About a year ago, just as the SoundCloud rap ecosystem was beginning to erupt into broader consciousness, some of its most agitated and popular figures — including Lil Pump and XXXTentacion — began screaming, in unprintable language, that the older and more measured rapper J. Cole should kiss off.

They said it the way one child pulls another child’s hair, the way a bad kid flips off a teacher. They said it because it was funny, and borderline improbable. And they said it because Mr. Cole, in his intense aesthetic sobriety, had become the avatar for a style of hip-hop that the young generation had no use for: lyrical, meditative, concerned rather than concerning.

For J. Cole, a 33-year-old monastic who is nonetheless one of the most popular rappers of the day, it was maybe a shock to find himself the butt of the joke. But a consequence of avoiding cautionary tales by committing to your own idiosyncratic path is that you will almost certainly become someone else’s cautionary tale.

Image J. Cole’s fifth album is “KOD.” Credit...

In hip-hop, Mr. Cole has more or less been a lone warrior — he lives in North Carolina, not far from where he grew up; he produces his own music; he essentially scorns collaboration. After flirtations with the conventions of major-label rap stardom, he retreated and began establishing a more tonally modest, historically minded and grown-up strain of hip-hop. He has things in common with Kendrick Lamar and Drake, and inheritors like Logic, but he is truly singular.