BTS Archive: the stories behind the artists, before the version you know now.
Most rappers who claim a city did their actual growing up somewhere else — a suburb an hour out, a relative’s place across state lines, a hometown that gets simplified for the bio. Cole’s version doesn’t need the simplification. He was born on an Army base in Frankfurt, West Germany. He moved to Fayetteville before he turned one. He never really left the story after that, even once he had every reason and every resource to. That’s worth sitting with before Wednesday’s show. Fayetteville isn’t a talking point Cole reaches for. It’s closer to the only address he’s ever actually used.
Born on a base, raised on Rosehill Road
James and Kay Cole met the way a lot of military families do. His father served in the Army, stationed overseas. His mother worked as a postal worker, originally from Michigan. They welcomed their son on January 28, 1985, at that Army base in Frankfurt.
His mother moved him and his older brother, Zach, back to Fayetteville by the time he was eight months old. Fayetteville is home to Fort Bragg, one of the most Army-shaped cities in the country. His father stayed largely absent from there on. What Cole grew up with instead was a mixed, working-class, deeply military-adjacent version of the South — the kind of city built around a base rather than a single industry, where families rotate in and out but some, like his, stay.
Terry Sanford, the 4.2, and the version of Cole nobody markets
Before any of the mixtapes, Cole was a first-chair violinist in his high school orchestra and a varsity basketball player at Terry Sanford High School. He graduated in 2003 with a 4.2 GPA. That combination — orchestra kid, ball player, straight-A student — doesn’t fit the origin story most rap biographies reach for, and Cole has never tried to force it to fit. It’s part of why the “backpack rapper who actually did the work” version of his image reads as true rather than performed: the receipts predate the career by a decade.
He left for St. John’s University in New York on an academic scholarship, not a music one. He started out majoring in computer science, then switched to communications, and graduated magna cum laude in 2007. Rap was still a side pursuit back then — one he’d been quietly building since he was twelve years old, writing first under the name “Blaza” and later as “The Therapist,” before he ever went by Cole.
The part of the story that doesn’t make the highlight reel
Here’s the piece that gets skipped in the shorthand version. College ended, and Cole didn’t go straight to a deal. He came back to Fayetteville — a city with essentially no music industry infrastructure, no A&Rs, no studios with real budgets. He worked regular jobs while he built The Come Up, the 2007 mixtape that actually got him noticed.
That return matters more than the eventual signing to Jay-Z’s Roc Nation a couple of years later. It’s the part where staying home wasn’t a flex or a talking point — it was just where he was, broke, grinding, with no guarantee any of it worked out. Most artists don’t keep that chapter in the official story once they’ve made it. Cole built his entire catalog around never cutting it out.
Why the city stayed the subject, not just the setting
Once the money and the platform showed up, the easy move was to let Fayetteville become backstory — a line in an early bio, a shoutout in an acceptance speech, nothing structural. Cole did the opposite.
He named 2014 Forest Hills Drive after the actual street he grew up on. His 2015 hometown show at Crown Coliseum became an HBO special because he chose to make the return itself the subject, not just a stop on a promotional run.
Now The Fall-Off — a double album built around two different trips back to this exact city, ten years apart, which we compare directly to that 2015 show here — makes the pattern explicit instead of incidental. Tracks like “And the Whole World Is the Ville” and “Bombs in the Ville” aren’t Cole reaching for hometown pride as a hook. They’re the same move he’s been making since 2007: keep the actual address in the work instead of letting success sand it out.
An Army town’s version of “multi-ethnic”
Fort Bragg anchors Fayetteville’s identity. It’s one of the largest military installations in the country, and that shapes a city differently than most people picture when they hear “hometown rapper.” Base towns cycle through families from everywhere, on rotation. That’s part of why Cole has described growing up in a genuinely mixed environment rather than a single-culture neighborhood block.
It’s a different texture than the hometown narratives built around one specific street or one specific sound. Fayetteville gave him proximity to a wider range of people than a lot of origin stories account for. That shows up in how expansive his reference points have always been — he never confined himself to one regional sound the way some of his peers from more insular scenes did.
The relocation that never happened
Plenty of artists who blow up out of a smaller Southern city eventually move the operation to Atlanta, L.A., or New York, where the industry infrastructure actually lives. The hometown becomes a place they visit rather than a place they’re from in any functional sense.
Cole had every reason to make that move once Roc Nation signed him — the label, the studios, the network all sat elsewhere. He didn’t relocate the narrative. He kept property and roots in North Carolina, built Dreamville as a label that stayed tied to the state rather than folding into an existing coastal scene, and routed his own festival to Raleigh instead of a bigger media market when he had the leverage to put it anywhere.
Wednesday’s show repeats that same decision, in miniature. A tour that could’ve closed its U.S. run in a flagship city instead closes in the city where none of this started with any guarantees attached.
What this means walking into Wednesday
Understanding that history changes what Wednesday’s show actually is. It’s not a hometown-hero stop bolted onto a normal arena run for a feel-good headline. It’s the latest entry in a pattern that goes back to before Cole had a record deal, when going home meant working a regular job with nothing lined up.
Terry Sanford High School sits a short drive from Crown Coliseum. Fort Bragg, the base that shaped the city his mother brought him to as an infant, sits right up the road too. None of that requires embellishment to make the show meaningful. It’s just accurate. For the news and setlist angle on the actual concert, our full Fall-Off Tour finale preview covers what to expect Wednesday night.
