J. Cole, formerly known as Jermaine Cole, recently surprised all hip-hop fans with a surprise single titled “cLOUDs.” This is the first that fans have heard from Cole since his 10-year anniversary deluxe for 2014 Forest Hills Drive. It was worth the wait. Cole used his new blog, Inevitable w/ Ibrahim Hamad, to post the new song. He did the same with the deluxe album.
The track was produced by himself, Omen, and DZL; and in my opinion the “Fender Rhodes-heavy beat” is amazing. The song begins with slow vocals from Cole and a refrain, then the first verse follows.
As soon as J. Cole started rapping, I felt like I had to take a step back. He comes out heavy and is spitting. Something I’ve always loved about Cole is his flow and rhyme scheme, and this verse shows it off perfectly. I feel like Cole found a way to make every word match each other so well while still being personal to his listeners and keep a theme.
Right after this, a major theme is shown: the theme of media exploiting less fortunate people and their sufferings. “The overdramatized, the traumatized with the sickness/thrown in the pan and caramelized for richness/and served on a plate with sirloin steak/ to billionaires who don’t care the world’s gonna’ break/long as they make money of it, pain brings profit/ there’s a bridge you can walk to hear God talk/ but there are real slim odds a rich man crosses/’cause greed is a poisonous seed, indeed/as it spreads like weeds through the the mind’s apple trees.” Cole says that people with money only care about money, almost like greed clouds their vision to all morality. He basically says rich people only care for people less fortunate than them because they make money off of it, not because it is something genuinely wrong; this “lack of morality.” Cole used imagery to illustrate how materialistic tendencies and greed create a barrier between people and spiritual righteousness. He describes a bridge where one can hear God, symbolizing the path to truth and wisdom, but then he also says the wealthy rarely cross it because greed, like a poisonous seed, takes root and spreads and corrupts the mind. He compares it to weeds taking over apple trees to suggest that greed suffocates clarity to make it hard to connect with what truly matters.
The next theme of the song is shown in the following lines: “I proceed with caution, and I’m not flossing/unlike some I’m not defined by my my fortune / I’m defined by my rhymes, though I’m in my prime/ there were times that I was down ‘cause I’d thought I lost it/ but no, low and behold, as my poetry grows/ I give all glory to God as the story unfolds/ and the gray hairs that grow on my head will show/ ain’t no time limit to get it, you ain’t never too old/so keep hold of your dreams, no matter how it seems/if you don’t water your lawn well, then it won’t ever stay green.” This section is a contrast from the previous section since Cole is saying he wants nothing to do with this despite his wealth. He says that money isn’t what makes him who he is, but rather his passion that does. One annotator on Genius said, “this could be a subtle shot at rappers, like Drake, who are often measured by their commercial success rather than lyrical ability.” He even says that he values this passion so much that his mood directly relies on how he thinks his performances are. Then he connects it back to faith and Christianity by saying that no matter how his performances are he will glorify God.
After this section, Cole connects it back to the overarching theme of where this world has gone to, like the state that the world is in. I believe J. Cole is a genius for the way he wrote this song. The subtle allusions and hidden meanings in every line is incredible. We’ve seen him write songs like this before, pondering the state of the world, like on “Snow on Tha Bluff” in 2020. This song reminds me a lot of that, and it is truly amazing.
