J. Cole Wants ‘The Fall-Off’ to Be His Best Album. Here’s How He Can Do It
With his seventh and final album on the horizon, J. Cole has the opportunity to cap off his legendary career with his greatest work yet. Here’s how he can make 'The Fall-Off' the masterpiece fans deserve.
Photo by Tim Mosenfelder, Getty Images. Photo illustration by Jefferson Harris for Okayplayer.
After six albums, four mixtapes, and over fifteen years of memories, J. Cole is ready to close the book on one of the greatest careers in hip-hop history. At the beginning of the music video for his song “Disc 2 Track 2,” he’s quoted as saying he’s been working on his seventh album and last album, The Fall-Off, for ten years with one intention: “a personal challenge to myself to create my best work.” That’s a tall order for a man who has built a legendary career, but it’s not impossible.
While his technical prowess and introspective storytelling have become his trademarks, The Fall-Off demands something even more: a return to the raw, unfiltered connection that first captivated fans. To create his magnum opus, Cole must balance artistic ambition with the authenticity that’s always separated him from his peers.
Okayplayer has compiled five essential steps Cole must take to make his magnum opus and remind us why his voice has remained essential from the blog era to now.
Let Jermaine Cole Speak
Cole is the equivalent of an open book with redacted pages. He’ll connect with fans by sharing personal tales of his teenage years (“03 Adolescence”) and insecurities (“Crooked Smile”), but won’t go in depth into being a father or husband. We’re not entitled to an artist’s private life, but the songs that have really stood the test of time are the ones where fans feel they can see themselves in Jermaine Cole. He’s not packing out arenas and selling out annual festivals simply because the music is amazing. People are invested in the scandal-free, honest rapper who is so divorced from the trappings of fame that you can catch him riding his bike around town. That sort of approachability needs to define The Fall-Off, especially if this is actually his last album.
This is also a perfect time to say that Cole should allow for this free-flowing of personal thoughts by continuing his recent trend of letting other producers work on his album. The Alchemist could provide Cole with his own version of “Meet the Grahams.” Imagine Cole discussing the difficulties of fatherhood over a haunting ALC piano loop. Knxwledge could lace him, too, elegantly chaotic jazz would be perfect for conversation about the ups and downs of marriage — which Cole rarely, if ever, discusses anyway. Letting sonic shapers handle the production affords Cole more outlets for inspiration, personal revelations, and fresh connections to fans new and old.
Give Us Anthems to Get Through This Crazy World
Cole has always championed the underdog, providing the type of anthems that made only having a dollar and a dream more than enough to get through life’s daily obstacles. For The Fall-Off to reach its full potential, Fayetteville’s son needs to channel society’s collective frustrations into irrepressible anthems that entertain and heal at the same time.
Cole’s gift for connecting dots to form the bigger picture means he can thread ideas like high grocery prices, ICE raids, and AI seamlessly. He can rap from the perspective of real-life people affected by these issues in a way that makes it feel like it could happen to anyone before asking listeners, “Ain’t you had enough?” over marching drums that sound like revolution.
Take a track like his four-times platinum hit “Neighbors,” a song about racist neighbors calling the cops on him because they suspect that his recording studio is actually a trap house. The beat is meditative, and his verses are measured dissections of racism’s pervasiveness. The chorus is a defiant punctuation mark. With his neighbor accusing him of selling dope, he serves up a middle finger of an answer: “I am!”
In this increasingly screwed-up world we’re in now, we need more of that defiance, and Cole can do his part by feeding us rhythms for the resistance. Music designed to turn up in the face of turmoil.
Keep it Uncomfortably Real
Cole doesn’t always spill tea, but when he does, it’s as artistic and all over the place as a Jackson Pollock painting. He’s been both one of our most fearless cultural commentators and our insider into the peculiarities of fame. Cole makes us feel as if we have a friend going behind the curtain and coming back to tell us the truth about what we’re consuming with blunt honesty. Cole doesn’t hide behind stereotypical rapper machismo. Instead, he invites us into his flaws, which adds verisimilitude to anything else he says about the world around him.
That’s why his brand of transparency has always endeared him to us. Doing so on The Fall-Off will give the closure we’ve come to expect. What is the current status of Dreamville? Why haven’t we had a J. Cole and Jay-Z collaboration in 15 years? What does retirement look like for him? He should convey the severity of certain admissions by stripping away the theatrics and delivering them as long speeches over angelic piano chimes and orchestral flourishes like he did on the 2014 Forest Hills Drive closer “Note to Self.” Other reveals should be given as light-hearted one-liners that force you to rewind to completely understand them, ensuring they stick in your thoughts long after the album is over.
Show Your Supremacy With a Dream Posse Cut
To me, nothing would make The Fall-Off more of a quintessential J. Cole album than him continuing his signature “no features” format. But he’s done that. If Cole really wants to surpass what he’s done, he needs to do things he hasn’t. Or rather, at least things he hasn’t done in a while. Cole’s also rarely done posse cuts with non-Dreamville artists. And that’s led to, let’s say, a severe dearth of respect on his name.
If you’re a Cole fan, seeing peak Jermaine wash the likes Kendrick Lamar and Pusha T on a track would be like suddenly finding a Gatorade water park in the middle of the Sahara. It would be a chance to end arguments about his mic prowess for good. And let’s face it: regardless of timeless radio freestyles and an endless stream of elite guest verses, those arguments have always persisted, and folks would rather get jokes off than admit Cole did his thing. To be clear, Cole always does his thing. But this would give his performance more immediate context.
That context was inescapable on Kanye West’s 2010 cut, “Looking for Trouble.” Trading bars with ’Ye, Push, Big Sean, and CyHi the Prynce, he folded biblical punchlines, self-mythology, and gunplay into a seamless tapestry of dominance. It was the kind of nuclear bomb verse that still is considered his greatest guest performance of all time. If he does that again, the message would be clear: if folks are “looking for trouble” on the microphone, they shouldn’t look Cole’s way.
Revisit the Stories That Made Us Love You
Cole is an audio illustrator of the highest order because he’s able to spin narratives so meticulously that you don’t realize your imagination is entangled with your heart. He’s also got a knack for making first-world mundanities — even things that could be embarrassing — into the stuff of hits. Seriously: he turned a story about the inexperienced curiosity of two virgins (“Wet Dreamz”) into a nine-times platinum single.
That relatability fuels more understated tracks, too. On songs like 2013’s “Can I Holla At Ya,” we felt Cole’s prepubescent anger at the man who left his mother out to dry. For tracks like “2Face,” he gave us visceral glimpses of his flirtations with danger. Diehard fans have invested years in these stories that the Dreamville captain should explore at least one more time on The Fall-Off. It wouldn’t be the first time he’s revisited stories and characters. “Power Trip” is about the girl in The Warm Up song, “Dreams.”
Imagine finding out whether Cole and the woman he impregnated in “Lost Ones” went through with the abortion they wrestled with throughout the song. Did they keep the baby? How do they feel now about whatever decision they made? Did the kid become a rapper like his father? We don’t necessarily need answers, but they’re worth thinking about. It would be cool to get answers for 4 Your Eyez Only, too. On the project, Cole spent 10 tracks crafting a message from the grave for a fallen friend’s daughter — it would be full circle to find out how those lessons shaped her.
This rewards longtime fans with Easter egg hunts to show their years of fanatical listening weren’t for nothing. It also inspires a new generation of listeners to dig through his catalog. If this is to be the end of the Cole Cinematic Universe, we might as well get a little Avengers: Endgame-esque closure.
