Part 1 READ the text1 in the attachment and answer both of the following questions. 1. In Chapter

Chapter 5

The Spiteful Chant

1.
The Beatles masterminded the most famous album cover of all time with
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, an album I was already tired of
hearing about when I was in high school, despite never even listening to
the so-called Greatest Album of All Time. Explaining the record sleeve
feels like bothering to describe Egyptian pyramids or the Sphinx—like,
surely you’ve seen it. The Fab Four sport colorful military uniforms as
they stand in front of a flower arrangement honoring the burial of
themselves. Roses on their grave spell out a huge BEATLES. They’re
surrounded by photos of over seventy famous figures pasted to huge
cardboard cut-outs: Einstein, Gandhi, Laurel and Hardy, even Ab-Soul’s
guru Aleister Crowley. When I broke down and bought the compact disc in
college, one of the things I loved most about the cover was a ragdoll
placed nonchalantly next to Marilyn Monroe’s high heels. The doll’s shirt
reads WELCOME THE ROLLING STONES in full caps.

The Beatles and the Rolling Stones—one of the most classic
Apollonian-Dionysian rivalries in music history. John, Paul, George, and
Ringo couldn’t have known their 1967 classic would go down the way it
did. But something about that Shirley Temple doll wearing a Rolling
Stones sweatshirt always seemed like a poke in the ribs to me, a way for
one group to tease the other about making the superior music somehow. As
if the Beatles knew they were so much more incredibly important that free
publicity for rivals couldn’t possibly affect their status as the more
untouchable force. Under the same idea, a writer frenemy released his first
book when I released mine in 2004 and I almost bought his promo T-shirt

to sport around Brooklyn. (I didn’t think anyone would get the joke
though … ah, youth.)

“Look at his competition, like the top tier guys. Everybody loves J. Cole, I get it. But for those of
us who grew up with MCs who are also producers and also look at the guys on the underground
—like Black Milk, Oddisee, or Roc Marciano—we could name about fifteen guys who we like way
better and make way better material. J. Cole has the backing and the name. He came up in the
mixtape thing, and he has the corporate backing so that he’s the guy out there. But we don’t
listen to J. Cole like that. I’ve heard better shit from Oddisee. But that’s neither here nor there.
The point I’m making is that Kendrick is head and shoulders above all the top-tier guys.”
—DART ADAMS

Mona Lisa painter Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, the younger
artist responsible for the Sistine Chapel ceiling, had an intense dislike for
each other around the turn of the sixteenth century. Exactly why has been
lost to time. Jump forward three thousand years: traditional conservative
Brahms and the more radically progressive Wagner belonged to a war of
the Romantics in classical music, the two composers really not feeling
each other either. Cubism—considered the most influential art movement
of modern times—came into vogue when master painters Pablo Picasso
and Georges Braque forged their own frenemy relationship to create the
style. They painted side by side in southern France in the summer of 1911
and bystanders could hardly tell their works apart, though Picasso ended
up with the far more famous reputation. Intense artistic rivalries go back
even earlier than the 1500s of Michelangelo; competition and jealousy are
hardwired into the arts, into human nature period.

Growing up on hiphop, I loved discovering that dis records existed
even before rap music. After the breakup of the Beatles, John Lennon
asked Paul McCartney “How Do You Sleep?” in 1971 (“The sound you
make is Muzak to my ears/You must have learned something in all those
years”). Back in 1960, R&B singer Joe Tex called out James Brown on
“You Keep Her,” based on a lover the men had in common (“James, I got
your letter, it came to me today/You said I could have my baby back, but I
don’t want her that way”). This music came out way before what I was
weaned on, the stuff of Roxanne Shanté vs. UTFO, MC Lyte vs.
Antoinette, KRS-One vs. MC Shan.

God once said—sorry, wait. So, spiritualist author Neale Donald
Walsch penned a series of New York Times bestsellers in the 1990s called
Conversations with God, with dialogues of what the Most High supposedly
told him. Somewhere in book three, God and Walsch converse about
competition and what a culture created by highly evolved beings might
look like. God says, “They do not compete. They realize that when one
loses, everyone loses. They therefore do not create sports and games,
which teach children (and perpetuate in adults) the extraordinary thought
that someone ‘winning’ while another is ‘losing’ is entertainment.” Sports
never appealed to me at all, I was never good at any of them, and this idea
always stuck with me because it seemed to explain why. Measuring the
skills of Stephen Curry against LeBron James is not a conversation I’m
interested in or capable of having. However. Debating over who won the
battle between LL Cool J and Kool Moe Dee, Ice Cube and N.W.A, or Jay-
Z and Nas feels completely different. 50 Cent winning while Ja Rule was
losing? Totally entertaining to me. Hiphop is my sports.

