Cole's": Producer Elite on '4 Your Eyez Only '". " "The Album Is Largely From a Perspective That Isn't J. The video only plays the first verse of the song. Cole used the footage of the incident from the closed-circuit television of his house as the video. The music video of the song was released on May 1, 2017. Upon its first week of release, "Neighbors" debuted at number 13 on the US Billboard Hot 100 and at number 8 on the US Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart. Cole revealed this during shows on his 4 Your Eyez Only World Tour, performing "Forbidden Fruit", then having the instrumental played in reverse as he transitioned into a performance of "Neighbors".
"Forbidden Fruit" contains a sample of the song "Mystic Brew" by American Jazz musician Ronnie Foster. The song's instrumental was derived from a slowed-down, reversed sample of Cole's 2013 single, " Forbidden Fruit" which features Kendrick Lamar. Because of obvious racism from the neighbors, the police were called and a raid took place. He’s out here doing extremely positive things for the community and for young artists. Cole is the last person to do anything like that. It’s just crazy ironic because out of anybody, they picked the wrong person. They go downstairs and all they see is a studio, and obviously they felt stupid. 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 flew helicopters over, sent an entire SWAT team armed with weapons, broke down the door and searched the whole house. And there was a huge investigation, like a million-dollar investigation. One of the neighbors told the police we were growing weed or selling drugs out of this house. Apparently what happened was, we were all in Austin, Texas, for SXSW thankfully no one was in the house when this went down. So the neighbors started getting real paranoid. Ubers coming, and every once in awhile you’ll see a group of us outside on the porch smoking weed.
So you have, predominately, African-Americans coming in and out of this house. It’s also in the suburbs of a pretty wealthy neighborhood in North Carolina. It’s basically a studio in a basement, in the woods. We call it the Sheltuh, and a lot of the album was recorded there. It’s not for him it’s like a safe haven/creative workspace for all the Dreamville artists and producers. During an interview with Complex on December 9, 2016, Dreamville in-house producer, Elite explained the incident which occurred a few months prior that inspired the story in the track, "Neighbors", saying, īasically Cole rented out a house in North Carolina. The song was recorded at the Sheltuh in North Carolina and Electric Lady Studios, and was produced and written by J.