Kids on Drugs. King Overdose. Kill Our Demons.
In society, it is all too easy to illuminate our differences, to decipher the things that make our individual experiences unique. But on September 26, J. Cole reminded me and his entire audience in Hartford, Connecticut the one thing that binds us all. While it manifests itself in different forms and at different times in our lives, it is inevitable for us all and that is the universality of pain.
Cole’s latest album and tour is entitled KOD, representing three meanings illustrated at the beginning of this article. The most important, to Cole, is killing our demons because while we all experience pain, there are healthy and unhealthy ways to deal with said pain. The finer point that Cole made is that our society does not teach us how to conquer our pain or at the very least, address it. Like a parent desires to silent its crying baby, we strive to silence each other’s pain without exploring its source. Neither of these actions do anything but delay the discovery of the source of the pain.
The power of J. Cole’s music is the fact that he is a dynamic lyricist that has the audacity to discuss prevalent topics of the human experience like addiction, -albeit to money, drugs or even, lust- broken homes and the reality of internal conflicts, of the human condition to inherently make mistakes. Looking around during the concert as Cole performed, I noticed the diversity in the audience, the variation in race, creed and color. I thought about how amazing that was, but why that was in the first place. We were drawn together because of a tactic unique to Cole’s style and that is his culpability. It is common when telling a story about moral decay or just bad behavior, in general, to leave yourself out of it, judge everyone else’s poor choices but your own. However, as an artist and individual, Cole deviates from the status quo. In fact, on tracks like Kevin’s Heart, he highlights his own battle with temptation. Not to mention tracks like Photograph, and even speaking on his mother and friends in tracks like Once and Addict and Window Pain.
The second meaning of KOD is King Overdose, who Cole, while talking to the audience, denotes as himself. If his music is not humanizing enough, he makes himself more relatable by establishing his imperfection, his propensity to fall short and make mistakes, like everybody else.
Society teaches us to idolize celebrities, to place them on a pedestal and view them as gods. But J. Cole is not the type of celebrity that you idolize or that even wants you to idolize him. He’s a flawed man that doesn’t demand anything of us, his fans, that he doesn’t demand of himself. He simply asks that we all reflect on the choices society gives us and the choices we make. All in all, we are not as different as society would lead us to believe. We are all bonded by an inescapable opponent called pain. That is the human condition. A part of it anyway.
