Hip-hop op-ed alert: J. COLE adds his voice to the in-progress BLACK LIVES MATTER box set that is pop music in summer 2020 with "SNOW ON THA BLUFF," which isn't so much a protest song about police brutality as it is a protest song about a protest movement against police brutality. It's written from the perspective of a man who wants to participate but hasn’t figured out how. He's wrestling with what he knows vs. what he doesn't know, he's been called out for not speaking out, or at least he thinks he has, and he has a few thoughts about the woman who he thinks called him out. He's humble enough to understand she's "way smarter than me," but there's something about her "tone," specifically her "queen tone," and, oh dear. Cue TWITTER. The case against J. Cole. The defense. It was immediately understood the song was a response to NONAME, though he doesn't name names. Her three-week-old tweet, since deleted, about how "poor black folks all over the country are putting their bodies on the line in protest for our collective safety and y’all favorite top selling rappers not even willing to put a tweet up" was widely understood to be at least partly about him, though she didn't name names either. Names aren't needed. Everyone knows. "Low key I be thinkin' she talkin' about me" is how he puts it. The gist of "Snow on tha Bluff," in which Cole raps over a drumless loop of guitar, electric piano and choral vocals that feels, appropriately, more like underscore than song, is this: He knows he isn't doing enough for the cause. He wants to be educated. He wants her to do the educating. He resents that she won't do that work. He's frustrated, angry even, that she doesn't seem to have the patience to bring him along. As several tweeters pointed out, he could join her book club. Because she literally has a book club. "Snow on tha Bluff" isn't a dumb song, just a problematic one. The writing is beautiful, the argument is muddled and the divide he straddles is no doubt very real. One can imagine lots of listeners silently nodding in agreement at a strange new privilege Cole identifies: the privilege of wokeness, which he believes she was born into and he was not. "Just 'cause you woke and I'm not," he raps, after calling out the good, activist parenting he imagines she had, is "no reason to talk like you better than me." His humility has morphed, within a single sentence, into a weapon. Will he bring that weapon to the protest one day, or will he reserve it for that internal struggle?... The formerly anonymous author of the widely circulated "Dear White Music Executives" comes out of hiding... Urban or nah? Latin artists J BALVIN, DON OMAR, GUAYNAA and BRYANT MYERS share their thoughts on a controversial label... LIVE FROM HERE WITH CHRIS THILE is canceled, a victim of cuts at AMERICAN PUBLIC MEDIA... A SPIKE LEE-directed film of DAVID BYRNE's Broadway show AMERICAN UTOPIA will air on HBO later this year. The Broadway show is scheduled for a second run starting in September, pending the pandemic.