Both Gonzophiles and hip-hop heads alike will agree that renowned rapper, J. Cole has been stepping in a new direction, away from traditional themes and subject matter. His lyrics already held a narrative perspective akin to Gonzo journalism, however, allegories more or less defined by Hunter S. Thompson are especially apparent on his new album, KOD, which was released on 4/20, nonetheless. Cole even features an alter ego, a la Raoul Duke on his magnum opus. If not the music, itself, I can’t help but feel Thompson could at least appreciate the new music video.
Even this song’s title is clever work on J. Cole’s part. ATM is, of course, an acronym for “automated teller machine,” but has, with the rise of internet culture, grown to mean “at the moment.” J. Cole explains the triple meaning behind his album’s name, KOD, in this trailer, and, from the same perspective, the double meaning I have derived from ATM would reinforce J.Cole’s recurring theme of higher introspection, instead of living, coping “for the moment.” According to Cole, there is much pain in this world and many ways with which to deal with it. Choose wisely.
Hunter says, somewhat satirically, fairly early on in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas:
“You have no faith in the essential decency of the white man’s culture. Jesus, just one hour ago we were sitting over there in that stinking bagnio, stone broke and paralyzed for the weekend, when a call comes through from some total stranger in New York, telling me to go to Las Vegas and expenses be damned—and then he sends me over to some strange office in Beverly Hills where another total stranger gives me $300 raw cash for no reason at all . . . I tell you, my man, this is the American Dream in action! We’d be fools not to ride this strange torpedo all the way out to the end.”
J. Cole, made up as a king in the ATM music video, represents that American dream, leading all of our children with a dollar, into a society in which they will inevitably turn to drugs and chemicals in order to cope with modern society’s many crimes against humanity. The children ride atop codeine and prescription pill bottles, just as the “children” of Hunter’s time would have ridden acid tabs and mescaline capsules. For Thompson, this phenomena was the wave of the 60’s. Sadly, when one compares what was going on politically, socially, and economically in the United States at that time to the present day, not much as changed since Raoul Duke drove into Las Vegas.
Hunter S. Thompson wrote, in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas:
“Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas. Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era—the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run . . . but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time, and the world. Whatever it meant.”
Cole’s video is full of fear and loathing, whether deliberately or not. His character runs into a funhouse with oddly shaped mirrors and such, mimicking his skewed perception of life. In the next scene, he is literally gambling at a casino. “Bet it all,” Cole is pressured. I know another man who gambled with fate, in Vegas and lost all but his mind and the revelations his debauchery brought. Moreover, J. Cole’s character in a straight jacket, locked in a room made of dollar bills may sum up what Hunter was trying to convey in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. The obsessive pursuit of currency, in accordance with the aforementioned “American dream,” will drive one to fear and loathing, to fall in love with big bills, big wheels and quick thrills. You can’t take it when you die, but you can’t live without it. This is the American Dream.
“Let me explain it to you,” wrote Thompson, “let me run it down just briefly if I can. We’re looking for the American Dream, and we were told it was somewhere in this area. Well, we’re here looking for it, ‘cause they sent us out here all the way from San Francisco to look for it. That’s why they gave us this white Cadillac, they figure that we could catch up with it in that.”
Eventually, a slimy used-car-salesman, also played by J. Cole, sells the other, slightly more relatable caricature of J. Cole a slick convertible. Just as Thompson joked and soulless advertising companies still promise, the ever-elusive American dream can be caught while driving just the right luxury car, even if costs an arm and a leg – literally!
Afterward, Cole drives off into the desert, Hunter’s bat country, where he once also drove, in search of the dream. As an obvious nod to Fear and Loathing and, therefore the good doctor, himself, J. Cole speeds through the desert in his hot, red convertible, before miraculously lifting into the sky, where he witnesses the children on their medical magic carpet, chasing the almighty dollar. Similarly, Hunter S. Thompson, in Fear and Loathing, lifts off into his own contorted space, and metaphorically sees the same thing, albeit his portrayal is cloaked in the more creative traits of Gonzo journalism.
Las Vegas, in the novel, represents everything vile about the American dream. It didn’t kill Thompson, but he left before it could. Today, our entire country has embraced that sort of savagery and hedonism, just consider our sitting president. Perhaps J. Cole’s grisly death at the end of the music video foreshadows the fates of us, living in Hunter’s nightmare.
Thompson goes on to conclude his epic journey: “So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”
When and where will our own, proverbial wave break and rollback, and does J. Cole have “the right kind of eyes” to see it?
