On Outgrowing Music

I was 13 years old and in the eighth grade when “2014 Forest Hills Drive” was released.

We all have those albums and artists we grow extremely attached to, not necessarily because of who they are, but what they represented within a particular moment in our lives. I think about J. Cole a lot in that space. I wasn’t the only Black boy who had gotten entranced with Cole’s mixtapes and early albums, excited about this mental grind to be the best we could be. In hindsight, it was (obviously) very middle school and I was an angsty kid who just wanted to think like someone was rapping for me. It was his straightforward delivery, the vocals, and the beats that I could just throw my head around that J. Cole’s music became an influential part of that time in my life.

But, in many ways like a lot of forms of media, or of celebrities broadly, we grow older. And I cannot think about how much I’ve aged out of Cole’s music (which is likely a good thing). 2014 Forest Hills Drive was my 4th favorite album of the 2010s, and yet, even as I rap along to songs like “G.O.M.D” or “Apparently,” I’ve got nothing left to take from the work. I recognize how much of hip hop ultimately doesn’t age well. That’s true of a majority of the genre. But I really would have imagined that at least for Cole’s albums, the projects I spent the most time with and…