Kendrick Lamar couldn’t level up to the top of hiphop without other
MCs coming for his crown, firing lyrical potshots, and challenging his
place. As a culture, hiphop has always been a space where proving your
worth is necessary to defend your position. I’d seen it firsthand in St.
Mary’s Park in the South Bronx in the late 1970s, B-boy crews dancing
against one another on folded-out slabs of cardboard boxes. And later in
the ’80s, teenage rappers at Truman High School banging out beats on
cafeteria tables and rhyming against one another for nothing more than

egos and reputation. Competition is in the lifeblood of hiphop, and
Kendrick couldn’t become the king without a handful of microphone
challengers.

2.
“Logged into my Twitter today and got a quick reminder that time is in
full flight,” Drake shared from his @champagnepapi Instagram account in
April 2019. “A lot of blessings to be aware and appreciative of for so
many of us … take a quick moment to digest the progression in your life
no matter how small or large. Then get back to it.” Nostalgia courses
through most of Drake’s material, his reflections on past relationships
(mostly romances) making up the bulk of albums like Views and Take
Care. He’d reposted Twitter direct messages going all the way back to
2009, from model Paris Morton, basketball players Kevin Durant and
Tristan Thompson, R&B singer Trey Songz, and—from June 9, 2011—a
pre–Section.80 Kendrick Lamar.

The Beatles had the Stones, Michael Jackson had Prince, Beyoncé has
Rihanna, and Kendrick Lamar, for better or worse, has Drake. With a
longer career, bigger streaming numbers, more Grammy nominations and
a fan base arguably larger than Kendrick’s, the Canadian rapper can’t be
left out of any serious conversation about the most popular MC in 2010s
hiphop. The Coca-Cola Company resurrected its Obey Your Thirst
campaign in 2015, printing lyrics from Rakim, Nas, Biggie Smalls, and
Drake on Sprite soda cans—meaning the billion-dollar business picked
Drake as the only representative rapper from the modern era. Rap fans
sitting by Sprite’s bus-stop posters in their hoods laughed to themselves;
lyrically, Drake isn’t considered to be anywhere near the class of those
other MCs from the standpoint of the culture. Ironically though, from the

perspective of mainstream popularity, none of those godlike rap artists
compare to him.

Born Aubrey Drake Graham one year earlier than Kendrick up in
Toronto, Ontario, classmates bullied the young Canadian over his biracial
parentage (his mother was a Jewish schoolteacher, his dad an expat
African-American drummer). With an affinity for the arts, Graham
dropped out of high school and launched an acting career at fifteen, as the
wheelchair-bound former basketball star Jimmy Brooks on the teen soap
opera Degrassi: The Next Generation. After leaving the show, mixtapes
came next—Room for Improvement (2006) and Comeback Season (2007).
“Man of the Year” opened the door for his relationship with rapper Lil
Wayne (Drake’s song samples a Flo Rida track featuring Wayne), who
invited Drake to join his North American tour and soon his Young Money
Entertainment record label.

Next to the dictionary definition of guilty pleasure (something, such
as a piece of music, that one enjoys despite feeling that it is not generally
held in high regard), a guy wearing AirPods listens to a Drake mix. It’s not
that I’ve never moved to “Started From the Bottom” on the dance floor of
some hiphop-friendly gala. But because of his penchant for narrating
fragile masculinity to elicit compassion from female listeners, most of
Drake’s music doesn’t sound made for male eavesdroppers, like the
feminist hymns of Beyoncé. The first season of HBO’s Insecure, which
follows the lives of two African-American twentysomething women in
L.A., features Easter eggs of Drake lyrics hidden in all its episodes. (“He
just really gets us!” says lead character Issa Dee in the premiere.) Women
adore him, and through all his anecdotes of unrequited love, he’s pandered
for their attention from the beginning of his career.

