Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
Hip hop artist J. Cole is the type of multifaceted talent that critics love. He’s as a skilled an MC as he is a songwriter and producer, and like occasional collaborator Kendrick Lamar, his music is informed by an acute social consciousness, without ever being weighted down by it. Like his recent album which shares its name, the HBO special 4 Your Eyez Only is a long form rumination on black life in the small towns and suburbs of the American South and Mid West. The 50 minute feature, his second for the channel, premiered last week, and is currently available for streaming on HBO’s various streaming services.
Not quite a video album, not quite a documentary, 4 Your Eyez Only ambles from one location to another, bearing witness to people’s stories, and mixing in musical interludes. It begins casually, as if you turned on a VHS home movie halfway through. We meet people in an as of yet unnamed African-American neighborhood, some hawking their own music, others engaged in intense discussions about the struggles affecting the black community. All the while J. Cole looks on quizzically, like the comic book character The Watcher, saving his commentary for his songs, which are a mix of album tracks and new music.
With its vaguely psychedelic touches, and restrained visuals, 4 Your Eyez Only perfectly evokes the soulful stillness of the South and America’s forgotten flyover states. Whether intentional or not, the film’s locales are also a rather apt metaphor for being black in America. You are an integral part of the nation, but also passed over, misunderstood and often neglected. Its muted sense of commentary is similar to Donald Glover’s FX television series Atlanta, which thoughtfully addressed a similar sense of black otherness, without grandstanding or hyperbole.
J. Cole travels to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where we meet a woman whose house was destroyed by flood. For her troubles the government gave her a check for $86. In his hometown of Fayetville, North Carolina, we meet a motel clerk that rents rooms to down on their luck Southerners of all races. In Ferguson, MO, Cole goes to visit a makeshift Michael Brown memorial, only to find it’s been removed, and visits with his friends, discussing how his death gave birth to the Black Lives Matter movement.
The legacy of the Brown killing and other police shootings informs much of 4 Your Eyez Only, both the film and J. Cole’s album of the same name. At one point we see him on his bus as the Walter Scott shooting video is aired for the first time. Cole has said that the album was an attempt to humanize the young black men so often villainized in the media, and victimized in the criminal justice system. As he raps in the title track, which concludes both film and album, “This perspective is a real one, another lost ‘ville son / I dedicate these words to you and all the other children /Affected by the mass incarceration in this nation / That sent your pops to prison when he needed education.” While Cole wrestles with these problems in song, the people we meet over the course of the film discuss their effects and how to survive them.
However, 4 Your Eyez Only is as much about love as it is about the struggle of everyday black Americans. Love of friends, love of family, love of your community. J. Cole eventually makes his way to his father’s hometown of Jonesboro, Arkansas. While hanging with his pops, who describes his multi-platinum selling son to a friend as “My son…the rapper,” he also learns about the area’s black history, visiting its first high school for blacks, which didn’t open until 1922. Perhaps most touching is the song “She’s Mine Pt. 1,” where Cole raps about a father who’s “fallen in love for the first time” with his new daughter. A new dad himself, Cole raps in character, but the lyrics also encapsulate the film itself; “I wanna talk about my days as a youth to you / Exposing you to all my demons and the reasons I’m this way / I would like to paint a picture, but it’ll take more than a day / It would take more than some years to get all over all my fears.”
Benjamin H. Smith is a New York based writer, producer and musician. Follow him on Twitter:@BHSmithNYC.
