Is it just me or is "Born Sinner" highly underrated on the coli?

[winb83]

man i really want to like J.Cole but all his songs run together to me. like just one long ass song

i haven't listened to more than these couple albums but dude's subject matter is very narrow. every song is talking about bytches and money or big uppin himself. he's basically a more narrow version of what Kanye West evolved into.

if he wants to go down as one of the greats he may need to consider evolving as an artist. the skill is there but he doesn't apply it to much subject matter.

 

[MAKAVELI25]

i haven't listened to more than these couple albums but dude's subject matter is very narrow. every song is talking about bytches and money or big uppin himself. he's basically a more narrow version of what Kanye West evolved into.

if he wants to go down as one of the greats he may need to consider evolving as an artist. the skill is there but he doesn't apply it to much subject matter.

You obviously haven't listened to much J. Cole. If he doesn't have much subject matter, then neither do 90% of rappers.

Listen to tracks like: "Losing Your Balance", "Chaining Day", "Show Me Something", "Lights Please", "Crooked Smile", "Farewell", "Enchanted", "Breakdown", and "Runaway"and thats just off the top of the dome.

 

[ISO]

Villuminati was fukking wack, overrated AF. The dude put in a bunch of struggle bars talking about fakkits , then he starts talking about Illuminati. Cole just can't ride a fast paced beat like that.

Forbidden Fruit was aight, Kendrick should have gotten a verse instead of that suspect chorus. He f*cked up the song with that corny a$$ Alvin & the Chimpmunks impersonation.

LAnd of the Snakes was nothing special lyrically, his flow was off IMO, subject matter is about b*thes as is much of the album

Long.Live A$AP>Born Sinner
LVL

Hell

Phoenix

Suddenly

1-Train

Ghetto Symphony

Long.Live A$AP

Pain

Jodye

Angels

Goldie

Some saying Cole is an elite lyricist he isn't, he's very average. A$AP isn't known as a lyricist more for his great flow, but Cole doesn't have a song on Born Sinner that can f*ck with Suddenly lyrically.

 

[MAKAVELI25]

Villuminati was fukking wack, overrated AF. The dude put in a bunch of struggle bars talking about fakkits , then he starts talking about Illuminati. Cole just can't ride a fast paced beat like that.

Forbidden Fruit was aight, Kendrick should have gotten a verse instead of that suspect chorus. He f*cked up the song with that corny a$$ Alvin & the Chimpmunks impersonation.

LAnd of the Snakes was nothing special lyrically, his flow was off IMO, subject matter is about b*thes as is much of the album

Long.Live A$AP>Born Sinner
LVL

Hell

Phoenix

Suddenly

1-Train

Ghetto Symphony

Long.Live A$AP

Pain

Jodye

Angels

Goldie

Some saying Cole is an elite lyricist he isn't, he's very average. A$AP isn't known as a lyricist more for his great flow, but Cole doesn't have a song on Born Sinner that can f*ck with Suddenly lyrically.

 

[winb83]

then neither do 90% of rappers.

which is why rap is such a flaky genre of music in the first place. the typical rapper doesn't create much in the way of relatable music so if they get hot its mostly off a great beat and its hard to maintain any type of long lasting fame. most people aren't really listening to what these guys are saying.

with other gernes of music people like songs more because they relate to them as well as the melodies and music.

 

[MAKAVELI25]

which is why rap is such a flaky genre of music in the first place. the typical rapper doesn't create much in the way of relatable music so if they get hot its mostly off a great beat and its hard to maintain any type of long lasting fame. most people aren't really listening to what these guys are saying.

with other gernes of music people like songs more because they relate to them as well as the melodies and music.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVquVB12Tpw

Start off with these and don't come back till you're done

 

[ISO]

Laugh all you want Cole stan, I doubt you even heard A$AP Rocky's album. J. Cole straight jacking classic beats and spitting struggle over them.


