After he left for college, Kay’s marriage deteriorated. “Family life wasn’t terrible but there wasn’t a lot of love in the house,” Cole remarked. And I would know she wasn’t eating lunch that day so that I could.” Cole’s stepdad was a rap fan, and the boys thought that was cool, but life wasn’t perfect. Money was still tight: as Cole told Music Times, “There were days when my mom would have to scrape up nickels and dimes to give me $1.50 lunch money. “hat’s the house I started rapping in, made my first beat, wrote my first song,” he has said. In the new house, Cole had his own bedroom, where he could shut the door and enjoy the privacy to listen to music, write, and daydream. “I lived in that house for like seven good years of my life from age 11 to 18,” the rapper shared. When Kay remarried, the family moved to a nicer Fayetteville neighborhood and a house on Forest Hills Drive the address would become the title of J. “To go outside of the city and tell someone you’re from Fayetteville, it’s like ‘Oh shit, uh oh.’ That’s the reputation.” “In the state of North Carolina we’re looked at as the worst city, the most crime-ridden city,” the rapper told in 2015. Fayetteville, or “The Ville,” as Cole calls it, has subsequently lived large in Cole’s music.
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Until Cole was 11, they lived in a series of small homes in neighborhoods and trailer parks. Kay and her two sons-Jermaine and his brother, Zach-lived in Fayetteville, North Carolina, where Kay juggled multiple jobs to support her family. Cole, was raised by Solo Mom Kay after Cole’s dad left the family. American rapper Jermaine Cole, probably best known by his stage name J.