“To find an analogy to explain Kendrick’s crushing dominance of 2010S hiphop, you’d have to
look to game-changers like Serena Williams in tennis, LeBron James in basketball, or Steve Jobs
in consumer technology. But the question of whether he would have ruled the 2010s if the
playing field for MCs was as competitive as it was in the 1990s assumes that super-skilled rap
icons of the 2010s like Nicki Minaj, Tierra Whack, J. Cole, Vincent Staples, Chance the Rapper,
Danny Brown, and Young Thug don’t matter or exist. It’s way more productive to consider him as
the latest and greatest in a long continuum of MCs—each of whom has raised the bar in hiphop
with regard to aesthetic criteria like flow, cadence, articulation/enunciation, versatility, and
timbre, not to mention issues of political and moral courage.”

—JASON KING

The twin poles of Drake’s oeuvre involve romance and nostalgia.
Hiphop isn’t alien to desire at all. Drake built on the maudlin heartache of
Kanye West’s groundbreaking 808s & Heartbreak to cement his style, but
LL Cool J, Q-Tip, André 3000, Method Man, and others all once did their
part to inject sensitivity into rap music. Drake sings nearly as much as he
emcees, but even that approach harks back to the Kurtis Blow single
“Daydreaming” from the ancient days of 1982. As a heartthrob MC, he
upholds that lovelorn rapper tradition like no one else. The second season
of the Emmy-winning surrealist comedy Atlanta devotes an entire episode
(entitled “Champagne Papi”) to on-again-off-again girlfriend Van Keefer
crashing a Drake house party. He’s not there; he’s on tour in Europe. But
she spends the episode in search of him: going through his closets,
spraying his cologne, humming his songs. From Insecure to Atlanta, Drake
rules the zeitgeist right now when it comes to female millennial thirst,
right alongside actor Michael B. Jordan and the Queen Sugar heartthrob
Kofi Siriboe. Rihanna may have recorded “LOYALTY.” with Kendrick,
complete with flirtatious video, but she actually slept with Drake.

There’s no doubt babies have been conceived to mood-music Drake
playlists, his sound lending itself amenably to the bedroom. He also makes
occasional overtures to male-dominant rap audiences—casting the sexiest
women’s basketball team ever in the video for “Best I Ever Had” for
example, with more bouncing breasts than a Russ Meyer movie. His
hiphop brings a neo-blues longing to the genre, his rhymes constantly
looking back on those who doubted his rise and the unlimited ladies left in
his wake. His laments have laments. To quote from the source, he’s for-
ever “running through the 6 with my woes,” an extremely woe-is-me MC.
Drake is also a master of the meme, with omnipresent social media gifs to
prove it. He debuted his More Life mixtape on his own OVO Sound Radio
show via Apple’s Beats 1 radio station, gluing everyone to the appointment
broadcast like the happy days of American Graffiti.

“Kendrick’s signature is really difficult to copy. That’s because his signature is his penchant for
complex multiplicity, his refusal to be reduced to any one single thing. Even some of the most
gifted MCs conform to one unique flow, or they’ve got one timbral or rhythmic gimmick. But

Kendrick effortlessly and experimentally gear-shifts between rhythms, flows, cadences, speeds,
and vocal registers—sometimes all within the same song. He oscillates between punchy rapping
and melodious singing, placing accents and stresses on weirdly unexpected syllables, like a
hiphop version of Thelonious Monk or Cecil Taylor. He refuses to be pigeonholed into any
singular sound or sonic concept, and he runs the emotional gamut, from ferocious rage to
contemplative introspection. That’s why his multiplicity is also a racial refusal—it’s how he resists
industry and cultural pressure to wind up a predictable, cliché, basic, one-dimensional
stereotype.”
—JASON KING

The most significant rap rivalry of the 2010s (Nicki Minaj and Cardi
B aside) belongs to Kendrick Lamar and Drake. Outside of Kanye West,
who lost major cultural capital by aligning himself with Donald Trump,
they’re the two biggest rappers on the pop landscape. As childhood
witnesses to the deadly beef between Tupac Shakur and the Notorious
B.I.G., both MCs tread lightly when it comes to ramping things out of
control. But their relationship progressed from friendly text messages to
appearing on each other’s albums to a string of subliminal disses in the
wake of Kendrick’s infamous 2013 verse on Big Sean’s “Control.” Both
rappers are fully aware that a cold war trumps a war with actual casualties,
which largely explains the subdued comments from each of them about the
other.

