First you hear the bass, an electric heart pumping through the arteries of Corona Park. Then there’s the enormous sign in glimmering type welcoming everyone to The Meadows 2016, New York City’s newest music festival. And then there’s the line to get in, which is not a line. It’s a slow-moving wave of people whose outfits fill the spectrum from inventive—glowing get-ups of self-stitched fabrics—to offensive—nauseating combinations of dashikis on pale skin. Haven’t there been like six Buzzfeed articles telling us to stop doing that already?
Walking into the festival itself is like entering a bizarre, man-made microclimate. Small clouds hang impossibly low, speckling the concrete expanse with a pungent haze. A rush of warm air emanates from around the stages where festival-goers become a singular mass of movement and where the ring pops are probably not the kind you sucked on as a kid. It all kind of looks like what would happen if Wes Anderson made a Bon Iver music video using a camera phone: colorful, mysterious, and hazy, but ultimately devoid of depth, choking on its own gleeful ambition.
All that said, when I attended The Meadows in New York City this weekend, I didn’t expect to be writing about it. Why? I guess I was a little embarrassed to be there. Going to a music festival like The Meadows—such a cushy and extravagant affair—is clearly a mark of privilege that no one should be shoving in anyone else’s face. More selfishly, I worried I simply wouldn’t have anything original to say. Yes, there were pushy kids scampering about. Yes, there were shitty beers that cost as much as a three-course meal at Ivy Wok. Yes, there were corporate tents the size of residential colleges. (Is there really a difference? Looking at you, Franklin Templeton College.) All valid. All true. All vaguely embarrassing.
Still, there’s a reason I’m writing this piece. He is a musician. A rapper. He is the man from Fayetteville, North Carolina who, last Saturday, showed me without the slightest suggestion of banality what it means to be sincere.
He is J. Cole.
***
Taking the stage at exactly 8:45 p.m., Cole donned a jersey with a rather obscure message: white letters on a metallic green background spelling the name “Megan Rapinoe.” I didn’t recognize the name at first, but after a quick Google search you’ll find that Rapinoe, an American soccer player, made the news recently for kneeling as the national anthem played before a game. Having immediately raised the stakes by making such a charged gesture, Cole wasted no time in launching into a searing portrait of masculinity, the almost unbearably personal saga, “Wet Dreamz.”
Everyone has songs that they don’t or can’t listen to. Sometimes it’s because of a memory associated with the track, a line that is offensive, or simply a sound that bothers them. For me, “Wet Dreamz” is one of those songs. But it’s not because of anything Cole does wrong; rather, it’s that Cole gets his message so painfully right. Through a combination of rich imagery and intense, unflinching narration, Cole tells the story of an inexperienced guy who strikes up a romance with someone whom Cole describes as a much more experienced girlfriend. His lyrics paint a virtuosic image of youthful exploration, disarming the listener with astonishingly delicate lines like, “But if I told the truth I knew I’d get played out son / Hadn’t been in a pussy since the day I came out one.” And his honesty evokes an almost visceral reaction, culminating when he reveals at the end of the song that it’s the girlfriend’s first time, too.
Like a thump in the gut, Cole’s fearlessness to relate his own struggles with insecurity challenges the listener to snap out of the delusion that all rappers have sex like Big Sean, who only complains about getting laid too much. And so perhaps the most pernicious aspect of this kind of long-dick-swinging masculinity is that, finally, one can get used to it. It can even be a reassuring voice to have around from time to time, which is why, when Cole raps so realistically about a different brand of self-aware, vulnerable masculinity, it’s totally jarring.
I used to cringe immediately upon hearing the opening line, “Wasn’t nothin’ like that / Man it wasn’t nothin’ like that first time,” and would proceed to ask whoever was playing the song to skip it. But something about last Saturday was different. This time, when Cole leapt into those first rhymes, so did I, screaming them at the top of my lungs. In fact, somehow I knew the whole first verse. And then I knew the chorus, too. I was in it now, malleable, free to think and feel however Cole wanted me to.
And so the set continued until the music stopped abruptly and without explanation. Then the lights went out. Murmurs filled the reconstituted parking lot behind Citi Field. But just when people were starting to think something had gone wrong, the stage was lit by a milky, lilac glow. A stool appeared. Slowly, Cole walked back on stage, took a seat, and started talking.
He began by introducing himself. Adorable—as if anyone there didn’t know who he was. He told us a little about his career, his family, where he’s from. He told us how New York, and specifically Queens —the borough where the festival was being held—was important to him. How he went to college nearby at St. Johns, how tonight would be his “last show for a long time.” The gasps were audible, but were cut short when Cole launched into a secular sermon, asking each person in the audience, stranger or best friend, to lock arms.
Cole touched on many things in the speech that followed, from social justice to personal appearance, but what unified each disparate topic was Cole’s underlying, undeniable sincerity. Thus, what made this moment so special was how counterintuitive it seems in retrospect: here was this celebrity talking down from a stage to thousands of regular folks as if he was one-on-one with any of us. I know I felt it. I’m sure others did, too.
How did Cole create this enchanting effect? My theory is that he earned the credibility to speak so candidly about clichéd subjects like “being beautiful the way you are,” because he doesn’t just do it between tracks. No, he’ll tell the crowd to love the way you look and then rap in the next song, “Never let ‘em see you frown / and if you need a friend to pick you up, I’ll be around / and we can ride with the windows down, the music loud / I can tell you ain’t laughed in a while, but I wanna see that crooked smile.” Almost all of his songs reflect the same ideology he promoted during his Meadows speech. Katie Liptak, FKA ’19, put it best by saying, “He didn’t just say all those nice things, then go off rapping about other stuff. He backed it up, using his music to flesh out his genuine-seeming message about taking some time to appreciate women who are overburdened and undervalued.”
***
I won’t pretend to know the most about rap music. I don’t. But something about Cole’s ability to combine a speech that teetered on the brink of corniness with some real moving music gave me pause. Forget what the advertisements say. The Meadows and music festivals like it are really just enormous cash factories. They’re pricey. They market themselves to a select demographic. But sometimes you can have an experience at an overtly capitalistic event that can help you forget that you’re at such an overtly capitalistic event. Last Saturday, I witnessed one man get more than a thousand others to lock arms solely based on the conviction that what he was rapping about was true and meaningful. Whenever J. Cole decides to return to the stage, many people will be confused to see the man from the Ville trade sexy backup dancers for a stool, sacrificing swagger for sincerity. But I will not be one of them.