2014 Forest Hills Drive

2014 Forest Hills Drive was released by J. Cole as his third recorded studio album on December 9, 2014. There were no features on the album as he was the only one performing on all thirteen tracks but he was not the only producer. I was a teenager when this album came out and it played a huge crucial part of my life at the time. I remember hearing the singles from the album on the radio at night before I went to bed and sometimes in the morning. J named the title after the house he had lived in with his family as a child in Fayetteville, North Carolina which is not that far away from where I lived as a teenager. Eventually he had bought the house years later after he had left for New York and it was put on foreclosure. Those events were brought up in the first verse of the first single “Apparently” where he mentions moving to New York to attend college while his family stayed in Fayetteville and the events that happened during his time there while the house went on foreclosure and how he thanks his love ones for everything and wished things could have been different. Then we jumped into the second single “Wet Dreamz” where he posed as the narrator of the song and described his first love which was more than puppy love. My first thought was that anybody has this type of feeling when it comes to falling in love for the first time and the feeling of losing virginity later on. The video that came with it shows two puppies that strongly represented the puppy love symbolism and it reminded me of the times I fell in love. The third single “No Role Modelz” strongly details his feelings on how black love had changed over the past couple of decades, there is not enough role models as much and the women that he had crushed on have grace but are much older but the ones on reality shows are shallow and have no role models of their own. The song in a way actually proves a point when it comes to reality shows portraying them in a very negative light in comparison with sitcoms and movies that showed love in the truest form. The fourth single “Love Yourz” tells the listeners how they should enjoy and love the life that they have as the lives of others around them are not as better as they expected. “Fire Squad” describes how he feels how a white artist is treated and how a black artist is treated. An example he states is when rapper Macklemore won the Grammy for Best Rap Album for The Heist which caused an uproar as he won over the other artists who were black. He also raps that he would have to try to show a smile if Iggy Azalea won the award next. The song did sit well with those who mentioned but it was not to be seen as malicious. Then there is the track “G.O.M.D.” which stands for “Get Off My Dick” and the lyrics focuses on the challenges that black people deal with on a daily basis and the video shows him portraying a house slave living in a plantation and he leads a group of other slaves into a uprising against the white slave owners and it ends with a dance around a bonfire. Overall I consider it one of the best albums released literally in the last decade and it played a significant part during my high school years and I could not imagine it in any other way. It was nominated for a Grammy for Best Rap Album in 2016 and it remains beloved by fans and critics.