“Kendrick is an MC that would’ve fit in perfectly during the ’90s. But had Kendrick been around
during the ’90s, he would’ve been competing directly with the best. I feel that Kendrick is great,
without a doubt. But Kendrick is head and shoulders above his contemporaries. Largely because
the mainstream rap industry is not what it used to be.”
—DART ADAMS

Back in 2011, a week after Kendrick Lamar and Drake exchanged the
texts above, Kendrick arrived in Toronto for the first time to play the
Sound Academy. He’d turn twenty-four the next day. Drake was in his
hometown laying down tracks at Sterling Road Studios for his second
album, Take Care, and reached out to Kendrick.

“We met up, chilled out, got to vibe, see where each other was at,”
Kendrick later told XXL. “Sometimes you like a person’s music but you
de-finitely don’t like the actual artist when you sit down and you talk to
them. That’s a real good dude; he got a real genuine soul. We clicked
immediately. We had spoken probably one time before that.” Essentially,
they celebrated Kendrick’s birthday together. The younger MC shared a
preview of his first full album, Section.80 (released a month later), with
Drake that night via email. The next month Drake invited him to appear on
Take Care, and Kendrick’s bars say a lot.

“Buried Alive (Interlude)” details the particulars of the two rap
giants’ first meeting in Ontario. Sandwiched between “Marvin’s Room”
and “Under Ground Kings,” Kendrick uses his two-minute verse to speak
on fame, vanity, and ego. He opens by confessing that he’s embarrassed
over what he sees in the mirror post–Section.80; he’s become a “suicidal
terrorist” willing to kill the old version of himself for a mainstream
reincarnation as a super-popular new Kendrick. He introduces “an alien
that said last year that she slept with a Canadian,” a sexy personification
of the music business who’s apparently already seduced Drake. Soon he’s
in the Palms Casino Resort of Las Vegas, choosing blowjobs over reading
Bible verses, losing himself in the perks of celebrity. He ghosts his one-
night stand, blaming Drake for showing him how to handle hookups as a
rap star.

“Drake is both the most commercially successful hiphop artist of the entire 2010s and the most
culturally impactful male hiphop star of the Obama-era too, at least prior to To Pimp a Butterfly.
As the first biracial, half-Jewish rapper in history to achieve mainstream success, Drake grabbed
the baton from MCs like Lauryn Hill, Pharrell Williams, and Kanye West by taking ‘emo hiphop’
to the next level. Hiphop after Drake sounded much more melody-driven, with raw, exposed
lyrics full of questioning, self-doubt, and navel-gazing introspection. His appeal is that he
upended ideas about masculinity, poking fun at himself instead until he morphed into the subject
of endless viral memes. Drake wasn’t just one of the biggest figures in hiphop of the decade—he
was easily popular music’s most influential supernova altogether, next to Adele and Beyoncé.”

—JASON KING

Then Kendrick takes it back to June 2011, cruising through Toronto in
Drake’s Mercedes-Maybach. “Felt like the initiation,” he says, bonding
with an artist who’s already further along on his own meteoric rise,
someone who also made noise through mixtapes and reached superstar
status with help from a cosigner (Lil Wayne instead of Dr. Dre in Drake’s
case). They speak casually about the record industry, about female fans as
the tastemakers of rap music. Kendrick turns twenty-four at the stroke of
midnight. Drake won’t turn twenty-five until October, so for a few
months, they’re the same age. Drake shares this with Kendrick—“and it
didn’t help ’cause it made me even more rude and impatient,” he says. The
atmospheric sounds and cohesive themes (past romances, the pursuit of
fame, ego, and braggadocio) of Drake’s acclaimed third mixtape, So Far
Gone, eclipsed the success of any of Kendrick’s projects up till then. We
can sense his envy and insecurity learning that Drake’s career has shot
higher, further, and faster in his twenty-four years. Kendrick ends “Buried
Alive” explaining that we should all fault Drake for his newfound vanity
and a rededicated laser focus that makes him consider leaving his best
friend (Whitney Alford?) behind. “So dig a shovel full of money, full of
power, full of pussy/Full of fame and bury yourself alive,” he resolves.
Then he dies. Take Care debuts at number one, selling over four million
copies. Section.80 sells five hundred thousand. As a young gun MC to
watch, Kendrick does his duty with A$AP Rocky as the opening act on
Drake’s Club Paradise Tour—the highest grossing hiphop tour that year.

