse. He starts with the event of his death, going through events like winning awards, the birth of his son, meeting his wife, performing for the first time, and being born. Even though the structure is limiting, because you can’t suddenly start talking about Bentleys and Benellis (sorry, Future), it feels extremely natural.
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The entirety of the second disc is about a man who has seen the top of the world, so material gains don’t matter, and neither do platinum records. He tells harrowing stories, like losing his friend to gun violence, and how that lives rent-free in his brain — the event and its repercussions.
For the ones who like a more chill and relaxed Cole, songs like “Life Sentence” and “I Love Her Again” go a long way (not that kind of life sentence). It reminds you of the Cole you heard on the album 2014 Forest Hills Drive, a Cole that takes the time to acknowledge the love he gets amid all the chaos of his general life. He raps like a grown man who has been thrown on the pavement too many times but one who doesn’t blame others anymore.
As the album starts coming to a close, even though I wish it didn’t, one can’t help but appreciate that Cole still refused to forget where he comes from. The song “And the Whole World is Ville: starts with the line, “What I rep to the death is where my steps were first taken. At the same time, my mom felt the earth shaking under her.” I mean, the man keeps on going about how this is his last album, but he still won’t let go of the town that made him.
When all the chips are down, The Fall Off is one of the definitive hip-hop albums of the last decade, maybe more. It keeps you hooked for 24 songs and makes you walk in J Cole’s shoes 24 times over. The first words on Cole’s first full-length album were, “Have you ever prayed for something your whole life?” If this truly is his last album and he did pray for hip-hop immortality, he got it, and no one can take it away from him.
