J. Cole Returns: ‘One Night Only’ at Madison Square Garden —Inside the“2014 Forest Hills Drive” 10th Anniversary Show
J. Cole performed two shows in New York City. One was on Friday, Dec. 13 — a surprise “rehearsal” at the Gramercy Theater. It was billed as a private event, with the tickets being given away by signing up to receive information through a phone number, at which point entry was determined on a first-come, first-serve basis.
When I arrived at the venue Friday night, the line was wrapped around the block. Though the marquee read “rehearsal,” and the show had only been announced less than 24 hours earlier, it seemed everyone in the vicinity knew what was taking place.
I traveled from my home in New Jersey by Uber. It was expensive, but on nights when I might have a few drinks, I rather be safe than dead. Besides, I hate driving. In New Jersey, drivers are always honking, tailgating, and cursing. I’ve even had crazy drivers follow me off a highway exit just to curse at me. It’s an absolute joy, driving.
Even in an Uber, holiday traffic was predictably awful. It took two hours to get through the Lincoln Tunnel. If Abraham Lincoln came back as a ghost, he would certainly regret winning the Civil War. ‘I saved the country,’ he’d think, ‘and you honor me with a two-lane tunnel for 50 million cars?
The weather outside was cold but I (thankfully) had two tickets, courtesy of my good friends at J. Cole’s record label, Dreamville. I’m 40-plus with a wife and 6-year-old daughter though. Most of my friends at this stage of life can’t do anything without making plans nine weeks in advance.
I mention this because despite the event’s allure—a private concert with limited public access — and the fact that phones, watches, and any type of device with recording capability were banned, no matter who I invited, nobody could go.
In fact, on the ride to the concert, I got into a conversation with my Uber driver. He was a kid, probably in his early thirties, from Queens. He mostly drove on Long Island but picked someone up who wanted to travel into Manhattan; after that ride, he’d driven into Jersey and was now, after my trip, going home.
He was playing 103.5 KTU in the car. Friday nights, KTU plays a lot of dance music. Remember, it’s the “Beat of New York — KTU!” Sometimes, Uber drivers play the music they think you want to hear. They’re like, oh, I got a white guy with long hair in the car, he’s in his forties, let me put on Tom Petty or some shit. Sometimes they think I’m a little younger, so they put on Coldplay. Occasionally, they’ll size me up as someone with above-average intelligence and play classical. Rarely do they put on rap music, which is what I’d prefer to hear.
But he left KTU on. And we got to making some small talk. Most of it was about Luigi Mangione. The driver, like a lot of people, seemed amused by the whole thing — the fact that a seemingly typical 26-year-old could walk up to a man he never even met and kill him in cold blood.
“You’ve got to be pretty smart to pull off something like that,” he said.
Now, I’m usually a pretty agreeable guy. I’m not particularly eager to project my point of view. But on that note, I had to disagree.
“Actually, I think he’s pretty stupid,” I said. “I mean, you’ve got to be pretty intelligent to build a gun with homemade parts. But think about it, if you’re going to kill someone, you’re probably going to get one shot at that. Then you’re going to get caught. That means you’ve got to kill the right person. Let’s say I give you the ability to kill anyone right now, knowing damn well you’re going to go jail, probably for the rest of your life. You’re going to kill some random guy you don’t even know? If that’s me — and don’t get me wrong, I’d never kill anyone — but if that’s me, hypothetically speaking, I’m gonna kill someone I got a real problem with. At least then I’d feel like I got my money’s worth.”
The driver laughed. We continued driving, and the music kept playing. Finally, I asked him, “What kind of music do you like?”
“I like party music,” he said. A Kid Cudi song was on when he was saying this — “Day N’ Nite.” “I listen to a lot of opera,” he said. “You wouldn’t think I do, but I do. Country music, too. I don’t listen to a lot of rap It’s too negative, puts me in a bad mood.”
