“It really is a song about fuckin’ laundry,” notes Cole, a celebration of the mundane domesticity of married life, not exactly a topic that’s been pored over by hip-hop lyricists over the years: “I get the basket and I grab your clothes out of the drier.” You could view this study in contrasts as a demonstration of the twin polarities of his writing, in which politics and righteous anger co-exist with a certain goofy, self-deprecating humour that might cause fans of “golden age” hip-hop to recall the Pharcyde or De La Soul, as illustrated by his performance of Wet Dreamz, a 2014 single that relates the saga of Cole losing his virginity. He follows its incredulous anger with Foldin’ Clothes, a track that caused a degree of bemused hilarity online when it appeared on his most recent album, last year’s 4 Your Eyez Only. The footage acts as an explicatory afterword to the livid song the incident inspired, Neighbors. Light on chart-friendly, hook-laden bangers … J Cole at O2 Arena.

“You know what people mean when they say nice neighbourhood, right? A white neighbourhood.”

“Can you believe this shit? I moved to a nice neighbourhood,” he sighs. It’s a genuinely shocking piece of film, to which he offers a commentary that veers from surprisingly wry – “you ever play Call of Duty? They look like they’re wearing stuff from Call of Duty, but the stuff you gotta pay extra money in the game to buy” – to furious and disconsolate. Cole certainly isn’t the first hip-hop artist to play with this kind of imagery, but he may well be the first to interrupt his live show in order to show CCTV footage of a Swat team raiding his home in North Carolina, after a neighbour informed the police that they suspected Cole was a drug dealer, apparently working on the principle that the musicians regularly visiting his studio were customers. The rapper himself appears wearing an orange convict’s uniform: his backing band are, as he puts it, “in lockdown”, hidden behind the fake prison’s walls. T he stage set for J Cole’s current world tour has been designed to look like a prison exercise yard, complete with barbed wire, punchbag, searchlights and a weightlifting bench.

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