Month 101: February
A living legend hints at filling the political superstar void, and sixteen other tracks from last month that are worth your time.
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As excited as I was to launch this recurring feature called Month 101 just a few weeks ago, the whole thing came with a certain amount of apprehension — right there in the name was a tacit commitment to do a new one every few weeks, to not forget, to not fall off. And yet, for the first 19 days of March, that's what happened anyway. And of course, the more time that goes on, the more songs I stumble upon that deserve inclusion.
All that to say, this second installment is not just a late one, but a beefy one — more than 45 minutes of music, where the usual goal is more like a half hour. Month 101 remains, as it was the first time, non-exhaustive, non-authoritative, non-anything-other-than-some-good-songs, complete with a healthy set of accompanying writeups, as well as Apple Music and Spotify playlists for your listening convenience. Of the 17 total songs that make up Month 101: February, I'm confident you'll find something to carry with you into the months ahead.
Download the playlist on: Apple Music | Spotify
**Note: One song from the list, by Defacto Thezpian, is only on Bandcamp, so doesn't appear on those playlists — you can find it by clicking a link in the story below.
J. Cole - "cLOUDs"
It's not quite "How will this affect LeBron's legacy?" but I must confess that one of my first thoughts, after listening to the wistful new song that Fayetteville native and Terry Sanford High graduate Jermaine Cole surprise-dropped via his blog last month, was whether it signaled a potential, near-future turning point in the "J. Cole fans be like" narrative — that is, that they (and he) are maybe a bit bigger on vague, performative gestures in the politically conscious direction than they are with actual political consciousness itself (not unlike LeBron's timeless reflections upon reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X: "just a smart man... a very, very, very smart man"). Especially on the song's first verse, there's a glut of the kind of lyrically dense, space-filling battle bars ("I caught a/lotta, murder charges, turn artists to martyrs") that have carried considerably less weight ever since the whole "my bad, nvm" situation with Kendrick last April. But from the second verse's opening words, there's a marked shift into a gear that, arguably, Cole hasn't found in years, if ever.
"I'm that bass in your trunk, the bullet that missed Trump/ the gun that jammed, cuz it seemed God had other plans," he starts, before calling out billionaires who profit off the world's demise, bemoaning an epidemic of children hopelessly dependent on screens, and depicting a dystopian AI future in which human-made music is all but obsolete. By the final chorus, as he sings about "gray hairs, I'm aging/faster than I thought I'd be," it seems clear that the rueful refrain has to do with a lot more than just growing old in the rap game. To critics, it could all still sound like the same old faux-political Cole, dipping his toes in the water just enough to seem provocative without actually provoking. And it's possible that, starved as we are for socially conscious rap stars (and please don't mention Kendrick "I don't know that guy" Lamar), hearing even the mildest criticism of billionaires from a mega-star can feel like the musical equivalent of a Molotov cocktail through a police windshield. Still, if this is any indication of the attitude Cole is bringing into his upcoming work, we could be in for a spate of music finally as cerebral and urgent as — to let the memes tell it — Cole fans have long only imagined it to be.
Maasho - "eyesore"
Like a 25-year-old NBA player who's been in the league since 18, Raleigh rapper/producer Maasho is both technically young and still undeniably seasoned at the same time. Since breaking through with the songs "Fresh Air" (alongside Weston Estate) and "boyfriend" in 2019, and "Lemon Baby" in 2020, he still has yet to release an album five years later — but it only takes a cursory exploration of his interim releases to understand why a faithful contingent are still patiently waiting, and lapping up whatever loosies arrive in the meantime. The latest in that vein is "eyesore," a swaggering "what do you see in him?" diatribe that, even if it loses a bit of steam somewhere in the middle, is as captivating as anything else to come out last month. Similar to recent tracks like "special" and the self-produced "GLUE," Maasho's pop sensibility is plain to see — now in even more anthemic fashion.
Khalil Nasim ft. Yahliq - "LITE BROWN"
If you were to pick just one of the many deserving songs off Khalil Nasim's The Disappearing Act to serve as an illustration of the album's potency and splendor, you'd like it to be one that sees Nasim seamlessly playing off another collaborator, as he does repeatedly throughout the project. It would also be prudent to pick a song that features one or more of The Deviants, the stylistically diverse and enterprising Raleigh-Durham rap collective of which Nasim is a part. It also, given staunch Nasim's political inclinations, would make sense if it were a track that wove together references to shared struggle and the globally oppressed, from Congo to Gaza to Mike Brown. For all those reasons and more, "LITE BROWN" is the one TDA selection on Month 101: February, but really, you should spin them all. Come for Yahliq's sage, Ab-Soul-esque opening verse ("Survivin' in a cold world, but I'm unweatherized/ and my plight fetishized"), stay for a Khalil follow-up that captures so much of what makes the early-20s Henderson native one of the most dynamic young voices in the state today.
