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Cole tries to get clever with this stuff, and it almost always turns out badly he actually rhymes "Rihanna" with "vee-gina."Ĭole's restless intelligence works against him almost as much as it helps him you end up wishing he'd just take some delight in a new car or some nice clothes without reminding us, again and again, that he used to be poor. Loverman songs on mixtapes rarely work, but one exception to the rule is Drake, who shows up here to breeze through "In the Morning", absolutely schooling Cole on his own track. In another, he wonders whether college was really the best way out: "One year cost 'bout the same as a Mercedes/ Four years cost wife, crib, and a baby."īut those sharp moments don't make up the whole of Friday Night Lights, and Cole wanders into less convincing territory when he rants that people never buy music anymore (though he himself has barely released any music that you can actually buy) or when he talks to the ladies. Or digging into the fluidity of class, and the weird effects it can have on a kid's psyche: "Me, I lived it all, from dirt poor in a trailer/ Worried about my mother and never trusting my neighbors/ To middle class with a backyard and my own room/ To being the only black kid in my homeroom." In one painfully vivid moment, he finds himself jealous of the white kids whose parents sent them to school with Lunchables. Cole, who left Fayetteville for college in New York City, explores bits of his own story that little rap music has found space to address- like being the one college kid who made it out, then returning home to realize that many of his old friends are in prison or Iraq.
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Like the TV show that shares its name, Friday Night Lights is an affecting tale of small-town people trying to figure out their paths in life. But Cole is, in the grand scheme, new to this, and there's a good chance he'll figure this stuff out. When he raps over Missy Elliott and Aaliyah's gorgeously still "Best Friends", it isn't. When he raps over the rippling lilt of Erykah Badu's "Didn't Cha Know", it's perfect. At its worst- the inevitable dragging moments that come with any hour-plus mix focusing mostly on one voice- that organic pose fades into an all-surface gleam that doesn't really suit Cole at all. At its best, the tape has an organic warmth that lends it an immediate approachability. Friday Night Lights finds him in a more expansive mode, getting into the minutiae of his own personal story over exclusively midtempo beats. On the great summer single "Who Dat", Cole came off tense and purposeful, as if he were trying to elbow his way onto radio playlists through sheer force of will. He's a striver, and he sounds like one.įriday Night Lights is almost entirely a self-produced affair, and it's to Cole's credit that he knows what makes him sound good, even if he does lean too hard on the tinkly piano sound he loves. It's not enough for him to enjoy the spoils of his success he has to spell out to us that he's doing it for everyone else who grew up poor in Fayetteville, North Carolina.
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Cole, in contrast, is the honor student who overthinks everything: Each boast or proposition comes with some sort of tortured justification. But Jay Elec is an effortless enigma, a guy who can (and will) rattle off absolute nonsense and make it sound like the deepest thing you ever heard. They're both Southerners who specialize in conscientious, Nas-Style New York rap, and devote their grainy drawls to complex rhyme patterns and even more complex introspection. "This 'posed to be a moment," Cole yells on the tape's intro, as if protesting preemptively.īeyond their first initial, Cole and Electronica have a lot in common. Instead, the spotlight fell to another Jay: Jay Electronica, who joined Cole on Jay-Z's Roc Nation imprint that night, being introduced by Hova himself at a media-heavy Manhattan gathering, in front of a bunch of writers who would've otherwise been home downloading Cole's mixtape. Cole's big night: the long-awaited release of the Jay-Z protégé's Friday Night Lights mixtape on November 12.