“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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