J. Cole’s Final Album Shows a Superstar in His Flawed Glory

Will The Fall-Off be J. Cole’s last album? The 41-year-old rapper has said as much, explaining in a lengthy note on Twitter/X that the title is an allusion to his 2007 debut mixtape, The Come Up, and that “The Fall-Off, a double album made with intentions to be my last, brings the concept of my first project full circle.”

There’s a tradition of rappers signaling imminent “retirement,” from Too $hort in 1996, Jay-Z in 2003 and Lupe Fiasco in 2006; to this year’s announcements from Cole, Westside Gunn, and T.I. It feeds into the myth of rap heroes as Jim Brown-caliber ballers capable of exiting the gridiron with their bodies, minds, and dignity intact. Ironically, Cole has long been undervalued in rap sabermetrics, with critics picking at his production choices, songwriting and thematic ideas.

They point to a damning moment at the height of the Drake/Kendrick Lamar war, after Cole’s claim on Drake’s “First Person Shooter” that they all comprised a “big three” sparked Lamar to diss the two on Future and Metro Boomin’s “Like That.” Cole tried to clapback on “7 Minute Drill,” then meekly deleted the song from streaming services and apologized to Lamar in front of tens of thousands of concertgoers at his own Dreamville Festival. If Cole is truly retiring, he can’t say that he’s leaving the field injury-free.

Cole makes his best work when he separates himself from rap’s fraternity rites and focuses on knotty and introspective music that explores his fears and desires. His three-album run from the last decade – 2014 Forest Hills Drive, 2016’s 4 Your Eyez Only and, to a lesser extent, 2018’s KOD – certified his reputation as a thoughtful and engaging voice in the genre. His early recordings, like 2009’s The Warm Up, his 2010 artistic breakthrough Friday Night Lights, and 2011’s Cole World: The Sideline Story, all posit him as a preternaturally talented spitter seemingly destined to dominate. Just before the release of The Fall-Off, he dropped Birthday Blizzard ’26, a four-track EP hosted by DJ Clue where he dazzled with heady bars over classic Nineties breaks like Black Rob’s “Can I Live” and the Notorious B.I.G.’s “Who Shot Ya?”

Then there’s The Fall-Off itself, where he bellows at one point that he’s “goin’ back in,” and says he’s a product of Fayetteville, North Carolina aka “Fayettenam, where they strapped like Iraq.” No matter where his strengths lie, he can’t help but try to show that he can scrap with the best.

It’s those kinds of contradictions that fuel The Fall-Off, a double album that spans an hour and 41 minutes and two distinct sections. The first, Disc 29, chronicles his return to his native Fayetteville at the age of 29, flush from industry success. The second, Disc 39, documents a similar trip home, but this time as a married father of two children. Its songs link together like chapters in a novel. In the second verse on “Drum n Bass” from Disc 29, he goes to a local club and talks up a woman who gives off “the glow of Aaliyah.” “The Let Out” finds Cole and his late-night hookup nervously walking towards his car while fearing a violent encounter in the club parking lot. “Will I make it home?” he asks. “Only God knows.” Next is “Bombs in the Ville/Hit the Gas,” a sex jawn where he first sings in an emotional fervor, “Let’s run away,” then switches to freak mode amid a sample of Ludacris’s “What’s Your Fantasy.” It ends with him rapping, “This is the Fall Off, I’m fallin’ off, how/The rappers do when they can’t find a new sound/Missin’ the day they was hotter year ‘round/But life is a film that cannot be rewound.” That leads to the first disc’s final cut, “Lonely at the Top.”

The Fall-Off can sometimes feel simpatico and obvious, with mellifluously soulful tones that conjure an air of anxious nostalgia. There are throwbacks to Mobb Deep’s “The Realest” (“The Villest”) and “Drop a Gem on ‘Em” (“Who TF IZ U?”). There’s an interpolation of OutKast’s “Elevators (Me & You)” on “The Villest,” with Erykah Badu on the chorus, no less. Cole breaks bread with Petey Pablo, the first North Carolina rapper to land a national hit, on “Old Dog.” He structures “Safety” as messages sent to him by past acquaintances, clearly inspired by Nas’s “One Love,” over a beat that interpolates the horns from Queen Latifah’s “U.N.I.T.Y.” And Future appears twice, eschewing notions that he and Cole have lingering tension from the Drake/Lamar battle. For “Bunce Road Blues,” Future interpolates a classic verse from Usher’s “Nice & Slow” as he harmonizes, “It’s seven o’clock/On the dot/I’m in my drop top/Cruisin’ the streets that I grew up in.” (Tems closes that number with a nice vocal.)

There are a few nice tracks on The Fall-Off, like “The Villest” and “Life Sentence,” the latter which pays homage to Cole’s wife as he interpolates the chorus from DMX’s “How’s It Goin’ Down.” Sonically, nothing jumps out and thrills, excites, or alarms. Cole has made his share of memorable bangers, like 2015’s “Wet Dreamz,” where he sensitively recounted his first sexual experience, and 2019’s “Middle Child,” where he flexed over keyboard fanfare. But The Fall-Off is symptomatic of a persistent quality that haunts his work. The music often descends into a pleasant muddle, populated by tasteful notes made famous by others, yet enlivened by sharp bars such as “I blaze by graveyards and destitute economies/Full of thug bones for refusin’ to move in harmony” on “Who TF IZ U.”

What ultimately animates The Fall-Off is Jermaine Cole himself. Throughout, he reveals himself as a witty, aggravating, and sometimes enraging presence. The third verse of “Safety” gossips about a local who died of AIDS after “runnin’ with fruity types, dick in the booty types.” The lyrics curdle into homophobia before Cole finally catches himself: “Some of us called him a f–…Nah, times have changed, I know that’s wrong.” He portrays himself as a superstar afflicted with survivor’s guilt and says on “Drum n Bass” that he feels his hometown is “so tired and stressed.” But he can’t help but partly think that folks aren’t wealthy like him because “You ain’t trying your best.” Like a lot of rappers, he’s primarily concerned with the Black man’s spiritual salvation. “Man Up Above,” which opens with a sample of Marvin Sapp’s “Never Would Have Made It,” discusses how “someone that’s close to me is facin’ time” and is having trouble with his baby’s mother. “Now he reads the Bible hopin’ God’ll see him contemplative,” raps Cole. He doesn’t wonder if the baby mother will find redemption, too.

Listeners may wonder if the spectacle of J. Cole in all his flawed humanity can carry them through a dense two-hour affair. They’ll rightly point out the innumerable contradictions in his thinking, and how he bellows “All y’all niggas is pussy,” on “Bunce Road Blues,” only to acknowledge on “Drum n Bass” that he “merely swam” amongst the sharks but wasn’t one of them. They may attack “What If,” an inherently ridiculous conceit where Cole imagines the Notorious B.I.G. and 2Pac sending letters of apology to each other as Morray croons the chorus.

But for others, Cole will shine as a distinct and fully formed character in a spotty but worthwhile opus. He’s not necessarily relatable, but he’s as an all-too-human artist unafraid to reveal his messy frailties amid clear lyrical talent. If nothing else, The Fall-Off should serve as evidence against premature retirement. He sounds like he’s still got shit to work out.