J Cole review – gripping rap tales of Swat teams and Ikea tables

O2 Arena, London
Crooning about laundry, sharing footage of police raiding his home and barking 90s-tinged raps from a prison yard stage set, Cole is smart, sharp and different

The stage set for J Cole’s current world tour has been designed to look like a prison exercise yard, complete with barbed wire, punchbag, searchlights and a weightlifting bench. The rapper himself appears wearing an orange convict’s uniform: his backing band are, as he puts it, “in lockdown”, hidden behind the fake prison’s walls. Cole certainly isn’t the first hip-hop artist to play with this kind of imagery, but he may well be the first to interrupt his live show in order to show CCTV footage of a Swat team raiding his home in North Carolina, after a neighbour informed the police that they suspected Cole was a drug dealer, apparently working on the principle that the musicians regularly visiting his studio were customers. It’s a genuinely shocking piece of film, to which he offers a commentary that veers from surprisingly wry – “you ever play Call of Duty? They look like they’re wearing stuff from Call of Duty, but the stuff you gotta pay extra money in the game to buy” – to furious and disconsolate. “Can you believe this shit? I moved to a nice neighbourhood,” he sighs. “You know what people mean when they say nice neighbourhood, right? A white neighbourhood.”

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from Music | The Guardian http://ift.tt/2zsBE8T

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