J Cole's The Fall Off is a self-obsessed hip-hop history lesson

Nearly two decades after his 2007 debut mixtape and six consecutive US No 1 albums, J Cole frames The Fall Off as a graceful bowing out — a double album that reads like a graduate thesis. Across 24 tracks and 101 minutes he shows technical proficiency, raw lyrical skill and heavy use of citation, interpolation and sampling as he attempts to embody a half-century of hip-hop.

Tracks reference Nas’s Rewind, nod to Common, borrow from Usher while featuring Tems, and recall OutKast’s SpottieOttieDopaliscious. That scholarly approach, however, comes at the expense of emotional depth. Much of the record is pure autobiography, and the people around him feel underwritten: he remains the only fully realised presence.

On Life Sentence his wife, Melissa Heholt, is lightly sketched despite the song’s billing as one of his most honest pieces, and Safety’s letter device ultimately keeps the lens fixed on Cole himself, even as it evokes epistolary rap like Nas’s One Love or Eminem’s Stan.

United States

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