The Alternate Timeline In Which J. Cole’s Dunk Goes In
NGL covers how the fabric of our existence could’ve changed — for better or worse — if the platinum-selling rapper had finished the flush back in 2019
Editor’s Note: This essay was originally published on Feb. 18, 2019. We have updated the story to reflect J. Cole’s major moves in the past 18 months. To read the original version, click here.
Let’s take a trip down memory lane to a magical year: 2012. For reference, 2012 was the year that South Korean pop superstar Psy created the weirdest-yet-somehow-incredibly-popular-dance-move-ever with “Gangnam Style”; a backup point guard for the Knicks dropped 25 points and 9 assists per game for a whole month, captivating fans worldwide; and we still weren’t sure if the apocalypse was gonna happen, or if it was just a joke as bad as the 2009 film 2012.
Another thing that happened in 2012? This:
Yup, that’s Kevin Hart lobbing it up to Fayetville’s very own, a dread-less, non-nappy J. Cole. The rapper didn’t disappoint, either, using every bit of his 6’2" frame to extend up for the jam, setting a new bar for celebrity basketball games everywhere and giving Cole more cred in the Every Rapper Wants To Be A Baller Rankings.
It’s not like his basketball skills haven’t been documented in the past. He starred in high school before walking on at St. John’s University.
(Or, well, at least that’s what Cole says. When writing about it in 2017, B/R had this to say: “According to J. Cole, he didn’t actually get cut and instead elected not to go to the second day of the walk-on tryout.” Kind of the equivalent of the yes-my-girlfriend-is-real-she-just-goes-to-a-different-school shtick, but I digress.)
Still, though, when you see rappers at NBA All-Star weekend, you kind of expect them to punch in, perform, hype up the crowd, sit courtside and get shown on the jumbotron a minimum of 72 times, get used as a Dunk Contest prop, and, finally, punch out.
Yet this is J. Cole we’re talking about. Not only was he the unofficial mascot of the celebration’s proceedings — he grew up three hours away from the arena, after all — but he’s also gone platinum three time without any features (did you know he’s gone platinum three times without any features?). He couldn’t just sit in a chair and let Dennis Smith Jr. dunk over him.
No, he had to try slamming one home himself. Without warming up. While wearing a hoodie. And rolled up pants. And it…
…almost went in. Almost.
Cole clearly had the elevation and timing down, but for whatever reason, he wasn’t able to replicate the magic from 7 years prior. Naturally, though, I felt that it was necessary to address the elephant in the room, the main thing on all of our collective minds throughout All-Star Weekend: how would the fabric of history and time itself changed if the rapper’s dunk rattles in?
Therefore, with some inspiration from one of the singular greatest episodes of television of all time, I bring to you an exploration of The Alternate Timeline In Which J. Cole’s Dunk Goes In. Be warned: while my hypotheses are known to be quite accurate, I’m by no means trained in the mystic arts of prognostication.
Nevertheless, someone had to give it a shot, right?
Feb. 16, 2019: J. Cole Dunks It Home
It’s All-Star Saturday night, which often flip flops between being one of the most entertaining televised nights in all of pop culture and inducing several yawns.
A delicate balancing act by The Association, but you’re already here, so you might as well stay for the Dunk Contest, right? Alright, you’re committed, you’re sinking down into your couch…and the first round is boring as hell. It goes to commercial break, and you start to scroll through Twitter, barely even noticing that the thing is back on and — oh, wait, is DSJ bringing out J. Cole? This is intriguing. Okay, Smith jumped over Cole and dunked, that’s cool and all, they’re celebrating an — WAIT A MINUTE! WHAT’S J. COLE DOING!? DID HE JUST YAM IT HOME WHILE SITTING COURTSIDE!?!?
Social media promptly explodes. Instead of taping that night’s episode of Saturday Night Live — hosted by the always-wonderful Don Cheadle — cast and audience members alike decide to flip on TNT and watch J. Cole’s postgame press conference, in which he explains what was going through his mind when he threw it down. In turn, President Trump, who’s been busy queuing up tweets about how Alec Baldwin’s hair looks bad, jumps ship, instead sharing with his followers, “The Dems are all acting surprised that a rapper like Jermaine Coal could dunk, but it’s their fault my law allowing ppl like him to get drafted into the NBA hasn’t gone through! Sad!”
