J. Cole professes, confesses as Life Is Beautiful Day 2 headliner

It was a stool, not a psychiatrist’s couch, but when J. Cole lowered himself on to the thing, it seemed to become one.

Cole only sat down between songs, for the most part, but when he did so, he gazed out into the crowd and confessed feelings of uncertainty and self-doubt, anxiety and equivocation, the kind of emotions you pay someone to address instead of addressing them in front of people who paid to see you.

“I try to put a lot of my life into my songs,” Cole explained over a jazzy backdrop while seated early in his set Saturday. “So that you might feel like you know me.”

Then Cole got to his feet, elevating his voice and 6-foot-3-inch frame alike as he launched into song, rhyming dexterously over rhythms choppy as stormy waters.

This pattern repeated itself throughout Cole’s command performance closing Life Is Beautiful’s second day on its largest stage: He’d puff himself up in song — at least in terms of delivery, if not always in sentiment — then he’d deflate it all during his brief, soul-baring monologues between tunes.

Prior to his set, it was fair to wonder if Cole could really own a headlining spot as big as this one.

Measured against hip-hop’s elite, he doesn’t match the dauntless bravado of Kanye, the impossibly nimble, motoric tongue of Lil’ Wayne, the singing chops of Drake or the casually outsize presence of Jay Z.

But he does possess all those attributes in more modest doses, and taken together, it makes him one of the music’s more complete talents, a special musician without an abundance of specialties.

What’s most distinguished him, though, is his candid, self-reflective narratives, where he parts the veil on his burgeoning celebrity and questions whether his music still matters.

“I’ve been strong so far / But I can feel my grip loosening, ” he acknowledged on “Love Yourz.” “Quick, do something before you lose it for good / Get it back and use it for good / And touch the people how you did like before.”

Plenty of his peers flaunt the fruits of their success as a means of validating their prowess, but Cole mostly does the opposite.

“Always gon’ be a bigger house somewhere …” he continued later on “Yourz” “Always gon’ be a whip that’s better than the one you got /Always gon’ be some clothes that’s fresher than the ones you rock … But you ain’t never gon’ be happy till you love yours.”

“No such thing as a life that’s better than yours,” he elaborated. “I hope one day you hear me.”

That day came this weekend.

Other Day 2 performances of note:

Crystal Castles

He let the din build until it felt like eardrums might pop like Bubble Wrap flattened by an anvil. Summoning a highly antagonistic electronic blare, Crystal Castles songwriter/producer Ethan Kath brought the noise while singer Edith Frances sounded kind of like a banshee screaming into a jet turbine. The duo’s violent, masochistic throb was equally suitable for dancing or soundtracking a machete fight. Amid flashing strobes and clouds of dry ice, it amounted to something more than sensory overload: This was a brownout of the nervous system.

Leon Bridges

Swiveling his hips like a kid spinning himself silly in an office chair, his feet gliding across the stage as if it was slicked with canola oil, Texas soul man Leon Bridges busted out the sweetest dance moves of the festival thus far, especially when transforming Ginuwine’s “Pony” from a randy R&B bedroom burner into a sensual soul striptease. The real showstopper, though, was Bridges’ own “Mississippi Kisses,” a righteous blast of blues hellfire that invoked the spirit of Bo Diddley.

Jane’s Addiction

Jane’s Addiction’s late-’80s emergence was akin to a much-needed dose of penicillin remedying the rock ’n’ roll herpes outbreak that was the L.A. hair metal scene at the time. Three decades later, though, they come off more like kindred spirits to all those blustery hard-rock hedonists. Flanked by a pair of lingerie-clad dancers, one of whom was frontman Perry Farrell’s wife, Jane’s Addiction exuded the flash and flesh of a Whitesnake video, with Farrell dry humping his better half as guitarist Dave Navarro ripped leads that frothed like Cujo’s salivary glands. On Saturday, the band heavily mined their second studio record, 1990’s “Ritual de lo Habitual,” an album instrumental in ushering in the alt-rock boom that ended the reign of the Warrants of the world, sending some of those dudes back to day jobs. Funny, all these years later, the two seem to have far more in common than originally thought. That’s not really a compliment.

Die Antwoord

There were cartoon characters on the video screen beneath the DJ booth and on the stage alike, and it was damn hard to differentiate between the two. What is there to say about South African EDM-rap nutters Die Antwoord that they can’t put far more eloquently themselves? “I whip my (male reproductive organ ) out an’ (relieve myself) on all dis horrible (cotton pickin’) rap,” frontman Ninja barked, documenting Die Antwoord’s service to the music industry.

Read more from Jason Bracelin at reviewjournal.com. Contact him at jbracelin@reviewjournal.com and follow @JasonBracelin on Twitter.