The 2011 song J Cole considers his “most personal”
J Cole has a reputation for his socially conscious songs, but he hasn’t exactly been shy of a spot of introspection, too.
Cole has written some extremely personal songs during his day, right from the beginning of his career, but there’s one early song that he believes hits especially close to the bone.
His first album, released in 2011, Cole World: The Sideline Story, dealt with some tricky subjects, touching on broad societal issues like abortion, but there were some songs that were extremely specific to Cole’s own experiences in life.
While speaking to Billboard during a track-by-track breakdown of his album in 2011, Cole explained how he came to write ‘Breakdown’, a deeply intimate song that he had started working on after ‘Lost Ones’, the tenth track on the album.
‘Breakdown’, Cole revealed, had been written a long time before the album came out, roughly around 2008 or so, and started to take shape, first of all, with the drums, which struck the rapper as quite upbeat and partylike in nature. The idea eventually occurred to him to combine these positive-sounding drums with something decidedly more emotional.
There are two prominent samples that Cole turned to while putting ‘Breakdown’ together; the first is ‘Bells’, a 1973 track by a group called Eero Koivistoinen Music Society, while the second is a song by Mariah Carey and Bone Thugs-N-Harmony, which is also called ‘Breakdown’, which came out in ’97.
The effect of these samples interacting with the drumbeat Cole had come up with is quite wistful, perfect for lyrics bearing a bit more emotional heft. That’s what Cole aimed for, ultimately, with his verses describing difficult situations he’s faced in life, with his parents playing key roles in the narrative.
The song immediately begins with Cole admitting that he had just “shed tears”, following a rare meeting with his absentee father, and he later raps about his mother’s issues with addiction, as well as describes a young woman’s situation after her boyfriend has been incarcerated.
“It’s actually probably the most personal song on the album,” is how Cole characterised the song during his chat with Billboard, and it isn’t difficult to see why he believed that to be the case, considering the content.