J. Cole explores his hometown in 2014 Forest Hills Drive promotional video.

J. Cole discussed his first cypher in a promotional video for his upcoming 2014 Forest Hill Drive album, which was released yesterday (November 16).

“My old stomping grounds, high school, Terry Sanford class of 2003,” J. Cole says in the video. “My first cypher was right up there. Look [he points to the top of the bleachers]. I was like 5 foot 7, high-pitched voice, skinny, walked up there with the big boys."  

The video depicts J. Cole going through his hometown of Fayetteville, North Carolina. Cole guides a camera crew through his high school football field and ascends the bleachers while he describes his first rap cypher.

“A bunch of people in the cypher and it’s two or three lines that he rapped blatantly from my favorite rapper at the time,” J. Cole says. “As soon as he said it, I was like, ‘Yo, like you bitin'. You a biter.' I said it out loud, but I didn’t realize I was saying it. I just reacted, but when I said it, it’s like the record stopped…and everyone stooped like, ‘What you say?’ ‘Cause, like, you know everyone wants to instigate in public. I was like, ‘Yo, he bit the whole line.’ He looked at me like, ‘You rap then.’ I was like, ‘All right, cool, I was waiting,’ but really I was nervous. I acted like I wasn’t nervous at all, though. I acted like I was mad confident and destroyed. It was over from that point forward. That was right over there.”

The video also shows J. Cole at his 2104 Forest Hills Drive address, his favorite roller rink as well as a diner.

J. Cole tweeted yesterday (November 16) to announce that his new album, 2104 Forest Hills Drive, is slated to be released on December 9, 2014.

“I’ve gotten to this point in my career and realized that, yeah I got a lot more dreams and I wanna go further, but at the same time, I don’t want it if it’s at the expense of my happiness,” J. Cole says in the documentary. “And I don’t want it if it’s at the expense of my sanity or if I have to become someone who’s so out of touch with what’s real: the people that love you and the people that you love. There’s a lot of people in Hollywood right now who have been there for a long time and they’ve forgotten about their small-town lives because they like this life better. But this shit ain’t real.”

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