So this is what happened. Cole rented out a house in a quiet area of North Carolina, and turned the basement to a recording studio. He needed a secluded place he could record songs. So, once in a while, his friends would come around, producers would come around, and maybe they would all chill on the porch and smoke weed and talk and all that. The neighbors, who are predominantly white, felt something illegal was going on in the house, and called the cops on Cole. This actually inspired the 'Neighbors' song on the '4 Your Eyez Only' Album.
Below is what his producer, Elite had to say about the the cop raid in his recent interview with COMPLEX.
It’s also in the suburbs of a pretty wealthy neighborhood in North Carolina. So you have, predominately, African-Americans coming in and out of this house. Ubers coming, and every once in awhile you’ll see a group of us outside on the porch smoking weed. So the neighbors started getting real paranoid.
Apparently what happened was, we were all in Austin, Texas, for SXSW; thankfully no one was in the house when this went down. One of the neighbors told the police we were growing weed or selling drugs out of this house. And there was a huge investigation, like a million-dollar investigation. They flew helicopters over, sent an entire SWAT team armed with weapons, broke down the door and searched the whole house. Thankfully nobody was in the house. Our engineer Mez had just stepped out for lunch and he came back and saw the SWAT team busting down the door.
They go downstairs and all they see is a studio, and obviously they felt stupid. It’s just crazy ironic because out of anybody, they picked the wrong person. J. Cole is the last person to do anything like that. He’s out here doing extremely positive things for the community and for young artists. Because of obvious racism from the neighbors, the police were called and a raid took place." (Elite's Interview with Complex)
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