Why J. Cole is the Best, Jerry, the Best (Right Now)

It's been a few minutes since I've posted anything substantive, but let's just forget all that and consider it time I've used to research pertinent blogging materials (Also when your blog blows up and you start making twelve cents a day on Google AdSense every bitch you ever meet wants to fuck you. I'll go to a party and be approached by tons of girls who are like, "Um hey are you Biff from Metacricket? Lemme finger your ass real quick." I guess the eager beaver is the collapse of the dam.)
But anyway, as I was dominating Dynasty Mode the other day on NCAA March Madness 2005 on my XBox, I was listening to J. Cole's "The Warm Up" mixtape for the 18th time, when it all became clear: J. Cole is untouchable right now (yes, even by Drake, but that's another story altogether that I will address in approximately three paragraphs). Here are the reasons Hwy:

He makes his own beats
Or as he so maturely puts it, "They say I'm like the human body/I produce my own shit." In a hip-hop/pop/R & B landscape that has become dominated by super-producers whose beats are the most recognizable element of any song (see: Neptunes, The or land, Timba), the actual art of creating a song from start to finish has fallen to the wayside. Unless the artist and the producer are very close and are working in tandem throughout the entire process (a la Drake and 40--again, we'll get to him soon enough--or Kid Cudi and Emile), what you're often left with is a stale beat (again, see Neptunes, The or land, Timba) and a rapper boasting non-sensical non-sequiturs for three and a half minutes between a hook about money, cars, clothes or hos (YUUUP). I mean, don't get me wrong, sure it's fun for Timbaland or Pharrell to cook up some stale late-90's sounding bullshit and hear Jay lambast Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly (what song am I thinking of?), but that isn't what creates lasting music. That's pop, which is short for popular, which means that one day it will be UNpopular, and it will sound stale and no one will like it because everyone is sick of it (see a, Ke$h).
But is this what I think of when I listen to the hook to "I Get Up" for the 525,600th time?

Abso-fucking-lutely NOT. This song is fucking timeless. This song is sustainable. Why? Because, for all intents and purposes, J. Cole WROTE this song. He found the sample, made the beat, and wrote the hook, all with a singular idea in mind of what this song was ultimately going to become. This organic process of song-writing is what begets quality, timeless music. Why can I still listen to "I Get Up" fifteen times a day, but after the third spin of "Tik Tok" I want to punch a baby in the head? (Don't get me wrong, "Tik Tok" is a pop masterpiece. But that's all it is. A pop masterpiece.) Why was "The College Dropout" so good? Because Kanye had saved all those beats, nay, all those songs for himself. He knew what he wanted to do musically and he executed it himself. J. Cole does the same.
Cole is as close to a songwriter as there really can be in hip-hop, and it sets his music apart from most of the other garbage to which we're subjected so often.

He's got something to say
Too often rapping today consists merely of a series of personal boasts that conveniently happen to rhyme. Lil Wayne has mastered this art, and apparently that makes him (or made him) "the best rapper alive," because he says things like "Bitch I'm me/And you are you too/But bitch I'm three." Christ jesus, he's fucking amazing huh? Suffice it to say, I think Wayne ran out of things to say a long long time ago (of course that presumes that he even had something to say in the first place, which is hard to decide).
Cole, on the other hand, isn't just barfing into a mic. He's telling us a story. Of course, that's not a new concept at all. What made "American Gangster" and both of the Cuban Linx records so good was the fact that they were telling us a story. That being said, there's only so much I can listen to about slinging dope and using burners and getting clapped up before I get bored and I also DON'T FUCKING UNDERSTAND ANY OF IT (although if you want to at least begin to understand all this street lingo, watching "The Wire" is the wisest choice you can make, because without it "Only Built For Cuban Linx II" may as well have been written in Spanish).
But J. Cole doesn't want to talk about slinging--maybe because he never did, or maybe because he recognizes that it's not as accessible or compelling as talking about, oh say, stalking the love of your life. "Dreams" is perhaps the best example of Cole's talent as an MC.

