J. Cole’s former landlord, Mohammad, talked about his unique bond with the rapper in a recent viral video clip on Twitter. He spoke about a time when J. Cole, born Jermaine Lamarr Cole, was still a college student in Queens, New York, when he lived in a townhouse with a few of his friends.

J. Cole was still attempting to pursue music full-time, and Mohammad had nothing but support for him.

“He was like a family member,” Mohammad explained in the clip, “I never treated him like a tenant.”

He said that he could tell just from listening to the beats he made that he would be successful in the future. 

“When he was playing music at my home, I was listening to his beats, and I was thinking that his beats were very good, and I told him, ‘I’m not a musician, but I feel you’re gonna do very good.’ I told him, ‘If you have that dream, don’t give it up,’” he said.

Mohammad was privy to the process of J. Cole’s work ethic that got him to where he is today as a big-name artist.

“Sometimes, he got frustrated. I said, ‘ Don’t be frustrated. Good things come after a long journey. If you continue to keep pushing… one day, that good thing will come to you. And it did happen. “This is a big, big, big thing in my life, that I see him in the Madison Square Garden.”

Cole has also talked about Mohammad in an interview segment with MTV. He confirmed a lot of stories that his landlord told. 

“My landlord from the first apartment I ever got kicked us out. I was looking and looking and looking, and this was the only place I found with enough bedrooms for me and my homeboys from school. It wasn’t the nicest, but it was affordable,” J. Cole continued to say despite the less-than-ideal circumstances. It was a necessity that brought him to meet Mohammad.

“I took the worse room in the house because I knew everybody didn’t want to come over there. I was just like, ‘Yo, what we gon’ do? We gotta go somewhere. I’m from North Carolina. I ain’t got nowhere to go. I need a spot. I’m getting this spot.’”

“So, that’s how we ended up here… My landlord Muhammad, he, like, really believed in me. So, when my rent kept piling up, he never tripped. He just let me kinda just stick around. So, when I finally got the deal, after all, them years, of course, I paid him back in full.”