J. Cole Reveals Video Footage Of SWAT Raiding His Studio
On Saturday (April 15), the Dreamville team premiered another partnered film with HBO. The film of the same name as J. Cole’s platinum album, 4 Your Eyez Only, debuted footage of an event detailed in the album that left the masses aghast.
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The track “Neighbors” from Cole’s fourth studio album, narrates a startling story in which a home the Dreamville imprint rents for their artists, The Sheltuh in North Carolina, was raided by the SWAT team. The in-house producer, Elite, detailed the event in an interview with Hot New Hip Hop:
“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.”
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Above is footage of the raid caught by the Sheltuh’s security cameras. You can see herds of SWAT team members flowing in and out of the house.
Following this unfortunate incident, Cole confessed to the New York Times that he was “frustrated that the locals had caught onto his presence.” Instead, the rapper looked at the experience, along with the release of the documentary, as an opportunity for his neighbors to “see how human [black people] are, and see black men walk around with their daughters, and get a whole different perspective.”
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