Why J Cole is embarrassed about “platinum with no features” joke
They say no press is bad press, but how about becoming the subject of a meme? Is being the butt of a joke spreading like wildfire online, even if the joke is, ultimately, complimentary, necessarily a good thing? J Cole should know the answer.
Cole’s third album, 2014 Forest Hills Drive, was a smash, going straight to number one in the American charts and selling hundreds of thousands of copies in its first week alone. It broke streaming records, too, and it was eventually certified platinum in early 2016. It was a sensation.
A particular observation about 2014 Forest Hills Drive, aside from its overall quality, began to gain quite a lot of attention following its release. Unlike so many of the other rap albums that were coming out around the same time, this one didn’t feature any other famous names. Cole made most of the album himself, with the help of some not especially well-known producers, and there were absolutely zero guest rappers jumping on for a verse. It was all Cole.
When the album became a hit, Cole’s fans started to highlight the fact that, really, this was almost entirely his own doing. That he had achieved all this success without other well-known artists to help him, they believed, was notably impressive. So they started posting about it online, and the album’s platinum status was specifically highlighted.
Thus the phrase “J Cole went platinum with no features” was born.
While the initial posts declaring that Cole had gone “platinum with no features” were broadly genuine expressions of admiration among his fans, the phrase, as can happen online, soon took on a life of its own. His success was reduced to a meme.
People started to use the phrase outside of its original context of praising Cole’s album, using it instead, among other things, to mock the overly enthusiastic nature of fan culture in general. The meme was soon all over the internet.
Cole, obviously, was aware of this as it was happening, and, at first, he was okay with it. But as it got bigger and bigger, refusing to disappear, he naturally started to grow tired of it.
“I was loving it,” he told GQ in 2019, reflecting on the strange phenomenon. “I was like, ‘Word up—this is funny as hell.’ But the second or third time, I was like, ‘All right, it’s almost embarrassing now.’ Like, ‘All right, man, y’all gonna make me put a feature on the album just so this shit can stop.’”