J. Cole’s low-key return focuses on fragility of life
J. Cole, “4 Your Eyez Only” (Dreamville)
J. Cole’s latest album, “4 Your Eyez Only,” is an intimate one. It unfolds like an old journal that’s been unearthed and shared with an audience of one — that is, an audience of you, or, more important, the daughter of a friend whose shooting death ties the rapper’s latest set together.
“Bloodshed done turned the city to a battlefield, I call it poison, you call it real,” Cole raps on “Change,” before narrating the final moments in the life of James McMillan Jr., whose life was cut short at 22.