All this good will between the two led to “Poetic Justice,” the fourth
single off Kendrick’s first mega-successful full-length album, good kid,
m.A.A.d city. “He had asked me to get on ‘Poetic Justice,’” Drake later told
XXL. “It’s a great song, but it’s the typical, you know, I’m going to be on
the soft girls’ song on the album. So it was like, ‘Let me give you some
shit.’” Drake counteroffered with “Fuckin’ Problems,” a track that became
a top ten song for A$AP Rocky (his biggest), higher on the pop chart than
“Poetic Justice.” Kendrick declined the song because it didn’t fit his
concept album’s narrative. The Grammy Awards eventually pit Kendrick’s
magnum opus against Drake’s Nothing Was the Same for Best Rap Album.

(Both lost out to Macklemore, the least culturally impactful of the three.)
But Drake and Kendrick enjoyed equal commercial success for the first
time.

Then came “Control.”

3.
On August 14, 2013—while Kendrick relaxed between music festival
performances in Sweden and Belgium—Kanye West protégé Big Sean
released “Control,” the lead salvo from his second studio album, Hall of
Fame. (In the end, “Control” didn’t appear on Hall of Fame; Sean was too
severely upstaged in his own song.) Kendrick called out eleven rappers by
name, earning him more enemies and engendering more ill will than
anything else in his entire career before or since then: “I’m usually
homeboys with the same niggas I’m rhymin’ with/But this is hiphop, and
them niggas should know what time it is/And that goes for Jermaine Cole,
Big K.R.I.T., Wale/Pusha-T, Meek Millz, A$AP Rocky, Drake/Big Sean,
Jay Electron’, Tyler, Mac Miller/I got love for you all, but I’m tryna
murder you niggas/Tryna make sure your core fans never heard of you
niggas/They don’t wanna hear not one more noun or verb from you
niggas.” Kendrick signed off, crowning himself the king of New York.

“Control” resurrected the competitive nature of hiphop in the space of
those eight lines. The spirit of Kool Moe Dee murdering Busy Bee with a
fusillade of rhymes onstage at Harlem World comes alive in those lines.
The essence of the Cold Crush Brothers battling the Fantastic Romantic
Five on that same storied stage floats through those lines. Hiphop hadn’t
seen any real contention between rappers since Jay-Z and Nas went
through a war of the words in 2001. General unfriendliness existed
between Azealia Banks and Iggy Azalea, between Nicki Minaj and Lil’
Kim as well. But the audacity of Kendrick Lamar insulting Big Sean and
rapper Jay Electronica, who’d also added instantly overlooked verses to
“Control,” on their own posse track became the talk of hiphop for weeks.

Some of the song’s targeted MCs sounded off on Twitter.

At least twenty-four different rappers took to the internet with
freestyle response records of their own, including J. Cole, Meek Mill,
A$AP Ferg, and Lupe Fiasco. Most responders inserted themselves into
the narrative just for the attention; they weren’t even mentioned, well-
known, or genuinely offended by “Control.” By the time I interviewed
Kendrick Lamar for an Ebony cover story in the spring of 2015, TDE
forbid media to ask him about the verse anymore. But two weeks after
“Control” detonated, Power 106 questioned him about the seriousness of
the song reigniting the type of East Coast vs. West Coast feud blamed for
the deaths of Tupac Shakur and Christopher Wallace (aka Biggie Smalls).
He answered:

It’ll never be like that again where two coasts [fight]. Not on my
behalf. Not while I’m doing this. And I think the OGs of the game

would want that anyway. They’d want that competitive nature back
and no bloodshed over it, you feel me? I’m way too wise and I’m way
too polished to not get caught up in the hype of the media. But what

I’m scared of is cats that’s not polished, and they getting caught up in
what they Twitter responses is saying and what they’re homies around
them saying, and people gassing them up. And they try to take it to the

next level. Nah, that’s not G. That’s not gangsta…

I respect the legends in the game. I respect people who done it before
me, people that lost they lives over this. So because of what they laid
down, I’m gon’ try and go ten times harder and breathe it and live it.

And that’s the whole point of the whole verse.

