Oh, Will We Enjoy The Hang Out

Whenever I think back to middle school, I have the distinct impression that I spent most lunches in detention. Logically, I know this is almost definitely not true (someone would’ve done something), and yet I can’t shake the feeling, more than 20 years later, that I was there nearly every day. This is probably because lunch detention, at least as far as I remember it, was almost uniformly a great time.

It's a plainly doomed enterprise from the start: take all the kids who’ve been singled out for disruptiveness, vulgarity, and other mostly harmless infractions, and put them in one room under the supervision of a distracted, overworked teacher without the time or interest to do much besides stand in the way of all-out mutiny. The most devious, immature, undiagnosed-ADHD kids, intent on turning most days of school into comedy specials, are singled out, and then surrounded with many of their favorite co-conspirators. No wonder these lunchtimes in captivity hold an outsize place in my memory, versus the comparatively unremarkable cafeteria meals of free society. 

Sadly, in adulthood, there’s no real equivalent to lunch detention, and I suppose it’s just one of those things we’re forced to accept as part of getting older. (As an adult, any situation in which you’re being held in a room by a higher authority is probably lasting longer than one lunch period, and your fellow captives are probably not nearly as fun.) So you can imagine my delight and sense of nostalgic comfort last Thursday, in a 180-seat second-run movie theater in Fayetteville, when director Mark Mayr’s premiere of the 2026 Two-Six Cypher turned out to be not just a local hip-hop coming-out party, but also, spiritually, a bunch of kids back in time out.

In this case, the opening (every class clown is always looking for an opening) was born out of technical difficulty: after a few unblemished seconds of runtime, the video abruptly cut out. When it came back, the audio played without video; then, vice versa. For periods of time, a fuzzy black band would slide onto the screen, then slide away. Taking this on the chin more than anyone was WCCG 104.5 radio host DJ Yodo, who had clearly been asked to do 30 seconds of pre-premiere riffing on the mic, but now had to stretch that to 10 or 15 beleaguered minutes. In short order, the pretenses of power and control that typically govern our everyday lives began to break down, and a new, hyperdemocratic, Lord Of The Flies-like scenario took hold, in which no authority—not Omni Cinemas, not Mark, and not DJ Yodo—reigned superior to the vox populi. 

In search of an oratorical life raft as footage silently played behind him, Yodo’s stratagem was a mostly free-associative, “Boom Goes The Dynamite” approach dictated by whatever was momentarily gracing the screen. Provoked by a shot of a young child, Yodo lamented the behavior of his kids, before sharing his punitive policy of tickling his daughter until she cries uncle. “That’s ABUSE!! It’s 2026!” came a response from somewhere in the back of the class. When Yodo made an earnest solicitation for music submissions for his radio show, at the email address “theyodoshow@gmail.com,” a chorus of willfully obtuse clarifying questions, familiar to anyone who’s ever been 12 years old, emanated from the ether: “You said hotmail dot com, right? Yodo at Yahoo?” During one of Mayr’s many appearances on screen, Yodo reflected, “I’ve never seen Mark without a perfect shape-up. How is that possible?” Scattered laughter quickly turned into a round of applause as a guy down the aisle from me, who I can only assume is Mark’s barber, stood up and waved to the crowd. In the midst of all this, perhaps encapsulating the horizontal leadership structure of the moment better than anything, was a booming request/demand from, again, somewhere in the back: “Keep talking for five more minutes, I gotta go to the bathroom!”

Which is all to say, I felt right at home. After the kinks were worked out, the main event—an 11-minute behind-the-scenes video, followed by the cypher itself—turned out to be, in both production value and emceeing ability, a stirring testament to the creative culture of Fayetteville. I highly encourage everyone to watch it, as well as this “easter eggs” explainer Mark put up yesterday on IG. (As for the emceeing, I’m partial to the one-two punch of William Prize and Carolina Cool Slim, but there isn’t a slouch in the whole session.) The mildly anarchic antics before the screening, enjoyable in and of themselves, were clearly a byproduct of something more profound: the genuine camaraderie and joy of a city’s indie hip-hop community, high on the (apparently) rare occasion of all being in the same place at the same time. You could feel the energy in the lobby beforehand, where media types like freelancer and SE contributor Keem Jones, FAYNC Magazine Editor-in-Chief Zairis TéJion, and Jimmie Dillard of Let’s Kick It 295 intermingled with artists like James Vader, Big Cas, and Mac DaBlackSheep, as well as other hip-hop-adjacent locals like Daville skate shop owner Terry Grimble. Cameras, video lights, and impromptu interviews were everywhere, but one got the sense it was motivated more by an exuberant passion for documenting local history than simply chasing digital engagement (or at least, a healthy mix of the two). Somewhere in the scrum, always either in conversation or being asked to be in a picture, was the event’s orchestrator, cinematographer Mark Mayr. It seemed like everyone in attendance was in some way connected to the cypher; I wasn’t sure if Mark had rented the theater or if this was just a reflection of the business the Omni does on a sub-freezing Thursday night in February. 

