The one album that changed the way J Cole raps: “A staple in my life”
J Cole has a sound that’s distinctly his own, but, while he was forming as a young artist, he specifically sought to emulate his heroes. He mimicked those he looked up to, with one album in particular holding a very special place in his development as a rapper.
Reflecting on his artistic evolution with Vice in 2013, Cole spoke about those he looked up to both as a burgeoning producer and as a rapper. In terms of the former, he acknowledged that Dr Dre, Kayne West and Timbaland were especially influential upon his early style, before, eventually, he managed to combine elements of all of them to form his own sound.
“Back in the days when I made my beats,” he said, “I could be like, ‘Oh that sounds like a Dre beat,’ or, ‘That sounds like a Kanye beat,’ or, ‘That sounds like a Timbaland beat.’ Now I can’t. It’s just a mesh of all this shit.”
In terms of rappers, he said that his first recording “sounded like Eminem married Nas and had a baby and he made a song,” while the next one “sounded like a Canibus clone.” In fact, it was his Canibus phase that he cited as being especially important, highlighting his debut album, Can-I-Bus, in particular.
“Aw, man,” Cole said, “that was a staple in my life. That changed the way I rap.”
Released in 1998, Can-I-Bus was known for containing a diss track against LL Cool J called ‘Second Round K.O.,’ the video for which contained a cameo appearance from none other than Mike Tyson. Beyond the diss track the album was otherwise concerned with social themes, such as US government corruption, American violence and the AIDS epidemic.
Cole, around the time Can-I-Bus came out, was a young adolescent who idolised his older cousin, who, crucially, could rap. “It was like ’98,” Cole recalled to Vice, “and my cousin was from Louisiana—I have this story that I told a million times by now. But I started rapping because he was the coolest dude I knew. He was 16, I was 12, 13.”
Cole’s cousin seemed to have everything that Cole coveted at the time. “He had all these girls, he could play ball, he was cool, he had a Jesus piece, he had jerseys, and he also used to just freestyle for fun,” he remembered. “And so, me just being young and looking up to him, I tried to rap too, like, ‘Yo, teach me how to rap!’”
The cousin agreed to help Cole, showing him “a couple of things about how to freestyle or whatever,” before moving on to actually writing lyrics. Cole, having learned from his cousin, initially rapped like he did, “which sounded like No Limit, Master P, and Cash Money.” But then the Canibus album pushed Cole in another direction.
“Long story short,” said Cole, “soon after that I heard Canibus, I heard that album, and it totally changed the way I looked at rap. It was harder, it took more thought to be so clever and to have these punchlines and to come up with these things and have people react like, ‘Oooooh, that’s fuckin’ crazy he said that.’”