Again, I can listen to this song an infinite number of times. This is another perfect example of the way the beat, the lyrics, and the hook all come together to create a perfect song. Also, the lyrics are fucking UNBELIEVABLE. He's able to craft a linear, coherent story without sacrificing any flow or wordplay. Here is an example of what I'm talking about:

And maybe I'll just drive by occasionally
And if one day I happen to see her outside, she'll wave to me,
Imagine what she'll say to me
This ain't no time to be afraid no more
It's time for bravery

Rhyming occasionally/wave to me/say to me/bravery is quite impressive, and the fact that it all works together makes the song one of the best OF ALL-TIME (Kanye voice). Not only are these lyrics coherent and compelling, but they're accessible, which leads me to my next bold section...

He makes you think, but not too hard
Lupe Fiasco may be the smartest and most intellectual rapper alive today, but that doesn't mean I'd rather listen to his albums over " The Warm Up." (Maybe I would, but whateverrrrr) I'm just saying, it's nice to listen to a rap song and be impressed by the story and the lyricism, but also not have to stop every ten seconds to google what each line means or ask Mike which Langston Hughes poem he's referring to. I mean, I love Lupe to death, but there's a reason "Enemy of the State" was so good: I could listen to it and be like "Oh shit, good line BECAUSE I FUCKING GET THAT LINE."
J. Cole straddles the line (haha pun!) between lyricism and intellectualism quite nicely. Lines like "For that living large but mama I aint done yet/Sit back and watch your son rise/Kick back and know yo son set" are fucking AMAZING and exhibit the kind of wordplay that we value in an MC. They also don't make me feel like a fucking idiot for not paying attention when my family visited the Vietnam War Memorial in 1996.
PS, there is still no song that can touch "The Cool." And if there is, J. Cole hasn't released it yet. This is an example of what I'm talking about: Lupe created a story--an entire universe--that was accessible and understandable, and he constructed a narrative using rapping that we could understand ("Hustler for death/No heaven for a gangster"--I just got goosebumps writing that line). Unfortunately, Lupe can get a little carried away sometimes. He's a little too smart for his own good, which is why my white sister who graduated from Harvard likes him, but he can't quite get as mainstream as Jay-Z or Kanye, despite the fact that he's a more talented rapper.


Now, where does that leave Drake in all this? Here's the way I see it: the world is separated into categories. Most of us fit into these categories, except for the select few that are anomalies. Artists like Drake, Andre 3000, and Cee-Lo are anomalies, because they aren't quite rappers, and they aren't quite singers. They're ringpers. At this point, Drake has been doing a lot more auto-crooning than he has rapping. That doesn't mean I'm dismissing what he does; "So Far Gone" is on the same level as "The Warm Up," but it's really like comparing apples to mixtapes--they're just different.
Drake can write a song and a hook with the best of them, and his rapping is beyond passable--it's actually quite good. Just listen to this:

Like I said before, this is little more than a series of boasts about how good he is at rapping and getting pussy and wearing pea coats in Autumn, but it's still so compelling, simply because there's something about the sound of Drake's voice (just like Andre and Cee-Lo) that makes us want to listen. Give me "So Far Gone" and "The Warm Up" and I'll listen to them equally, and I guess we'll really just have to wait for their albums to drop to reach a conclusive resolution, but even that will be temporary.
I love them both, the same way I love cheesesteaks and watermelon vodka. Sometimes I want a cheesesteak, because it's satisfying and fills me up, but sometimes I want watermelon vodka, because it's sweet, fruity, delicious, and I just have a good time when I consume it. That doesn't make cheesesteaks any better than watermelon vodka, and vice versa, it just makes them different entities altogether.

Thanks for reading friends. Let's hope we can come up with more stuff like this in the future.