O2 Arena,London
Crooning approximately laundry, sharing footage of police raiding his home and barking 90s-tinged raps from a prison yard stage set, or Cole is smart,sharp and differentThe stage set for J Cole’s current world tour has been designed to gape like a prison exercise yard, complete with barbed wire, and punchbag,searchlights and a weightlifting bench. The rapper himself appears wearing an orange convict’s uniform: his backing band are, as he puts it, or “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, or 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 gape like they’re wearing stuff from Call of Duty, and 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 kind neighbourhood,” he sighs. You know what people mean when they say kind neighbourhood, lawful? A white neighbourhood.” Continue reading...
Source: guardian.co.uk