You know what's really funny? The fact that J.Cole had the audacity to say this on wax
"My verbal AK slays fakkits
And I don't mean no disrespect when I say fakkit, okay fakkit
Don't be so sensitive
If you wanna get f*cked in the a$$
That's between you and whoever else's d!ck it is"

You know what else is funny the amount of name drops on this album, it's like this nig*a is a Hov or the Game. Corny name dropping fgt
"Y'all nikkaz soft like Meagan Goods lips"


Meanwhile A$AP was riding extravagant beat after extravagant beat and even dropping some real shyt from the heart

 

[MAKAVELI25]

Laugh all you want Cole stan, I doubt you even heard A$AP Rocky's album. J. Cole straight jacking classic beats and spitting struggle over them.


You know what's really funny? The fact that J.Cole had the audacity to say this on wax
"My verbal AK slays fakkits
And I don't mean no disrespect when I say fakkit, okay fakkit
Don't be so sensitive
If you wanna get f*cked in the a$$
That's between you and whoever else's d!ck it is"

You know what else is funny the amount of name drops on this album, it's like this nig*a is a Hov or the Game. Corny name dropping fgt
"Y'all nikkaz soft like Meagan Goods lips"


Meanwhile A$AP was riding extravagant beat after extravagant beat and even dropping some real shyt from the heart
A Rocky - Suddenly - YouTube
A Rocky - Hell (ft. Santigold) - YouTube

You do make some excellent points

 

[duncanthetall]

Yo, the Rocky album was nice...but stop

 

[notorious8562]

man i really want to like J.Cole but all his songs run together to me. like just one long ass mediocre song

Fixed.

 

[☑︎#VoteDemocrat]

Anonymous asked: Why is JCole mediocre?

http://tumblinerb.com/post/54242835122/why-is-jcole-mediocre

Well to provide a little context - I wrote that subtweet in response to a mess of folks on my twitter timeline who were taking great pleasure in the fact that Cole’s record was coming so close to matching the sales of Kanye’s Yeezus. This is sort of understandable - Kanye’s a natural heel and he works pretty hard to invoke the wrath of the masses. But come the fukk on thinking people, for better or worse he made a very ambitious album and has a bunch of squares banging acid squelches and metallic shard bursts while scratching their heads. It might only be subversive as a means to amplify Kanye’s ego, but at least it’s subversive. J. Cole made a regular ass mediocre rap record that only appeals to and appeases the mediocre people of the world.

And I do mean mediocre in the most literal sense. I don’t think Cole’s garbage or anything. Dude can rap okay as far as rapping humans go. If he were in a cipher on a corner or in a dorm room or at an open mic or whatever he’d surely evoke the “oh cool, rapping" response that such activities exist to evoke. That old rap rap raprap / rap ra rap rap approach can go a long way in certain social situations. But great rappers and rap stars have historically been expected to transcend that.

I mean this guy is supposed to be a great lyricist, a compelling writer, The Nas Of Our Time but nobody seems to notice that he failed to absorb the most (only?) compelling aspect of Nas’ style - that project window vision. Dude is wholly incapable of seeing outside of himself. Literally every idea on Born Sinner is I / me / my on some elementary school essay shyt. His subjects exist only as one dimensional props for him to hang his own personality and narratives on.

The “Art Of Storytelling" beat jack on “Land Of The Snakes" is perfect because it opens Cole up to such a bold contrast against the Outkast original. Sasha Thumper was a fully formed human, one with hopes and fears and slumber parties. She even exits the scene and lives an entire life outside of Andre’s verse. The women of "Snakes" and elsewhere on BS are set pieces. They have no names, no stories, no personalities, no specific characteristics. It’s just “this bytch," “some hoes" and endless “she"s. Sometimes they talk at him like wamp wamp wamp wamp but that’s where it stops. I’m sure someone could extract an intense gender politics thinkpiece out of this but it’s not just women either. He does the same thing with his family, with physical spaces, even with his own heroes (On “Let Nas Down" Cole makes no specific case for Nas’ talents or appeal, he just talks about shaking dude’s hand and hanging posters on the wall.) It’s flat narcissism and it’s definitely not good writing. Good writing requires a panoramic worldview.

