Ode To Cole: Stain of Perception
“The Fall Off, is just faith in flight.”
I rarely write about rap. At least, not as much as I have in the past. But rap has embodied and carried the inspiration that captures me. The texture and stories. That feeling of inspiration, when an idea arrives, the room spins, words swell up in me, and I desperately need to build a world that holds how I feel. Like a brief breeze, inspiration calms chaos, but you only have a short period to capture it before it leaves, and you pray that same feeling circles back to find you.
Cole’s music has always been a voice calling me home– back home. Like street lights, when darkness has claimed its place. And within the voice that holds Cole’s music together is an unmistakable claim to one’s truth. A commitment to a poet’s true self, beyond the matted lies and truths that make up a song. The poet’s spirit moves through every line and bar, bearing the rapper and the one who exists off the page in each hand. Beyond the hypermasculine braggadocious performatives that carry traditions of rap lyricism and hip-hop’s competitive nature. I imagine the paradox of being a rapper, bold and tenacious, ready to get bloody with the stroke of a pen against paper, and being a father, friend, and childhood hero. Stretched thin between home and what you thought was heaven, only as it compared to the chaos you pray to escape.
But Cole helped me see, name, and navigate the paradox. And become and hold the war within my soul, between the sinner, both holy and inevitable, right there, within the tension. Between violence and peace, heaven and hell’s melody, study hall and dope boys, church and corner stores, where those black boys’ souls cried out and kept me up at night. Cole sounded the trumpet, and the war he carried is the war many of us bear. The back-and-forth screams between the real me and the part of me the world believes it owns. Rappers must often sacrifice their truest selves for the sake of their egos. To hold together the fragile flesh and bone of the rapper.
Hearing J Cole name or gesture toward his true self fighting back to the surface grounds me. Assuring us to “Find peace with the audience you appeal to. Be yourself. Live yo’ truth. Niggas’ll feel you.” He rebukes the lies that the rap industry bribes you to tell. He exposes the stain of perception. Ducking cameras, avoiding interviews, “On red carpets, moving awkwardly. Posing all nervous, afraid of the judgment.” Withholding smiles in pictures. Fame will scare you out of your surest skin. With his newest album in mind, I’m thinking about never having heard stories of people who prayed in heaven. Who prayed because heaven turned out to be something else. Who missed the Earth. Those who wish they could be over the edge, and once knew how the ground felt.
I wrote something.
Ode To Jermaine
We don’t just fall. As if the ground
Has promised to catch us. There is still a sky.
There is still the room in between highs and lows
The space that sits between breaths
Where death briefly opens its eyes. But we don’t fall.
I approach the cliff, and sometimes
What looks like falling is really a jump. Is really,
The faith even the devil thought would save Jesus.
I have spent my life learning how wings work.
Considering my wings were actually too heavy for me to fly. My wings kept me grounded.
But this fall, or rather, jump, signifies my faith in flight.
We get put on. To fall off.
Told by: Kwon
