J. Cole Talks About Wanting Nothing to Do With Fame In Rare Interview With The NYTimes

J. Cole doesn't do interviews.

It's come to the point where we wonder if he hates them as much as he hates features. For his latest album, 4 Your Eyez Only, which dropped last December, Cole did no press. He just announced it, then dropped it. The album is already platinum.

So we were surprised and delighted to see a new interview with Cole in The New York Times. It comes just a day before the premiere of his HBO 4 Your Eyez Only documentary.

The article is mainly about J. Cole abandoning fame. (He lives only a couple of minutes from where he grew up at.) It's not just fame he's not interested in, but any of the metrics that make people a great MC in this day and age:

“For so long my mind state was, I have to show how much better than the next man I am through these bars. Who’s the best? Let me prove it. And it’s just like, damn, I’m really feeding into a cycle of keeping black people down, I’m really feeding into that.”

There's some cool little tidbits in this article that fans will get a kick out of (like the fact that he owns his own masters.) So definitely read the entire thing.

The 4 Your Eyez Only documentary was directed by Scott Lazer and it will follow Cole as he travels and interacts with people, from Jonesboro, Arkansas to Ferguson, Missouri.

“I felt like it would be mad powerful for black people to see black people talking to each other, and you see a rapper who’s considered one of the biggest in the game, just listening.”

The documentary airs Saturday, April 15, at 10 pm.

After this, Cole is getting ready for his massive 4 Your Eyez Only, which starts at Columbia, South Carolina on June 1st. Check out those dates here,

H/T: NYTimes