Throughout all the mayhem, Adam Silver quietly pulls Cole aside after the press conference and informs him that there’s been a request from The King himself to join Team LeBron on Sunday. The rapper graciously accepts and officially becomes the first person to play in the All-Star Game and simultaneously perform at halftime.
Without any features, to boot.
Mar. 1, 2019: The Knicks Come Calling
How does a Southern kid wind up in the Big Apple? Well, there’s several reasons why the New York brass pegs Cole as a viable option for a 10-day:
There is a modicum of precedent. He went to St. John’s for undergrad, where he graduated magna cum laude in 2007 with degrees in communication and business and a 3.8 GPA. Part of the reason he went to college in New York was to secure a recording contract, and it worked, as Cole signed with Jay Z’s label Roc Nation in 2010.
The Knicks just traded for Dennis Smith Jr., after all. The duo goes way back, as both grew up in Fayetville; they even played pickup together back when Smith was still in high school. There’s a lot of bright lights in New York, and Smith could use a familiar face to alleviate some of the pressure of such a big adjustment.
At this point in the season, the Knicks are far and away the worst team in the league, with a record below even that of the Suns (the Suns!). I know, you know, even your grandma knows that the team is tanking in order to have a shot at Zion Williamson. But the club still has to sell tickets, so if they’re going to trot out a shoddy, half-baked roster every night, why not opt for a clear publicity stunt in signing Cole?
The Knicks' management is bad. Like, really, really, reaaaallllyyy bad. Therefore, would you really put it past James Dolan to do something as mind-boggingly stupid as sign a rapper?
In the end, Cole proceeds to put pen to paper…and suits up in all four games over the span of his contract, dropping 20 points and generally looking like the best Knick on the court night in and night out. When New York realizes what they’ve stumbled upon, they quickly throw together a contract extension before some other team can snap him up.
Cole declines, however, opting instead to work on an album with a working title of 10 Day. He stops producing the album one month later, though, due to an onslaught of intense legal pressure from Chance the Rapper’s people.
Nov. 22, 2019: Cole-Sanders 2020
Off the heels of his successful 2018 album, KOD — which attempted to demystify kids’ drug use and depression — J. Cole decides to create a new concept album called Iron & Cole.
Emboldened by Trump’s poorly-written tweet from earlier in the year, the rapper wants to use his platform as an international superstar to raise awareness about global warming. As a verified contributor on Genius, Cole writes:
“This past year, I’ve bee thinking a lot about the influence I wield and the message I’ve been sending. And the truth is, you can’t have no Dreamville if there’s no ‘ville in the first place — you know what I’m saying? So I’ve decided to create this album, and I thought that I couldn’t, you know, properly tell the story myself. So that’s why the whole thing is told through the eyes of a white birch tree.”
Cheesy? Maybe. Yet it’s never stopped him before, and Iron & Cole goes on to become his best-selling album yet. The mainstream rap community bumps it; the left adores it; and the ultra-left, Green Party folks champion it, so much so that they decide to nominate Cole for the 2020 presidential elections.
The rapper graciously accepts the bid and quickly rises as an alternative favorite for those disenchanted with the two-party system. Bernie Sanders even becomes so enamored that he drops his own campaign in order to become Cole’s VP. Many of his voters, however, cede to Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson when they realize the latter has a better shot at winning with the backing of the Democratic Party. A little less than a year after the release of Iron & Cole, The Rock goes head to head with the Republican Party’s own candidate: Kanye West, who beats out his buddy Trump by doing nothing other than playing the nine-minute version of “Runaway” at all of his campaign rallies.
Oh, yeah — did I mention that J. Cole’s album becomes the quickest to ever go Diamond, moving 10 million units in less than a month?
Feb. 24, 2020: Roll Out the Red Carpet!
It’s the 2020 Academy Awards, and J. Cole is up for Best Actor due to his role in Django Unchained: A Spike Lee Joint.
