J. Cole’s Recording House Raided By Swat Team During The Recording Of 4YEO

J. Cole got raided by SWAT during recording of 4 Your Eyez Only.

The controversy around J. Cole’s most recent album 4 Your Eyez Only has definitely been crazy. The speculation about the over all meaning by a fan and other details about the album have this project quite the mystery. Well to add to the hidden meanings, Cole’s producer Elite sat down with Complex.com to discuss his hit “Neighbors,” and the lines”I guess the neighbors think I’m sellin’ dope, sellin’ dope, Okay, the neighbors think I’m sellin’ dope, sellin’ dope.” which in the credits were described as “inspired by true events.”

Here’s what Elite had to say about the whole situation:

The “Neighbors” story is crazy. Basically Cole rented out a house in North Carolina. It’s not for him; it’s like a safe haven/creative workspace for all the Dreamville artists and producers. We call it the Sheltuh, and a lot of the album was recorded there.. It’s basically a studio in a basement, in the woods.

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 Juro “Mez” Davishad 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.

Ending the song with the line “Well motherfucker, I am.” It’s just a different kind of dope.

Not only is the song a great catchy vibe, the story certainly gives some insight to background and making of the project.

By H D (https://www.flickr.com/photos/hdiep/5487455602/) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons