Martin Luther King day is to thank for J. Cole’s latest release.
Its name? ‘High For Hours.’
Its purpose? To reflect on what has changed and remained the same in society since the civil rights leader’s murder.
I had a convo with the president, I paid to go and see him
Thinking bout the things I said I’d say when I would see him
Feeling nervous, sitting in a room full of white folks
Thinking about the black man plight, think I might choke, nope
Listen below…
Raised my hand and asked a man a question
‘Does he see the struggles of his brother in oppression?
And if so, if you got all the power in the clout as the president
What’s keeping you from helping ***** out?
Cole’s latest album ‘4 Your Eyez Only’ was recently certified Gold for sales of 500,000 units, casting a credible shadow over efforts launched by the latest batch of Hip-Hop’s singles driven staples.
Yet to hear the story behind the LPs inspiration?
Cole’s producer Elite broke it down in an interview with ‘Complex.’
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” Davis 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.