Friday Night Lights: 10 Years

I just missed the mixtape era. Not that I’m huge into the distinction between an ‘LP’, an ‘EP’, and a “mixtape” anyway. It just seems that these days, if you have any tick whatsoever, you’ve got an album coming out and a deluxe with the same number of tracks dropping the week after.

And that’s cool, I guess.

But, I personally, have a tough time becoming a fan of a new artist that way. Part of the reason fanbases become so strong is because a good amount of that fanbase were fans before that artist reached mainstream appeal. Not to say that all artists are mainstream today, but from the outside looking in, it seems like the road from unknown to global phenomenon is expedited by social media, market saturation, etc.

I say all of that to say this. There are very few mixtapes that I know of, much less that I have an affinity for. Call me whatever you want, but I was ignorant to 50 Cent’s robust mixtape catalog until a few months ago and I’m still not all the way hip. I still haven’t listened to So Far Gone or Overly Dedicated all the way through intently.

One of the only mixtapes I still listen to regularly (if not fervently), is Friday Night Lights. J. Cole is my favorite living artist so that shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who knows me. But I find it wild that a mixtape that was really one of the last great ones of its kind is so etched in my mind rather than others by similar artists and some of my other favorites.

It was the first rap project that I loved for the rapping. I didn't fall in love with J. Cole because of Friday Night Lights, that probably wasn’t until Born Sinner. I loved this tape before I knew what Cole's face looked like. I didn’t fall in love with hip hop culture because of it, that was years before because of my family and how I was raised.

Friday Night Lights was when I fell in love with rap and began to envy the skill it took to be a rapper.

FNL came out in 2010 but I really didn’t hear it until a year or so after. My older brother, who put me on to most of the hip hop music I love, left his PlayStation with my other brother and I in the fall when he returned to college after Thanksgiving break. We played Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit profusely (I am just reading that they remastered the game for Next-Gen consoles??). Somehow, my brother, before he left, programmed the PS3 to play his downloaded music instead of the game’s actual soundtrack, which is brilliant in its own right, if I might add.

Anyways, as much as I played the game, I listened to this mixtape just as much. I learned about how beautiful and relatable rap was.

“These boys got them holsters and clips, they pack like Lunchables… Eyeing they s***, wish I was trying they s***, knowing when momma hit the store she wasn’t buying that s***”

As a 10-year-old, there was literally nothing more relatable than that line from “Too Deep for the Intro”.

Before this, I enjoyed music’s melodies, dancing, and performances. This was the first album I truly listened to.

Along with helping me fall in love with rap, FNL was the history lesson I never got.

What if I told you it wasn’t until I was 17 that I heard “Didn’t Cha Know” by Erykah Badu, the sample used in “Too Deep for the Intro”, for the first time.

What if I told you I wouldn’t hear 2Pac’s “Hail Mary” for the first time until years after I knew all the words to “Enchanted”?

What if I told you “Hypnotize” wasn’t the first time I heard the lyrics from the chorus of “You Got It”?

Cole was my Pac, Biggie, and Nas. After FNL happened to me, I started to write raps myself. I think every little homie goes through a phase like this. You find something that you love done perfectly and you want to see if you can do it too. For some, beautifully, that phase never ends.

To this day, if you tell me I have to spit a whole song, word for word, or I die, I’m choosing “Back to the Topic” every time, and that’s been my choice since Obama’s first term.

The other side of why this project is so important is because it has so many songs and is appropriate for so many different instances. I can remember points from elementary school to now when I needed motivation and gained it from “Before I’m Gone”. Had problems with girls and felt lyrics from “Loves Me Not”.

In my sophomore year of high school, I started on the varsity football team, and to say I had butterflies before the first game would be an understatement. The night before the game, the last lines from “Premeditated Murder” described my mindset perfectly:

“What if I’m wrong and I ain’t got what it takes? Then all them people that was counting on me, boy won’t you climb down the mountain for me.”

However, the last song I listened to before kickoff was the tape's Intro: “This is your moment… What good if being the one when you the only one that knows it?”

When driving up to school this past summer, I listened to the mixtape again. It's that multifaceted. Hype, fear, motivation, and nostalgia. And it’s straight rapping too. There are some crazy beats, but this isn’t a situation where you’re lauding the production over the content, in my opinion.

I cannot go through every song because that would make this piece much too long. Happy 10 years to Friday Night Lights. A lot of people think this is Cole’s best project. Right now, I would have to disagree.

But, upon further review, I could definitely be persuaded.