J. Cole Talks Living in Fayetteville, North Carolina, Says It No Eminem '8 Mile': Rapper to Open House on '2014 Forest Hills Drive' Album Cover to the Poor
J. Cole is planning to give back in a major way by opening his childhood home in Fayetteville, North Carolina to single mothers at no charge.
The home became famous after the 30-year-old rapper featured it on the cover of his latest album, titled "2014 Forest Hills Drive." He also held a first-listen event at his childhood home, reports Billboard.
Now, the Roc Nation-signed artist says that he is working to transform his previous single family home into a temporary, rent-free haven for single moms.
"What we gonna do, we still working it out right now, obviously it's a detailed, fragile situation I don't wanna play with ... My goal is to have that be a haven for families. So every two years a new family will come in, they live rent-free," Cole announced during a recent interview on the Combat Jack show.
The "Crooked Smile" hip hop artist also explained that the motivation behind his act of kindness is to give children the same feeling that he had after his family moved from a rough area to a nicer neighborhood.
"The idea is that it's a single mother with multiple kids, and she's coming from a place where all her kids is sharing a room. She might have two, three kids, they're sharing a room. She gets to come here rent free. I want her kids to feel how I felt when we got to the house," he continued. "In the South, especially in North Carolina, it's like this. ... That was my first glimpse of the hood. This is not Eminem, '8 Mile.' Sh*t was f**ked up. No disrespect to people that's still in the trailers and sh*t, but that's what it is."
According to J. Cole, the area has "very affordable housing."
"The neighborhood we lived in was f**ked up. I was a kid. The reason why it had such a big effect on me is that I was coming from somewhere else. I was coming from a military base," J. Cole explained. "My father was in the army and my mother was too, she got out when she had me. Before I was 1 we moved back [from Germany] to Fayetteville, Fort Bragg."
The rapper added that his parents ended up separting before he "was even conscios."
"When they got divorced we had to move out of the military quarters 'cause you can only live there if you're married. That's like real nice housing, it ain't no mansion but it's safe. Everybody got jobs, everybody got benefits 'cause they're all in the Army,"
When J. Cole was four, he and his brother and mother moved to Spring Lake, an area outside of Fayetteville.
"We moved to the trailer park in Spring Lake. It was my first taste of like, 'Oh, sh*t. This is nothing like where we came from.' I knew the energy was not right. I knew my mother was the only white lady in the neighborhood, and there was no man in the house," J. Cole said.
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