Thou Art Jermaine

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.