Noire Notes XXI

Quik Stop

Author’s note: This is a work of fiction. The only thing real about this story is the music.

“It’s the difference you make.” – J. Cole

You’re in a record store, looking for some inspiration. J. Cole’s The Fall-Off is playing in your headphones and you think back to when you first heard his music. That moment in June 2009 when you downloaded The Warm Up, worrying about how much your life will change after high school.

Ironically, it’s been a lot of the same since then: same routine, same unfulfilled dreams. You thought that you would have figured it all out by now but you continually feel like you’ve barely started. You’re halfway through your third decade of life and feel woefully behind. The quarterly updates you get from your high school’s alumni magazine confirms that thought.

You remember when you first wanted to be a writer. The first thing you ever posted publicly being a review of your favorite rapper’s second album (Born Sinner). You remember the amount of time you spent researching beforehand: watching interviews, reading other album reviews, consuming anything that you can get your hands on.

You remember how exhilarated you were posting it and how crushed you were, shortly after, by your words largely being ignored. Twenty-five views, that was the best that you could do at the time. Thirteen years later and it’s crazy to think that the rapper you first wrote about is now on his ‘final’ body of work with a wife, two kids and almost ten million albums sold worldwide.

“Keep grinding, your life can change in one year”. That’s the phrase you clung onto when you first heard it in your college dorm room. But how many times have you repeated it to yourself and see nothing change? How many times have you worked hard, ‘trusted the process’, only to be disappointed by the results? Recently, you’ve had to refamiliarize yourself with the frailty of the human body, of the troubling truth of time passing you by, of the never-ending weight of shouldering responsibilities until you, one day, ‘shuffle off this mortal coil’ as the Bard once said.

Then you see him, a different bard, hailing from Fayetteville, North Carolina. You double-take at first because, why on Earth, would he be here as the album in your ears lands on the song you, currently, hold most dear.

A thousand questions go through your mind, like what happened to the record that starts playing at the 25:06 mark of his Eyez documentary or what words was he singing in the background during the pre-chorus of “Deja Vu”? More importantly, has he ever read your work? If so, what did he think about it? You know, the one that Ib retweeted almost ten years ago about “Neighbors” and the dangers of one racist act? Or what about the one you wrote a few years later, analyzing his discography through the four Greek words for love?

You have to make it quick so you don’t get the answer to these questions. Instead, all you muster up is a simple “thank you” for all the times that his music helped you during a difficult moment in your life. How it gave you the drive to keep going, to keep getting better at your craft, even if you never reach the heights that he reached. He acknowledges your words and keeps it moving, his manager and small entourage of labelmates and security guards following right behind him.

You put your headphones back on as your new favorite album comes to a close, thinking of new ways to turn your reignited passion into prose.

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Further Watching

[1] J. Cole, The Fall-Off: Trunk Sale (Part 5)

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