The subtext to all this was a small detail of local import: within hours, the rapper J. Cole, a Fayetteville native who also happens to be the most famous hip-hop artist ever from North Carolina and one of the most famous entertainers in the world, would be releasing a new, double-disc album heavily based on his upbringing in the city. For weeks, billboards all around town had hyped the arrival of The Fall-Off, and its Fayetteville-centric “2/6/26” release date. On Thursday night, beyond the pleasantries and catching up, the questions du jour were “Do you think J. Cole is going to pop up in the city tomorrow?” (folks weren’t so sure, but as it turned out, yes); “Are you staying up ’til midnight to listen to the album?” (the consensus seemed to be no); and, “Do you think one quarter of all features on the album will be Future?” (I don’t think anyone actually said this, but it would’ve been incredibly prescient if they had). It was a beautiful scene, but for someone who’s almost never in Fayetteville, it would be entirely reasonable to wonder if all the hubbub had as much to do with Colemania as anything else. Or at least, it’s what I would’ve wondered, had I not had the benefit of the night before. 

Twenty-four hours earlier and 90 or so miles away, I was in attendance at a remarkably similar event in Durham, the public premiere of “MerryGo,” a horror/martial arts music video made for the Defacto Thezpian song of the same title. Rather than an old-school movie theater with a traditional name (The Omni), the location was a newly opened dive bar/music venue with an unusual name (Stancyks), but the basic principles were identical. A relatively short video was being debuted, and a locally specific coterie of creative collaborators, close friends, and kindred acquaintances had gathered to take it in together. No hometown hero was releasing a charts-shattering album the next day, but there was an unmistakable fervor in the air all the same.    

After the video had been shown, about halfway through director John Laww’s 40 or more individual shoutouts to cast and crew, it struck me that rarely if ever have I been at an event in which the acknowledgements take more time than the attraction itself. But what at first seemed a bit ridiculous eventually dawned on me as enlightened, even radical. How often, really, do we get to be celebrated in front of dozens of our neighbors and friends? I’ve got a feeling that for most human beings, the answer is “not enough.” Well a ton of people got exactly that on Wednesday night, on top of the good company, lessons on how to pronounce Stancyks (it's "stan-chicks," by the way), and everything else. 

Obviously, a significant part of me very much understands the technical and aesthetic value of art as a thing unto itself—hence why we have an assessment from Yoh today on The Fall-Off proper, and the aims of its author. But sometimes, another part of me wants to cast that conventional wisdom aside, and insist that none of it really matters, and that the whole point of art is really just what follows from it—in others words, that I’ll accept a fucking banana duct-taped to a wall if it brings us together, and pierces the bubbles of our increasingly siloed lives.

I don’t know which is more correct than the other (OK let's be honest, it's not the second one). I just know that I’m appreciative of events like the MerryGo and Two Six Cypher screenings for how their very existence provides a reason to be in the same place with a wonderfully self-selected group of people—just like how goofing off in class used to punch your ticket to an invite-only function with the funniest kids in your grade. In 20 years, I might have a hazy recollection that in 2026, I was out watching music videos with friends almost every day of the week. It won't be true, but I won't really mind.

Ryan Cocca is the founder/editor of Super Empty and a decade-plus veteran of regional culture coverage in North Carolina, whose work has appeared in INDY Week, Pigeons & Planes, and more. He (I) can be reached at ryan@superempty.com.

Also This Week On The Tuesday Mixtape:

• 💿 A new album from J. Cole, reacted to by Yoh, and some NC albums we missed in January
• 🎧 New songs and videos from Mique, Jah-Monte x leroy, MAVI, and SkyBlew
• 🔗 A brand new roundup of fresh links, and two giveaway winners!

💿 The Fall-Off, As Heard By Yoh Phillips

Editor's Note: Click here to read this as a standalone piece on our site. (Member sign-in required.)

The challenge with pursuing a creative craft is that taste often exceeds skill, most severely at the beginning. Artists must remain committed in the conception process, knowing what they make won’t be exceptional, while believing their next attempt will be better. It’s a cycle wherein pain becomes pleasure, pleasure becomes pain, and from the aches, out of the passion, art is made.

Some years ago, I spent a month with an aunt who worked in Wilmington, North Carolina. She would leave at dawn and return before sunset. During those quiet, in-between hours, her condo felt like a fortress with no knobs, no locks, no trespassers. Becoming a palace for the art I wished to stock in secret. This privacy is needed to dream, I thought, allowing an intense, lonely, creative escape into the imagination.

Wilmington showed me a creativity most accessible when solitude meets silence. Not just external noiselessness, but an inner quietude. Unconscious of judgment, free from worldly concerns, in a state of mental abstraction to write better perspectives, greater descriptions, and expand my points of view. How I felt then, encountering a peace to explore imaginative worlds without restraints, is what I hear when listening to J. Cole’s new, double-disc album, The Fall-Off.

It’s evident in the ideas. Modernizing Common’s “I Used to Love H.E.R.” as “I Love Her Again,” channeling “Rewind” by Nas to make “The Fall-Off is Inevitable,” rapping from the perspective of a remorseful Notorious B.I.G and Tupac on “What If,” are audacious choices to make creatively and aren’t concepts executable when concerned with being shamed for falling short. As a longtime listener, it’s a highlight to hear him create music with an artfulness that, in his younger days, would have been clunkier or less fully realized. In that area of imaginative development, The Fall-Off reaches a higher artistic plateau than any of the J. Cole albums before it.