Cole has stepped his game up in several respects one of his greatest liabilities in the past was that his rhyme schemes were far too basic to be interesting, and he made up for that by having exciting storytelling (“Lost Ones”, “Dollar and a Dream”) and lively content in his raps. Cole “brag like Hov” with some of his most cohesive rhyme schemes and effortless flow to date, and despite some left field homophobia (“Just a little joke to show you how homophobic you are /and who can blame you”), “Villuminati” comes out as a great start to an album that slowly falls off. The album opens with immediate highlight “Villuminati,” sporting the best real beat on the album, a murky atmosphere peppered with sharp drums and a “Juicy” sample. Cole’s obvious talent but it refuses to ever display it for longer than just a few bars. It boasts only a few standout tracks (but just as many duds) and while it’s still a better album than Cole World in every way, it’s riddled with flaws, the most glaring of which is it continually taunts us with J. Cole showed the world that he’s capable of being a top tier rapper, but Born Sinner is not the incredible album J. And yeah that sounds harsh but let’s be clear, J. Cole hasn’t really grown up much at all he’s still rapping about the struggle of being a light skinned rapper and his obsession with fucking everything that smiles at him, and worst of all his music is, as always, so very safe – perhaps he feels a pressure to make radio hits because his “worst fear going broke ‘cause bad with money,” or maybe because his talent has deluded him the same way it’s duped us: into thinking that he actually has a classic album in him. But despite proclaiming himself the “man”, J. So yeah, it’s not unreasonable to muse that with some good music Cole could rise to be hip-hop’s next obsession (again). And now, he shows that he has the stones to challenge Kanye West by releasing his album (which, I might add, has a song boldly titled “Runaway”) on the same day “just to show the boy’s the man now like Wanya”. Furthermore, he’s slated to release a collaborative album with rap’s favorite godson, Kendrick Lamar. He’s proven on releases like The Warm Up, his outstanding 2009 mixtape, that he has the chops to go bar for lyrical bar with some of the upper echelon rhymers in the game, and with his debut album Cole World: The Sideline Story, he showed that he has just as much (if not more, given the level of hyperbole that his talent is apt to receive) mainstream appeal. Cole certainly seems to be in an enviable position in the current realm of hip-hop. Review Summary: "Yo j coles album is like boringly good"
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