“It’s funny you say that,” I said. “Because where I’m going tonight — it’s a concert. It’s a J. Cole concert, actually. Private event. I was going to ask you, since you said you’re going home after this, I got an extra ticket. Do you want to come?”
He said, “Oh man, that’s crazy, for real? J. Cole, I love J. Cole. He’s got a brother that went to jail. Did his brother ever get out of jail?”
I told him he did. But as for the concert, it was a tough sell.
“I have a 1-year-old baby at home, he said. And my wife is home now, bathing him. I need to get home to him.”
I said, “My man, if there’s one thing you can miss a concert for, it’s a 1-year-old. That’s time you’re never going to get back, and even everyone tells you it goes fast, you don’t really realize how fast it goes until it’s gone. And then, of course, as they get older, you have more moments to appreciate. But the 1-year-old moments are something else. Every breath a child takes at that age is a small miracle. And each one you are present for restores the life inside you that, through the years, has been drained away. You can’t miss that!”
Finally, we pulled up to the Gramercy Theater. I was alone, and I didn’t really mind, to be honest, because aside from my wife, I rather be at most things by myself. It allows me to concentrate and be in the moment, without having to worry about whether who I’m with is having a good time or not.
I write about this show at Gramercy because there are nights when everything seems to connect. Going to a concert, being at a concert — it’s all about energy. How you feel. How does the crowd feel. Is it the right music for the right time, on the right night of the week, and so on. No science can make something like this predictable. And it’s probably different for everyone. The best night of your life is someone else’s worst.
That night, the energy was perfect.
Gramercy Theater is a small room. It’s capacity is only 650 people. But inside, it felt electric, as if every person was waiting to see what Cole might do.
The show was a rehearsal—an, ahem, warm-up—for a second show, a much bigger show, the following Monday (Dec 16th) at Madison Square Garden. That show, the real show, billed as a “one-night-only” event, would find J. Cole performing his breakthrough album, 2014 Forest Hills Drive, in full. It was a celebration of the album’s ten-year anniversary. Tickets sold out almost immediately.
On stage at the Gramercy Theater, Cole entered with a smile. He was greeted with a huge applause and seemed thankful to be in a room with some of his most die-hard supporters. If I could describe what it felt like being there, it was… love.
To put it in perspective, moments after Cole walked out, he spotted someone in the crowd filming him with a phone. Before he even started the show, he humorously called the guy out and asked the fan to shuffle to the side and put the phone in a locked pouch — but implored the crowd to hold the person’s spot so he could get right back to where he was before and enjoy the show.
Then Cole explained why we were there. He had to prep for the MSG show and admitted he might not catch every word to every song. He was backed by DJ Dummy and two keyboardists (Ron Gilmore and Irv Washington).
Technically, this was the first show he had done in some time. And the reason why the night may have felt so alive was because, for the past few months, there had been much public speculation as to how J. Cole would respond to a series of historic events.
Lest you forget, back in April, on the heels of releasing Might Delete Later, his seventh album (Wikipedia calls it a “mixtape”), Cole was sitting comfortably atop the rap game, playing musical chairs with the other members of the so-called “Big Three” — Kendrick Lamar and Drake.
He had just spent the winter on a co-headlining tour with Drizzy (dubbed the Big as the What? Tour), playing sold-out arenas around the country. The tour was preceded by “First Person Shooter,” a Drake collab that saw Cole nab his first number-one record.
And there’d been a series of hit records over the past few years (either by himself, like “Middle Child,” or with others, like “The London” w/ Travis Scott and Young Thug, and “A Lot” w/ 21 Savage). So with Might Delete Later, it seemed Cole was taking a much-deserved victory lap, inching one step closer to his penultimate project — The Falloff, an album he’s said to have been working on for years.
Might Delete Later had no shortage of outstanding records; the rhymes were top-notch, and the beats were crazy. You couldn’t hear songs like “Crocodile Tearz” or “H.Y.B.” and think the kid from Fayetteville, NC, wasn’t firing on all cylinders. On first, second and third listens, it was like, yeah, this makes sense: another win in a career that had been chock full of them.
