J. Cole recently revealed why he stays off of social media on Kevin Hart’s “Hart to Heart” show on Peacock.
The 29-year-old rapper whose real name is Jermaine Cole, said he wasn’t feeling good or appreciated, and he felt the work he had done wasn’t getting the proper recognition.
He said there was too much interest and focus on the things he hadn’t accomplished yet, and up until that point, that wasn’t the way he thought about his career.
J. Cole admitted it was very much an ego thing on his part.
As he was passed up for Grammys and other opportunities, he would wonder why until he got with a new publicist name Kathryn Frazier who taught him about transcendental meditation.
He said learning transcendental meditation coincided with him realizing that something wasn’t right, and he began to make some baseline rules for himself.
…But mind you, her telling me about that was coinciding with me, ah, realizing, yo, something’s going on bro… You gotta, you gotta… So, so I had set rules for myself.
One was like, ‘Bro you can’t go on social media no more.’
Like, we’re from the first generation of, like, entertainers, celebrities, whatever, where it’s like, bro, you could literally at any minute see what somebody’s saying about you, you know what I mean?…
And it’s like there was nobody to tell you, like cigarettes, when the whole world for decades was smoking cigarettes.
There wasn’t anybody loudly saying, like, ‘Ah, that’s, that’s gonna kill you in about… You probably shouldn’t do that.’
It took a long time for somebody to realize how harmful this was.
And similarly, we’re in a generation where our entertainers, our basketball players, our boom, boom, boom, like no one was there.
And even now, nobody’s there to be like, ‘Don’t Google yourself. Don’t search your name,’ or boom boom boom.
So I say all that to say I had set some rules for myself, some baseline rules, like, yo, don’t go on Twitter, don’t read your replies, do not search your name, boom, boom, boom.
That’s rule number one.
Number two, when you’re creating, you got to create from a pure place only, like there was a rule I set for myself.
Like everything has to only be truly what you feel in your heart boom, boom, boom.
…The nastiest place to ever do some artful sh*t and some pure… It’s just like, yo, you can’t… It’s like you have to leave all room I feel like in the creative process for, like, for God, you know what I mean?…
And the minute you start, like, thinking about what somebody else is going to think about it, or boom, boom, boom…
I had caught myself in that space for a moment, and it was so unfamiliar to me because that’s never how I use to work.
And so to get up out of that, I had set these ground rules in place…
Watch the clip of the J. Cole interview from “Hart to Heart” below:
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