Kendrick never seemed shook by the Pandora’s box he’d opened, but
he’d never been the target of so many slings and arrows from other rappers
either. Lupe Fiasco called him insane and childish, dissing Kendrick for
putting himself in the same league as Nas and Jay-Z. Sixteen-year-old Stro
faulted the five-and-a-half-foot MC for having a Napoleon complex.
Papoose attacked his manhood, accusing Kendrick, Kanye, and Drake of
supposedly acting feminine and wearing womanly clothes. Kendrick didn’t
hit back at any of them.

“I didn’t really have anything to say about it. It just sounded like an
ambitious thought to me,” Drake finally said in response to “Control,” two
weeks after its release. “That’s all it was. I know good and well that
Kendrick’s not murdering me, at all, in any platform. So when that day
presents itself, I guess we can revisit the topic,” he told Billboard. “That
verse, he’s giving people moments,” he said weeks afterward in a public
interview at New York University. “That verse was a moment to talk about.
Are you listening to it now? At this point? I can’t wait to see what he does,
because now it’s time to show and prove. Consistency. It’s been like one
album. Consistency is, make more than one album. I look forward to
seeing what he does. He’s super fucking talented.”

But between those statements, Drake released “The Language,” a
preview single from his September 2013 album, Nothing Was the Same.
Listeners took the song’s very first lines—“I don’t know why they been
lyin’/But your shit is not that inspirin’”—as a stab at Kendrick, similar to
Jay-Z baiting Nas (“what you tryin’ to kick, knowledge?”) on “Takeover.”
Drake never mentions Kendrick in any of his songs, before or after
“Control.” When it comes to the art of the subliminal dis though, “The
Language” launched a cold war between hiphop’s greatest postmillennial
MCs that’s lasted for years.

That October, the BET Hip Hop Awards gave a live platform to
ScHoolboy Q, Jay Rock, Ab-Soul, Isaiah Rashad, and Kendrick Lamar to
run roughshod over the beat to Mobb Deep’s “Shook Ones (Part II).” Other
performances come to mind first when considering Kendrick and his
impressive award show routines, but the raw energy of the TDE cypher
reflects street-corner emceeing more than any Grammy or talk-show set
he’s ever done. With many a hard act to follow, Kendrick still manages to
devour all the space in the room by the time Isaiah Rashad passes him the
microphone. “Nothing’s been the same since they dropped ‘Control,’ and
tucked a sensitive rapper back in his pajama clothes,” he spat midway
through, making for subliminal dis number two.

I was an intern fresh out of college when Vibe put together its first
issue in 1993, a black-and-white, Richard Avedon–like headshot of Snoop
Dogg gracing the cover. A Time Warner venture with Quincy Jones, Vibe
took a more polished approach to the hiphop music, culture, and politics
that The Source had already been documenting in magazine form since
1990. The gangster rap that first inspired Kendrick Lamar to become an
MC reached a fever pitch with Snoop’s debut album, Doggystyle, making
him perfect for the magazine’s inaugural issue. Another print media
casualty of the internet by the twenty-first century, Vibe’s final physical
issue came twenty years later: from opening with Snoop Doggy Dogg in
its premiere issue to closing with Drake on the cover of its last.
Questioned about the Kendrick beef in the magazine’s final December
2013 cover story interview, Drake inevitably mentioned “Control”:

Where it became an issue is that I was rolling out
an album while that verse was still bubbling, so
my album rollout became about this thing. What
am I supposed to say? Nah, we’ll be buddy-

buddy? Mind you, I never once said he’s a bad guy
[or] I don’t like him. I think he’s a fucking genius
in his own right, but I also stood my ground as I
should. And with that came another step, which
then I have to realize I’m being baited and I’m not
gonna fall. [Michael] Jordan doesn’t have to play
pickup to prove that he could ball, no offense. But
I’m not gonna give you the chance to shake me
necessarily, ’cause I feel great. There’s no real
issue.

He’s going to do what he has to do, like the BET
[cypher]. But again, it’s not enough for me to go.
We haven’t seen each other, but I’m sure we’ll see
each other and it’ll be cool. And if it’s not, then I
guess that’s how our story unfolds.

The third MC of the new millennium to mature from an acclaimed
mixtape moment to multimillions of downloaded albums is J. Cole. After
dropping The Come Up, The Warm …