But there was one misstep. At least, according to Cole himself. On a song called “7 Minute Drill,” he laid into his former pal Kendrick Lamar, who had, just a few weeks earlier, fired a shot at both Cole and Drake on the song “Like That,” rapping “Muthafuck the big three, n-gga, it’s just big me.”
“7 Minute Drill” was an interesting song. At times, it flirted with being an outright dis record, but for the most part, it came off as a series of light jabs — nothing personal or too flagrant (certainly not as personal or flagrant as the Drake/Kendrick Lamar songs that would shortly follow). The song may have been only a warning shot, but to an audience hungry for chum, it shifted the attention away from the full album and placed it squarely on the one song aimed at Kendrick. Altogether, it created an aura of antagonism, an energy alien to the J. Cole orbit.
That was perhaps why, just two days after the album’s release, at Cole’s annual Dreamville Festival, he did the thing almost nobody expected: he walked the whole thing back.
That night, right before he performed one of his flagship songs, “Love Yourz,” he told a story about how that particular track was conceived. The song appears at the tail end of 2014 Forest Hills Drive and is mainly about gratitude. He said it was written during a period of internal conflict.
“I was in a cloudy, dark place,” he said. “I had talent, I had belief in myself, I had motion, but at the same time, I also had fear. I had fear that maybe I wouldn’t get to where I wanted to go. And so that fear had me moving in an unusual way. It had me moving in a way that I damn near was thinking about and listening to people’s expectations of me and then responding off of that.”
He then explained that while recording 2014 Forest Hills Drive, he had begun having a closer relationship with God. It was not an overnight change. It happened gradually. Over time, his faith in something bigger than himself allowed him to be guided by an unknowable force. No longer would the music business, critics, or the internet writ large influence his decisions. Everything from that point forward would be of his own accord.
But his response to Kendrick had been fashioned in the opposite manner. He’d been hearing the chatter about what Kendrick said. Ten years since 2014 Forest Hills Drive, everything had been fine. He’d trusted himself, and it worked. He was happy. But now, he was being tested. He had to respond. That was what rappers traditionally did, right?
“The world wanna see blood,” he said. So, he gave them some. The only problem was that his heart wasn’t really in it. He didn’t actually dislike Kendrick. He really had no problems with him. In fact, he had a lot of respect for Kendrick. And Drake. He was just “chasing their greatness,” as he put it.
He then asked for forgiveness and said if Kendrick were to dole out some kind of lyrical punishment, he would stand there and take it. “I’m gonna take that shit on the chin,” he said. “Do what you do.” In the interim, he would try returning to his “true path,” the one he’d been on since that fateful album, 2014 Forest Hills Drive, the one that effectively changed his life.
Now, while those of adult-age maturity could appreciate his position, in a world where making sensible decisions isn’t exactly the hot thing to do, people weren’t quite sure where this whole fracas had left him. Remember, they wanted to see blood.
It goes without saying that when it comes to musicians — especially rappers — audiences can be very fickle. In fact, in the history of hip-hop, there are only a few artists who, more than a decade into their careers, can still sell out arenas. Even after you’ve collected a slew of gold and platinum plaques, there’s no guarantee that if you say you’ll be somewhere and tickets go on sale, people will show up.
But Madison Square Garden on a Monday night in December, two weeks after you announced the date. Only a chosen few can pull that off.
So, there I was again, back in the Garden. I had seen Cole here in 2018 when he was touring the album K.O.D. (ed note: I profiled him then for Vulture). And I had seen him some years before that, at the theater inside MSG, a smaller room; that was on the What Dreams May Come tour, a show that actually saw him joined on stage by both Jay-Z and Kendrick Lamar. He turned 29 that night; Jay gifted him his original Roc-A-Fella chain. Of course, I’d also seen him intermittently perform at various other shows. I was even there at Le Poisson Rouge in NYC the night The Warm-Up came out!