.zone - ".ease in"
There's an undeniable air of Chicago and its contemporary poet-rap movement on the woozy February track ".ease in," which wouldn't be out of place among the work of Mick Jenkins, Noname or Saba, but is in fact a product of Durham's own (and Deviants member) .zone. That could be to do with its smart but soft-edged, self-aware writing, the communal approach to its creation (Tyler Esquina Lee and Lance Scott, collectively known as Durham group E.L. Scott, lend production and a verse, respectively; plus Bella Nona on background vocals and Julian Lambert on production), or .zone and Scott's shape-shifting delivery, nearly every line marked by tempo shifts and melodic inflections that make them impossible to box in or pin down. None of these things are the sole domain of 2010s/2020s Windy City rap, of course, but the confluence of so many of them on ".ease in" suggests at least some spiritual kinship, if nothing else. At a time when new songs are a dime a dozen, it's a treat to hear something this rich, lived in and full — whatever city it comes from.
CJ Monét - "open your heart"
CJ Monét's warm and inviting new song, "open your heart," would've been a gift all on its own, but as previously covered on this site, it happened to arrive alongside three others like it, in the form of her Catharsis EP. As a singer, visual artist, events organizer, and probably many other things I don't know, CJ's prolific output spans a range of different mediums, with new things popping up all the time — great for the vitality and vibrancy of an arts scene (Raleigh/Durham, in her case), not always great for someone being able to create their own substantial, cohesive bodies of work. Even just as a four-track EP, it was great to see Catharsis for that reason, not to mention for its lush musicality and doses of piercingly sober perspective ("I never thought big houses would cost this much/ Or that this degree would mean so little"). By the estimation of this particular music blog, "open your heart" is the best of the bunch — Monét's gentle contralto and a sumptuous bass-and-synth backdrop resulting in a plea for connection that should be hard for any listener to pass up.
SK the Novelist - "Forgiveness"
It feels right that the frigid month of February (NC's second-coldest, if you're wondering) would bring new music from SK the Novelist, the razor-sharp rapper who's had one foot in the mountains and another in the Triangle hip-hop scene for a decade-plus. A battle rap veteran among the best in the state at hurling pointed, icy barbs at opponents, SK takes a different tack on "Forgiveness," focusing less on others' shortcomings than his own: "I apologized to zero/ Analyzin' everybody, never looked at me tho/ Put my eye up to the peephole." Straightforward though the message may be, the usual wit and irreverence of SK's writing ("An empty man once tried to tell me how to manage feelings/ And then he poured another shot, I told him 'That's the spirit'"; "My cup runneth over, who gon' clean this mess up?") is more than enough to make the ride an absorbing one.
OTHER TOP SONGS FROM FEBRUARY:
Shame Gang - "Forbidden Fruit"
Over a saturated soul loop that feels like something Talib Kweli would've flowed over in the early 2000s, Shame spins a yarn of desire fit for a summer block party — or at least the kind of warm, sun-soaked days that are just around the corner.
Defacto Thezpian - "I Get It Even If You Don't"
SAKY - "College Town Blues"
Sh8kes ft. The Grouch - "Move On"
TiaCorine - "ATE"
Joshua Raw - "WHAT IF?"
The opener from the four-track DOGFOOD demos EP that also includes "JNCO JEANS," which we covered last month. A soulful, infectious foundation does much of the heavy lifting here, but it's Raw's unique and magnetic affect — at turns both bracingly aggressive and breezily nonchalant — that makes it worth running back again and again.
JUSTOMOBBIN - "FIRST BASE"
MindsOne ft. Shylow and DJ Noumenon - "Rejection"
A standout from the Wilmington underground hip-hop outfit's first full-length in almost nine years, Stages, "Rejection" has all one could want from a Golden Era-inspired song in 2025: dense and detailed lyricism, a chorus made up of DJ cuts and classic lyrical samples from Method Man to The Pharcyde, a spoken outro from Nina Simone. "How do you tell somebody how it feels to be in love?" she says. "You cannot do it to save your life." Sounds like me trying to explain to someone why for me, songs of this kind will never get old.
N!c - "Too Fine"
Tesh - "I Like"
Bigbabygucci - "Flagslikeweconfederate"
One thought: it's possible that, as an unintended consequence of his voluminous output, Charlotte rapper Bigbabygucci receives a disproportionate amount of coverage, relative to his peers, on this blog. A second thought: I don't know what this song, or its Confederacy/Arabic mashup art, means. A third and final thought: like it, hate it, or something in between, I didn't hear another song that sounded like it all month. Seems like as worthy a reason as any for inclusion on the second edition of Month 101.
Great read!