The ‘Ville is back. Jermaine “King” Cole (aged 33), the Fayetteville North Carolina rapper and founder of Dreamville Records has re-ascended the throne with his newest album, “KOD.” The title has three meanings: Kids on Drugs, King Overdosed, and Kill Our Demons. A renaissance man, Cole delivers a thematic triptych illustrating to the latest generation of Soundcloud rappers the pitfalls of their imbibed “trap drum” fame.

 

Concerning production, this album quite easily houses the cleanest of J. Cole’s career. Sub-bass ponderings and kinesthetic kicks are pliable foundations for copasetic cymbals and self-harmonized bridges and hooks. Despite a great deal of serious and heavy subject matter, Cole doesn’t hesitate to have fun on tracks like “Motiv8,” where subject matter and cadence highly resemble KOD rappers, for no other reason than to illustrate that their style and overall vibe is easily recreated by someone as skilled as Cole.

 

The figure of the ‘Kid on Drugs’ (KOD) is templated from rappers like Lil Pump (17), Lil Uzi Vert (23), and XXXTENTACION (20), which Cole role plays with ferocity on “KOD.” But this is not entirely to mock. On some level, Cole is impressed with their “flip / ten keys from a quarter brick / Bentley from his mama’s whip.” However, Cole paints a bleak picture of the KOD, remembering when they “got [their] first view of the blood / […] hangin’ out and they shoot up the club.” This is one of those experiences that “would normally call for therapy,” but instead forces the KOD to turn to his “pharmaceutical plug” for “numbin’ the pain.” Though the KOD may see Cole as an old man screaming from his soap box, Cole messianically illustrates that he too has dealt with painful experiences – “demons” resting “at the bottom of the hourglass” – in his past.

 

“Once an Addict (Interlude)” recollects the series of events that drove Cole and his mother to substance use. It started small, “growing up I used to always see her up / late as shit, cigarette smoke.” But his “step-daddy just had a daughter with another woman,” and Cole can’t understand “why she do this to herself.” The song’s introduction defines lack of understanding as the cause of pain. Cole can’t understand his mother’s actions, but his mother also can’t understand the actions of her husband, and both turn to substances. Cole is at school “lost in a cloud of marijuana,” and his mom “kill[s] a whole bottle of some cheap Chardonnay.”

 

Not all drugs are consumed, some are felt. The outro on “KOD” lists much more, like “power, greed / money […] fame.” This is where the second meaning of the album’s title, King Overdosed, becomes relevant. “Kevin’s Heart” parallels drug use and infidelity with clever turns of phrase: “my phone be blowing up, temptations on my line.” Presumably, this is the phone of a King. He’s got the whole “earth in the blunt,” requests xanax “at once,” and “get[s] the skirt” when he wants from his Queen. This King doesn’t look much different from the romanticized preconception of the successful artist. He has everything he could want but is just as tempted by women as Kevin Hart was, now that “love today’s gone digital.” Use of words like “blow” and “line” suggest that the “strongest drug of them all / love,” possesses an addictiveness like that of cocaine.

 

To further relate to the KOD, Cole introduces ‘kiLL edward,’ his drug-addled alter, who appears on “The Cut Off” and “FRIENDS.” ‘kiLL edward’ has “cop[ped] another bag [to] smoke today,” singing, “feels so right to let things go / this is how I should be.” Both songs address the social isolation that ‘kiLL edward’ will experience as getting high replaces the social connections in his life. “Lil Cole,” the pitched-up young alter from Cole’s “Born Sinner” album also returns to represent the KOD’s inexperience with taxes on “BRACKETS.” After Lil Cole gets his “first […] million-dollar check” Uncle Sam calls him and asks for the taxes on it. Lil Cole is taken aback, “Half? […] you better suck half my d***!”

 

As Cole sees it, the KOD is plagued by their own demons, and they lack the experience they need to deal with their demons and their success. However, Cole “was on the same things” (“money, p****, parties”) when he was young (see ‘Hollywood Cole’ on “2014 Forrest Hills Drive” and “Cole World: The Sideline Story”). On the boom-bap track “1985 (Intro to “The Fall Off”),” Cole raps, “I love to see a black man get paid […] you having fun and I respect that.” But Cole is trying to warn them of what’s to come if they don’t “[think] about [their] impact.” “One day the kids that’s listening gon’ grow up / and get too old” to “see you pop a pill.” When this happens – when all the fame, validation, attention, and gratification fade away, “for acceptance n****s will do anything / n****s will rep any gang.” Deep down Cole has similar desires: “all I wanna do is kill the man that made my momma cry.”

 

While Cole seems to want to do everything he can to “Kill Our Demons,” as the album’s third meaning suggests, Cole’s solution is perhaps much more complex than the oversimplified mantra on “FRIENDS:” “meditate, don’t medicate.” Painful experiences, demons, can be suppressed, but only so much as they are eventually expressed. The KOD “shoot at police and clap at old ladies.” Cole’s meditation provides a much different implication, however, that non-suppressive coping strategies require learning how to co-exist with the pain underneath, accept the desires that are born out of that pain, but restrain from acting upon them.