And I can hear you little frutflies spitting out cheetoh dust onto your keyboard and filling my ask box with baahh but Chief Keef and Migos can write? questions. No, of course not. Those guys fukking suck at traditional rhyme writing when compared to Cole’s ample mediocrity. But their goals are very different. They redirect the effort that they would’ve put into pure lyricism elsewhere - into delivery, into structure, into intensity, into flows, into adlibs, into hooks, into sonics. This is perfectly fine. Writing ("lyricism") isn’t everything in rap. I don’t even think it’s the most important thing. But if an artist is going to make it the focal point of their work - which is what Cole clearly aims to do - then they should be doing it better than he does. I mean not to go all old head on you but if someone is not at least striving to be as vivid as Nas or as emotive as Scarface or as imaginative as Posdnuos or as bugged out as Cam’ron then I’d be more comfortable if they were to just give up on writing entirely and make a thousand kewl grunt noises on their record.

I don’t know, maybe this is a generational thing - you young people sure are in love with yourselves and maybe you need stars who are equally self-obsessed - but as a writer it’s hard for me to sit back and call someone a good writer if their shyt is as insular and shallow as Cole’s. Wale suffers from this sort of narcissism and lightweight laziness too and you could pretty easily sub his middling ass new album into any paragraph here. These guys are stuck in their own heads and bouncing around cliches that they cribbed from played out Mount Rushmore rap legends like Nas and Jay. They see nothing beyond the mirror and do very little within this narrow perspective. They’re prisoners of their own realities and of the laws of language and it destroys me to think that anyone would consider them the great lyricists of our time. But hey most people don’t pay very much attention to words at all anymore so whatever.

2:59 am • 30 June 2013 • 462 notes

 

[☑︎#VoteDemocrat]

lyricism is looked down upon on this forum


if u aren't dropping ignorant trap music with catchy beats nobody cares about you

nah.

fukk that.

J Cole ain't as lyrical as he portrays himself to be.

he's actually pretty lazy on the mic and wastes a lot of his bars setting up whatever he's doing/saying/expressing.

Ya'll nikkas act like you have to fill dead space with ad libs and verbs and nouns just to be considered a "great rapper"

No. Its more to it than that.

Thats why nikkas can't accept that Drake is a better rapper. That Big Sean is a better rapper. That WAYNE is a better rapper. That Wale, Ross, etc. are ALL better rappers than J Cole.

 

[☑︎#VoteDemocrat]

It's a solid album. It didnt really have a ton of replay value IMO, but I bought the album after listening to it, so it was obviously something I liked. Plus, Cole's album is being received really well by the masses commercially, so it's not like people aren't showing their appreciation with their wallets.

I agree with the handful of dudes that say that Wale's album seems to be the most slept on album of the year though. That shyt is a splendid album, better than any of the albums released in the last month imo, and it doesn't seem to have improved Wale's standing commercially or respect wise one bit. After listening to that joint when it leaked, I thought that the album was going to be huge for him and catapult him to around the Cole tier of young dudes. shyt hasn't happened yet, at least as far as I can tell.

Exactly.

I listened to it 4 times now and it has NO replay value. In fact, it gets worse the more I hear it. The beats are just so average and his rhymes don't stand out like you'd expect. Its just one big mess after a minute.

Wale DEFINITELY had the sleeper of the year though.

 

[stealthbomber]

its been in constant rotation since it dropped

 

[Enchanted]

i haven't listened to more than these couple albums but dude's subject matter is very narrow. every song is talking about bytches and money or big uppin himself. he's basically a more narrow version of what Kanye West evolved into.

Deeper meaning bruh