It’s surgical in its precision, and as moving as it is funny. Yet the song isn’t a boast about his irresistibility (or isn’t entirely that): After acknowledging he was a virgin at the time, he moves step-by-step through the ensuing rendezvous, pointing out all the ways he concealed his nervousness with braggadocio. In one track with an unprintable title and a warmly soulful beat he produced himself, Cole recounts being propositioned by a girl in his high school math class. ![]() Even when he’s drawing on his own experiences - the album’s title refers to the address of his childhood home - he exercises an observational acuity that suggests how much noticing he’s been doing lately. “2014 Forest Hills Drive,” his third major-label disc, is thick with the residue of these immersions. For Cole, though, the street isn’t just a source of (borrowed) credibility it’s where this storyteller goes to absorb details that for others might merely be glimpsed on a screen. That insistence on authenticity is a familiar pose in hip-hop, which often measures success not by how far an artist travels but by how little that travel changes him. “But at the same time, I don’t want it … if I have to become someone who’s so out of touch with what’s real.” “I got a lot more dreams, and I wanna go further,” he says in the slickly produced clip.
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