Allow me to take you guys back man, to a time in my life I’ll never forget. A time that feels so far away, almost as if I’ve lived it a million times, but it will forever be apart of me holding a special place in my heart.
Everything needs context, and understanding, a bit of a backstory before we dive straight in. Music holds significant meaning in my everyday life, activities, and mindset. However, there was something about music this past year that I had to capitalize on.
This starts back in the spring of 2021. I found myself wrestling back and forth with how much time I spent on social media. Unlike the previous year, where it felt necessary for school, graduating, and keeping up with friendships…now it felt useless. I have a degree; a job and free time to myself to not feel like I must put as much of my life out there for others to see. So, why am I even on it?
However, I also found myself quite down mentally as well, I felt as if I were missing something, something that would always keep my mind from racing and overthinking so much. I had fun with friends close to me in Texas and kept up with a handful from Oklahoma, but one thing I noticed was that when I wanted to escape mentally, I found that hard to do, almost as if the same things I had seen and done to escape were too repetitive and didn’t spark my interest anymore.
The Big Three’s Return
As the spring continued, I did regulate my time seeing others’ lives and the activities they were up to. It wasn’t something that just changes and is easy to do overnight. It was slowly disciplining myself from experiencing the same down feeling I would have when on it. The comparison phase of my life was at it’s all time high after graduation. It crept in underneath my overwhelming excitement to just be finished.
However, I also changed a lot of the content I was seeing to specifically match the positivity I wanted to see. All it took was one tweet to create a snowball effect of excitement in the music industry. An interesting enough post that got my attention because he’s never on social media. That meant only one thing…new music was coming. Within the hour, he would follow up with another post telling the world he was back and going to release his latest studio album called The Off-Season on May 14th with cover art and all. Jermaine Cole was back to releasing music.
At this point in my life with music, I had a strong sense of what I loved listening to. I'd often gravitate towards the old school R&B sounds of yesteryear. The classics of Kool and the Gang, Earth Wind and Fire and Michael Jackson would fill my eardrums daily at work. However, add in J. Cole, Kendrick Lamar and Drake too. The new age of rap and hip hop wasn’t intriguing enough to me though. The pandemic had delayed so many big named artists from dropping, that the underground and newer age rappers took over, none of whom stuck out to me that much.
As early May approached, I didn’t just brush up on his music, but also wanted to dive through YouTube to see others just as excited for the album. I hadn’t felt this way about an album release ever actually. Hell, I usually am late to new music releasing. My former historian of NABJ Anthony and I would speak often about our favorite artists, as our music tastes weren’t just similar, but almost identical at times. We’d trade texts exchanging tracks we felt the other hadn't heard of yet and would fit in the others playlist well.
Nobody would have put me on more lyrically expressive music than him. I would repay the favor as often as I could. It's safe to say he’s molded my music taste more than anyone else. We both were excited for J. Cole to release a full-length studio album. Watching YouTube channels such as the NFR podcast talk about what instrumentals and samples could potentially be on the album and who would be featured made me feel the same way I did whenever I was excited for an upcoming game of my favorite sports teams.
Then, a week before his release, Cole dropped the lead single for the album called “Interlude”. As always with Cole, he’s just different than others, as usually an interlude is a bridge track to the album, like an intermission. It’s not the ideal song to release as a single to garner attention and traction. An example of a great lead single would be Drakes “Gods Plan” before he released Scorpion. The song alone was enough to get attention for that album and was his most commercially successful song off that project.
When I put my earphones in and listened to “Interlude” though, I knew exactly what the vibe was and why he chose it. This was a mystery of a project. It had been since 2018’s KOD dropped when Cole was even teasing music for an album. In the summer of 2020, he released two tracks and then nothing came of it, so the sound of interlude was enough to feast on for a week.
As the week went on, he released a documentary called Applying Pressure, where he showed a peek of his own mindset for the album. Clips of Cole retelling how he wasn't as determined to achieve his basketball dream and wasn’t putting his all into rapping, only for his friends to check him in his place was shocking to hear. The documentary itself, even for people who don’t listen to his music would find it inspiring because of the pathway he took to be who he is, to hone his craft and not stop until he felt he was satisfied, which it sounds he's close to accomplishing career wise.
The main thing to take away from it, was that he admitted he was close to retirement, which was hard to hear. He was a father and only had so much time to put into his craft until he wanted to step away from it. This made me think to myself “I need to see him in person before he retires.”
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