J. Cole – The Off-Season
Hip Hop – Released May 14, 2021 – 12 songs, 39 mins
ROZ’s album drop:
For my pick, I’ve chosen an album that has been floating around for the past few weeks, initially as a potential pick by one Steve before being outed by the other Steve. I think it’s time to have a listen. In a return to hip hop for us at TSR, my pick for this week is: J. Cole – The Off-Season.
REID
With TSR’s 23rd album, we finally do a fresh hip hop record. That alone should give you a good indication of our group’s appeal to the genre. My interest in rap and hip hop has fallen off significantly over the last decade. The only artists I really listen to or keep up with are Action Bronson, Kendrick Lamar, Joey Bada$$ and a bit of Drake and Kanye. And even with those guys, I listen to their earlier stuff. Hip hop’s seemingly overwhelming movement to mumble rap and auto-tune in mainstream circles has been a huge deterrent for me. The emergence of guys like Travis Scott has left me scratching my head on the direction of hip hop. A lot of these guys have undeniable talent but literally speak to their fans on stage in auto-tune.. I just don’t get it. My personal taste has certainly changed as well and that prevents me from digging deeper for talent. Anyway, this is just one man’s opinion I felt worth sharing with my review of The Off-Season.
J. Cole is not someone I’ve followed. No Role Modelz is a great song from 2014’s 2014 Forest Hills Drive but he’s relatively new to me otherwise. From that song alone, I could tell he wasn’t an auto-tuner and he can really spit so if Lundi or Roz didn’t choose this one, I probably would have. Super cool that he played in his first professional basketball game in the newly formed Basketball Africa League a few days off this release. The Off-Season has a handful of bright spots. I really enjoy applying.pressure, punchin’.the.clock and hunger.on.hillside. Two of those three are 2 minutes or less of J. Cole just killing it over a sick beat. Pride.is.the.devil is another cool song worth mentioning (specifically J. Cole’s parts). Other than that, the remainder of the album doesn’t do much for me. There are several guest appearances of guys I either haven’t heard before or am not a big fan of their style. There really isn’t much for me to elaborate on here. Many of the songs are hard to differentiate from one another with no standout qualities.
J. Cole has mad talent. I love that he hasn’t conformed to the mumble rap/autotune movement, despite some hints of it on The Off-Season. But other than three or four tracks that kill it, the rest of the album fails to keep me interested.
Overall Rating – 6.7/10
Favourite Song – a p p l y i n g . p r e s s u r e
ROZ
It’s been a hot minute since we’ve reviewed a rap album!
J. Cole is something else - rapper, singer, songwriter and producer (a damn good one at that), the man can do it all. When The Off-Season got announced I knew that if one of the boys didn’t pick it up as their album, I definitely would.
Lyrically, this album has a lot of amazing wordplay. Right off the bat on 95 south: "Put an M on your head, you're Luigi’s brother now”... absolutely hilarious and amazing at the same time. Not only that but if you look at the songwriting credits, J. Cole writes all of his own lyrics - a breath of fresh air in this day and age where rap albums sometimes have dozens of writers throughout. Productionwise, I’m just really glad J. Cole is in the category of rap that isn’t a cacophony of excessive autotune and mumble rap - something that sadly saturates the market in today’s pop-rap, Tik Tok environment (and for that J. Cole I am eternally grateful).
Now onto my review. Pretty much all of the tracks on this album hit for me, other than pride is the devil because I don’t like Lil Babys style at all. The first standout was amari, specifically for the production side of the track. I mean, it’s produced by hitmaker extraordinaire Timbaland so that’s not a surprise. I actually had the opportunity to watch this beat get created on Timbaland’s twitch stream, and the story goes like this: Timbaland made up the beat live while J. Cole was listening in on the stream, who in turn recorded the beat on his phone and rapped over it. J. Cole then sent it back to Timbaland who loved it, polished it up and gave it to him as a finished, mastered track (pretty fucking cool eh?).
Another one I really liked was applying pressure with it’s slower 90’s era hip hop beat; it honestly reminded me of an old New york-style Biggie Smalls track. Lyrically, my two favorite tracks were punchin‘ the clock and let go my hand. There’s way too much to unpack here but I found myself getting blown away over and over again. The elements came together so cohesively and had so much soul in let go my hand that I’d be a fool not to pick it as my favorite.
I don’t have anything overly negative to say about this album. Not every track hit for me but overall the wordplay was clever, the sampling was fantastic, and the beats punched hard. You can’t ask for much more than that.
Overall Rating – 8.5/10
Favourite Song – l e t . g o . m y . h a n d
LUNDI
Lundi’s Dream: TSR becomes big enough that I can have a guest complete rap reviews for me.
Rap has just never been something I’ve dove into and find it challenging to review. Unless it has standout production element or has comedic writing (I basically like Kanye) I feel out of my reach. With that mini rant out of the way I have to say I very much enjoyed J Cole’s The Off-season.
This is my first exposure to J Cole and it certainly delivered. I love his rapping style more than anything I’ve heard of lately and have the utmost respect for any artist who can write, perform, and produce an album. Maybe it’s just great to hear something that’s not mumbled or auto tuned to hell but I find Cole’s rapping packs a punch and hits you in the face with each verse.
Downside here for me are that the album doesn’t get away much from what I expect from many rappers. There’s a lot of guns, lot of being poor, lot of murder, etc. Cole manages to touch on some broader elements that face society as a whole but he isn’t on the level of say a Kendrick Lamar in those terms.
I hope the off season is just Cole preparing for something bigger as I would love for this traditional type rap to make a comeback of sorts. Definitely gained a fan in me and I look forward to exploring the rest of the discography.
Overall Rating – 7.7/10
Favourite Song – a m a r i