Fans of contemporary hip-hop will know that artists these days seldom focus on/rely upon releasing an album. In the digital age artist’s are able to build a career and in some cases enjoy unprecedented success by following a simple formula: Release 2 or a 3 singles a year plus 1 or 2 collaborations in the same time period and you can establish a loyal, cult-like fanbase, travel the world and rest on the laurels of a pretty small catalogue. Regardless of whether you back this approach to making music or not, that’s simply the way it is now and will be for the foreseeable future. There are however, rappers that do focus on releasing albums – that trace the blueprint of the artists that came before them. J Cole is one of them. The song we’re having a geez at is titled 1985 – Intro to “The Fall Off” (abbreviated 1985).
Today’s Juice is vintage J Cole. There’s no auto-tuning, no obnoxious production muddling vocal delivery, it’s just you Cole and a simple beat. Now, 1985 is as its title suggests, a prelude to a forthcoming project titled, yep you guessed it “The Fall Off”. Now, if this project is a conceptual body of work and picks up where today’s Juice left off then Soundcloud rappers beware. Throughout today’s Juice Cole constructively criticises the nature of modern-day hip-hop and gives, what could best be described as advice to the abundance of rappers following the aforementioned single + collab formula. By no means is 1985’ a passive delivery. There are without question a few rappers in Cole’s crosshair but overall it seems as though Cole expresses some level of empathy for what he clearly sees as young naïve rappers blinded by materialism amongst other things.