📍2014 Forest Hills Drive, Fayetteville, NC 28303, USA
1995 – 2003“Jermaine Lamarr Cole was born in January 1985 on a US Army base in Frankfurt, West Germany, the son of an African American soldier and a white mother, Kay, who worked for the postal service. When his parents split up, his mother brought Jermaine and his older brother, Zach, to Fayetteville, North Carolina, home of Fort Bragg, where they first lived in a trailer park in Spring Lake, on the edge of the city; he remembered his mother as the only white woman in the neighbourhood, with no man in the house. When his mother married another soldier, the family moved into a modest, 1,600-square-foot brick house at 2014 Forest Hills Drive, in a quiet neighbourhood of Fayetteville, and to Jermaine it felt like a mansion, because for the first time he had his own room. There, he could zone out to the music he loved, and he started rapping at twelve, filling notebooks with rhymes. At fifteen, his mother bought him a sampler, and he taught himself to make beats. He was a good student and a basketball player at Terry Sanford High School, and he dreamed of moving to New York to become a rapper, inspired by Nas, Tupac and Eminem. He won a scholarship to St. John's University in New York, graduating magna cum laude, while making mixtapes, and in 2009 he became the first artist signed to Jay-Z's Roc Nation. Years after his mother lost the house to foreclosure, he bought it back, named his 2014 album 2014 Forest Hills Drive after it, posing on its roof for the cover, and through his Dreamville Foundation offered it as a rent-free home for single mothers and their children.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today