RAMBLE ON: "Snow on tha Bluff" by J. Cole

“Real L year for J. Cole,” remarked a friend of mine at the end of 2020. (“L. Cole,” I texted back.) Naturally, it did not matter – J. Cole’s status as one of the premier lyricists alive was completely intact when he released his next album the year after, and his underwhelming tracks from 2020, “Snow on tha Bluff” and “Lion King on Ice,” were swept under the rug. Much like everything that happened that year, it already feels like a bizarre half-forgotten dream (oh man, remember #StopAsianHate? Guess we stopped it, good work everyone).

A confession: I’ve never listened all that closely to J. Cole. I can do a pretty killer rendition of “Power Trip” at karaoke, for the record, but his stuff has just never super-interested me. I’ve gone back to listen to his music more so that I can put up some kind of façade that I’m a professional music critic who knows anything about one of the most popular artists alive, and yeah, I’m not at all going to dispute his well-earned great reputation for flow, lyricism, storytelling, thoughtfulness, etc. But unfortunately (both for J. Cole and for me), the first time I really had deep and considered opinions about J. Cole was “Snow on tha Bluff.” It’s not a song you’d want to make your deepest impression with.

For those who don’t remember, J. Cole was responding to the implied criticism from a very angry woman on Twitter (it was all but confirmed, all but instantly, to be Noname), who was angrily blasting celebrities and rappers for being silent at a flashpoint of crisis. J. Cole tries to be understanding (he concedes that he’s “not above criticism” and wants to listen), but then swerves into tone policing (he literally says “it’s something about the queen’s tone that’s bothering me”). It becomes a long lecture about the way she’s doing activism wrong, including a lot of assumptions about Noname’s privileged upbringing that she was quick to point out were incorrect. His advice is basically that you get more flies with honey than vinegar, but he also advises her to “treat people like children,” which is more deeply infuriating than anything Noname could say. It may stand as possibly the most wrongheaded and tone-deaf way J. Cole could have been responded.

If you only glanced at Twitter, or read only the reviews, you would think not a single person liked this song. This is not true; I had Cole stans shitting up my mentions for criticizing it, and fascinatingly, on Reddit the track was widely praised. That could be because Twitter, especially, breeds the abrasive self-righteousness that J. Cole is criticizing, or it could be r/hiphopheads’s extremely male audience didn’t pick up the sexist undertones. (The comments on YouTube, naturally, are sickeningly sycophantic.) But honestly, I can see why “Snow on tha Bluff” has defenders; I think it’s a bit underestimated, and I can easily imagine a world where I was a fan of this song, because there’s a lot I do relate to. As a semi-public figure, I also stress about how much to use my platform for good causes, and I chafe at the constant negativity and self-righteousness of Twitter activism. By the same token, I’m not sure I agree with Cole’s critics that it was condescending and paternalistic; I might have joined in if he sounded more confident, but he certainly doesn’t. Cole’s defenders will say he was trying to provide a window into his own conflicts and insecurities. After all, he begins with a statement that he’s not as smart as people think and he ends with an admission of doubt that all of Noname’s criticism is true.

With the last line – “deep down I know I ain’t doing enough” – I think what Cole is going for is something similar to what Kendrick Lamar pulled off on “The Blacker the Berry,” where Kendrick promises to reveal himself as a hypocrite, rants for three verses about systemic racism and police, and then reveals in the final line that, as he is rapping from the point of view of a murderous gangbanger, he does not have room to judge. The last line recontextualizes the entire song, and I think Cole was hoping that by ending the song on the epiphany of his own shortcomings, Cole could change the meaning of his awkward and condescending lecture.

It doesn’t work. At all. I can only speculate where Cole drew inspiration from but if it was indeed “The Blacker the Berry” then he completely missed why that song works. People have debated whether Kendrick was right to call his narrator a hypocrite; whether he is or isn’t, the “hypocrisy” doesn’t undercut the song’s power in any way. People listen to “The Blacker the Berry” to hear a passionate activist decry the system, and while the final lines adds some new shading to the song, they don’t change the appeal. So if Cole expected his stark admission to make it easier to stomach his condescending lecture, he is wrong. And that’s the charitable reading; the less charitable one is that he wanted to sting Noname with his verse and then cop out and cover his ass with his final lines rather than deal with the implications. Personally, I think Cole was trying to intentionally reveal himself as a man plagued with self-doubt, and well, he does and he doesn’t. One line doesn’t erase the bulk of the verse; the overwhelming sense given by “Snow on tha Bluff” is not of a man struggling, but a man whining.

So, “The Blacker the Berry” is not a good comparison. The song that it actually reminds me of? Brad Paisley’s “Accidental Racist.” That was another one that many critics, I among them, shellacked for its half-hearted Confederate apologia, but I do respect that Paisley was sincerely grappling between his love of his home and his awareness of its sins. It sounded exactly like “Snow on tha Bluff,” caught between defending one’s self and conceding the point, and what came out was something that was neither here nor there, mealy-mouthed and confused. I do believe that both Paisley and J. Cole are trying to do better but it sounds like they’re on Step One of a journey that shouldn’t be shared before the conclusion.

J. Cole took the backlash in stride and urged people to listen to Noname; I think he means well. But for all his good intentions, “Snow on tha Bluff” is basically unlistenable, a Michael Scott cringe comedy scene, and much preachier and more annoying than Noname’s single tweet could ever be. Kendrick, ever the canny operator, brushed off the criticism for his mysteriously silent 2020 as “overnight activists” and “social gimmicks” on this year’s “Family Ties”; in one brief line, he not only expressed his commitment to the cause and dismissed his critics with no sweat, he also showed how unwise Cole was in writing a whole verse about it. I truly do wonder what J. Cole thought the response would be; at a time when the entire country was erupting in outrage, the last thing people wanted to contemplate was one rich celebrity’s hurt feelings.