2016Released
3:36

Did You Know?

Interesting facts and trivia about Neighbors. By Songfacts®.

Frustrated with the racial stereotype that an African American can't be rich unless they're selling drugs, Cole vents his anger on this cut about his relationship with the white community. The song draws inspiration from an real-life event that took place on March 18, 2016, when Cole rented out a house in North Carolina. It was located in a wealthy neighborhood in North Carolina as a creative workspace for the Dreamville artists and producers. Much of the 4 Your Eyez Only album was recorded there. Dreamville in house producer, Elite, explained to Complex: "You have, predominately, African-Americans coming in and out of this house. Ubers coming, and every once in awhile you'll see a group of us outside on the porch smoking weed. So the neighbors started getting real paranoid. 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. They go downstairs and all they see is a studio, and obviously they felt stupid. It's just crazy ironic because out of anybody, they picked the wrong person. J. Cole is the last person to do anything like that. He's out here doing extremely positive things for the community and for young artists. Because of obvious racism from the neighbors, the police were called and a raid took place."

This is the only 4 Your Eyez Only track where Cole is the sole producer.

Cole is also credited with playing bass and guitar on the album. Between 3:06 to 3:19 on this track, we hear him laying down a funky riff.

Top Listeners

Song Analysis

Key, BPM (tempo) and time signature of Neighbors.
F♯Key
MinorMode
4/4Time Signature
139BPM

Album

The album Neighbors is released on.

Released By

The record label that has released Neighbors.
J. Cole P&D
© 2016 Dreamville, Inc., under exclusive license to Roc Nation Records
℗ 2016 Dreamville, Inc., under exclusive license to Roc Nation Records

See your Spotify stats (with number of plays and minutes listened) and discover new music.

Music data, artist images, album covers, and song previews are provided by Spotify. Spotify is a trademark of Spotify AB.

5.9MArtists
74.3MSongs
12.4MAlbums
6.3KGenres
2.5MLabels
493.6KPlaylists