J. Cole put out what he says is his last album, The Fall Off, then got in his old Honda Civic, filled the backseat with CDs, and drove city to city handing them out. Just him and the car and the physical media, like it was 2003 and nobody had told him.

Here’s what I keep returning to. Cole announced his farewell and released it into a world that had spent eighteen months talking about everything except J. Cole. The great rap beef of 2024, Kendrick and Drake, the diss tracks, the cultural earthquake, made Cole’s decision to walk away from his own beef look either principled or cowardly depending on who you asked, and nobody stopped asking. His previous album got swallowed whole. We stopped talking about how good it was because something louder happened. That’s the thing about genuine craft. It’s always one news cycle from irrelevance.

So The Fall Off arrives carrying the weight of a farewell and the baggage of a retreat. It has to be both statement and final word, and the problem with final words is everyone has an opinion about what they should sound like. Twenty-four songs on your closing album means every track that doesn’t feel essential becomes an argument against you. Not because the songs are bad. Because the frame demands perfection, and perfection demands brevity.

The song people can’t stop arguing about is “What If,” where Cole imagines Tupac and Biggie apologizing to each other, choosing a different ending. I understand the impulse. The cost of rap beef isn’t just lost artistry, it can become lost life, and Cole walked away from his own beef so of course he’d rewrite the original. But it lands complicated. Kendrick already did his Tupac homage in the aftermath of allegations about his own marriage, and the timing made it feel like a man reaching for something real while the ground moved under him. Cole’s version feels like a thought experiment. A “what if” in the most literal sense. Some people think Pac would never have apologized. I don’t either. And in 2026, with everything we’ve learned about who was actually responsible, the old stories don’t hold their shape.

Cole wrote a reconciliation scene for two characters whose real story we’re still learning was darker than anyone imagined.

The rapping is technically better than it’s ever been. That’s worth saying. “Safety” might be the best song on it. “The Fall Off Is Inevitable” is the one that’ll hit different when he’s gone, his whole life story, the retrospective that becomes a eulogy before anyone’s died. His collaborator Ibrahim wanted it to close the album, right before “Ocean Way.” Cole disagreed. Ibrahim was right. Imagine ending with that. The whole biography, the whole arc, then silence. Instead we get “Ocean Way,” which is fine, which is a perfectly reasonable closer, which is not the same thing as inevitable.

Features are sparse and slightly strange. Future shows up twice, lightly, doing what Cole wanted rather than what Future normally does. Reciprocity, maybe, for the features Future gave when Cole needed that number one. No Dreamville. No J.I.D, who is supposed to be next and could’ve used the look. Cole’s position: this is my thing, I’m the platinum-no-features guy. His right. But it leaves J.I.D finding his own way, and you think about how Wayne brought Drake along, how the legend reaching back used to be part of the contract, and whether that contract expired when every artist decided they were Kanye-sized and alone.

Reception is split exactly in half, which may be the most honest thing that can happen to an album. Diehards call it a classic. Skeptics call it bloated. I’m with the skeptics. I wanted to like it more than I did. Individual songs land but the album as a whole doesn’t hold. A hundred minutes is a lot of time to spend with someone who’s saying goodbye and keeps not leaving. Cole gave me something to sit with when I wanted something to move with. An album doesn’t owe you both but a 24-song farewell probably should’ve tried.

What I keep thinking about is the Civic. Cole is worth tens of millions and he got in the old car, filled it with CDs, and drove. Not only as marketing but because he genuinely believes the version of hip-hop where you hand someone a physical object is better than the version where everything streams and nothing sticks. He might be right. He might be the guy at the party insisting everyone put their phones away, and everyone agrees in principle, and then someone checks their phone.

Bad Bunny just won the first all-Spanish Album of the Year and performed entirely in Spanish at the Super Bowl. He didn’t exist ten years ago. Cole put out his last album and drove it around in a Honda. Somewhere between those two facts is everything I find confusing about making something now. Whether you break forward into a world that looks like nothing before it, or drive backward toward a craft that felt more real, and whether the difference is as large as it seems or whether they’re both just people making the thing they needed to make, hoping someone takes the CD.