But something was different about this night. Of course, few of the 15,000 people at MSG had been at the rehearsal; for the most part, Cole hadn’t been seen in months. He’d spent the weeks leading up to the show engaging in a rare bit of nostalgia — Inevitable, a 10-part audio series, nearly 20 hours in length, where Cole retraced his steps, from the beginning of his career up to Forest Hills Drive. And the release of his earliest mixtapes to streaming services.
And yet, at the Garden, you got the sense that people were doing far more than merely revisiting the past. As Cole ran through the songs from 2014 Forest Hills Drive, he seemed genuinely joyful; like, shit, I’m really here. Looking out at the crowd, he probably saw some familiar faces. But there also appeared to be many newer fans, young kids who probably had only discovered J. Cole over the past few years.
About halfway through the show, he acknowledged this reality, saying that people discover things at different times; he was well aware only a select few were familiar with his entire catalog. On that note, he further explained that even though he was from North Carolina, New York was like his second home. So deep was his affinity for the city that he called several of his songs, particularly the lesser-known mixtape tracks, “Mohammad Crib Classics.” He called them this because they were written in the last apartment he’d rented, out in Queens, before his career took off (Mohammad was the landlord).
Two songs that stuck out in this section were “Grown Simba” and “2Face,” the latter a slow-moving, deeply introspective cut more designed for headphones than an arena (which made its appearance all that much more remarkable). Highlights from the FHD-specific portion were “No Role Modelz” (which had recently been certified diamond by the RIAA), “A Tale of 2 Citiez,” and “Fire Squad.” Arguably the night’s standout song was “G.O.M.D.,” with attendees belting out the expletive-laced chorus (“Get off my dick!”) at ear-deafening levels. And of course, phones lit up the whole arena, and eyes went watery everywhere during “Love Yourz.”
The thing about music — and most art generally, but especially music — is that it captures everything and everyone in time. It does this not only for the fan. But the artist themselves. They make the music, and the music is an expression of what they felt at any given moment. No moment is the same; minute to minute, hour to hour, day to day, they are changing. And so are you.
Pick a song, any song, and it’s a time capsule. The artist was in this place when they made it, and this is what was happening; for the listener, they were going through this thing, or this is how the music made them feel the first time they heard it. Life goes on, and those moments are gone. But when you hear that song or you see the artist perform that song — it’s real again, even if it’s only in your mind and your heart.
And music is different than sports in the sense that while rappers may be competitive, it’s not like the NBA; there is no Larry O’Brien trophy to be won at the end of each season. There are charts, record sales and award shows, and if you add them all up you can paint some portrait of success (or lack thereof). But in truth, the only real championship ring is making something that stands the test of time. What an artist leaves behind is the memories their work helps create in the hearts of their listeners.
The original inspiration for 2014 Forest Hills Drive was the house that Cole lived in growing up. It was there that he wrote his first rhymes and where his dreams of what one day might have been first took hold. It was there that the hunger and drive first festered, where the experiences that fueled his early writing actually occurred.
This show was an artist revisiting an album and, ultimately, a time in their life that put them on a particular path, which, for one reason or another, they had briefly strayed from. Perhaps the show was, for all intents and purposes, a means of reconnecting with the divine inspiration that set him up to be who he is today, to once again set his feet upon that path.
He had mined that house located at 2014 Forest Hills Drive in Fayetteville, NC, for material once before. It had brought him to the stage at Madison Square Garden back when the album was first released, and now again, after ten long years had gone by. After the world had changed over multiple times and the generation that had come of age with a twenty-something J. Cole had grown older and, like him, become adults themselves.
And yet, the material felt fresh. They were timeless, these songs. As if it was wine in those time capsules, growing more refined as the years went by.
Here, at MSG, J. Cole was home again. Not for the first time. And hopefully not for the last.