Yep, as the story goes, Spike saw Cole’s acting job in the music video for 2018’s “ATM” and decided that he had his man. “No, I didn’t give it [the titular role of Django] to him purely because he played for the Knicks for 10 days,” Spike bristles in interviews during the weeks leading up to the Oscars. “Why would you ever say that?”
Anyway, after taking home Best Film for BlacKkKlansman in 2019, the acclaimed director realizes that he’s done enough to solidify his standing among the greatest filmmakers of all time. So why not tarnish the legacy of one of his biggest adversaries, Quentin Tarantino — the duo’s beef goes all the way back to the ’90s, with Tarantino calling Lee a “son of a bitch” as recently as 2015 — by remaking his hit film into a rom-com musical starring Cole as the titular character?
To the detriment of Tarantino and the surprise of Lee, as it turns out, J. Cole can act as well as he can rap. His various musical numbers, including the Grammy-winning “I Like the Way You Die, Boy!” become favorites among Academy members, who praise Lee for his “artistic vision” and Cole’s performance as a “triumphant tour de force.”
Cole doesn’t take home the award for Best Actor, though. He loses out to known method actor Christian Bale, who goes through the process of cryogenically freezing himself in order to properly play Walt Disney in a 2019 biopic. The rapper’s not sure if this acting thing is for him, anyway, and hangs up the cleats after appearing in his first and final flick. His performance does attract the likes of playwright Lin-Manuel Miranda, though, who’s busy adapting some combination of Shark Tank, mariachi music, and the War of 1812 into a Broadway production. Want in? Miranda asks the rapper.
Almost a year after the dunk that changed history forever, Cole looks around his apartment, then shrugs. Sure, why not.
What better things do I have going on?
That is…until the pandemic hits, of course.
Aug. 21, 2020: COVID Cole
So what would’ve happened that fateful night if J. Cole’s dunk doesn’t go in, and how does the fabric of our reality shift?
Again, I’m no Doctor Strange — I can’t see all 14,000,605 different timelines. But what I can say is that in our current one, the dunk didn’t go in, and coronavirus reared its ugly head. Now, I’m not one to propose the myth of correlation meaning causation, but also…
…what if?
No, no, no. That’s a little bit too much, even for me.
What I can tell you about, however, is the way in which Dreamville’s Own has spent these last several months. Because with COVID-19 seriously limiting our ability to travel and resetting the “new normal,” it’s left many of us questioning our passions, what we should do with all of this newfound time.
And for J. Cole, it meant working on his jumper:
Master P isn’t the only one singing the praises of Cole, either — former NBA vet Larry Sanders recently had this to say about the rapper’s chances of making the league:
"I do, for real. I've seen him hoop before in some games and I knew he took the game seriously when he was younger…he always raps about it, so that's dope. I'm excited to see that."
Editor’s Note: For context, this quote was obtained from Sanders during one of those cringey TMZ moments where the paparazzi nag someone just to get a quote out of them. It makes for a good headline, but the reality is that this particular video was quite awkward. Also, I’d love to explore the timeline where Larry Sanders is relevant enough still to warrant being followed by TMZ…but we’ll save that for another story.
All of this hype, in turn, led to an actual tweet by the Detroit Pistons inviting Cole to a tryout with a finishing line of “This is for all the dreamers #Dreamville.” Whether that tryout actually happens is one thing; and yet, it’s hard not to predict this one in the first place — Cole told us his intentions himself on the 2018 track “FRIENDS”:
“Blame it on Trump shit, blame it on Clinton / Blame it on trap music and the politicians / Or the fact that every black boy wanna be Pippen / But they only got 12 slots on the Pistons”
We should’ve known that this is where our timeline was bound to take us. With two singles under his belt, an upcoming album on the way, and Lakers hitting game-winners in his newly-minted signature kicks, it’s looking like Cole has channeled his creative focus while also keeping doors open.
And maybe, just maybe, one of those doors will lead down a path that even Doctor Strange couldn’t predict.
Nathan Graber-Lipperman is an aspiring conspiracy theorist and free-thinker who writes silly stories like this on the side. You can follow him on Twitter here.