Once in a while he can create something catchy- the Miguel-featuring 'Power Trip' almost seems like it was designed in a lab for radio rotation but the album as a whole splices together musical eras and reference without much purpose. But while the production (mostly by Cole himself) favors the soulful, laid-back vibe of College Dropout and the string swoops of Late Registration, there's very little to make it distinct, something more than a nod to the past. Part of the reason you can't help but think of them is because Cole keeps bringing them up- when you constantly point to the work of others, comparisons with them are inevitable. City ('Let Nas Down' can certainly be viewed as Cole's answer to West's 'Big Brother', which Cole references on the hook). Listening to Born Sinner, you can't help but think of the gold standards of the modern era, among them Kanye West's first two albums as well as Kendrick Lamar's 2012 opus good kid, m.A.A.d. Cole's second, attention-grabbing mixtape, 2009's The Warm Up, positioned him as an upstart unmoored from traditional conventions, an artist who could switch up flows, rap furiously and build his own hooks Born Sinner finds himself standing in about the same place he was on Cole World: The Sideline Story, but the green room here is a little nicer.

Who is the person at the center of all this outward projection? We still don't really know. And toward the end, there’s a song-length love letter to Nas- “Used to print out Nas raps and tape 'em up on my wall/ My niggas thought they was words, but it was pictures I saw.” “Forbidden Fruit” finds Cole swimming in A Tribe Called Quest's “Electric Relaxation”, a track that also features a barely audible Kendrick Lamar. He co-opts a snippet of a Mike Epps comedy routine and he flips Cults’ “Bad Things” on a song about cheating, a track that also doubles down with Dirty Projectors’ Amber Coffman showing up to coo on the (long, guitar-heavy) outro. tirade. He duets with the remaining members of TLC (“Crooked Smile”) on a song that can be read either as a breezy style mash-up or as sacrilege. 1” (“Land of the Snakes”) and fashions it into an anti-L.A.

He repurposes OutKast's “Da Art of Storytellin Pt. By the time you’ve reached the record's end, you’ll have seen him try on a number of familiar hats. Born Sinner, the heavily referential second LP for Roc Nation signee Jermaine Cole, borrows its title from the Notorious B.I.G.’s 'Juicy'.

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