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Plenty of people relocate to New York from the South in search of a dream. Few pester America's hippest CEO into signing them to a big label deal. Cole did. He nudged Jay-Z until the rap megastar finally bit. Cole ended up being the first artist on Roc Nation, the label Jay-Z formed in 2008 when he partnered with the live-events company Live Nation. That was just three years ago, and Cole's still trying to figure it all out. "I don't know what it was," he says. "I guess it was my personality and the things I wanted. I always had big dreams."

Cole gives much of the credit to his manager, Mark Pitts. He says Pitts was the only person who believed in him all along: "He really called it. He said, 'You're gonna shock a lot of people.'"

Jay-Z gave the talented rapper and producer plenty of time and creative control to piece together Cole World and stood to lose as much as anyone if the album didn't pan out. "I'm only into artists," Jay-Z told New York radio personality Angie Martinez of the patience he had with Cole's slow recording process. "I'm not into people that can only make hit records. I want to build artists and I want them to be here for, you know, 20 years."

Cole would bring songs to Jay-Z to get his input and feedback. While pressure came from the label to work with big-name producers, Cole was determined to craft the album on his own. "I know it was certain times where they were looking at me like, 'Ah man, why don't you go see Timbaland or something?' or 'You sure you want to do this on your own?'" Cole says. "They believe in you, of course, but at the end of the day, no one really knows."

Praise wasn't so effusive while making the record, and Cole admits he was learning on the job. But he shunned the temptation to put out an album littered with outside production. As he'd done on his own mixtapes — The Come Up, 2009's The Warm Up and last year's Friday Night Lights — Cole painstakingly crafted things his own way. "It was hard, man. You have to understand that I didn't have any credentials. Of course, at the end of the day, I'm blessed that they gave me — especially Jay-Z gave me — that space and that freedom to do it."

Those mixtapes had created quite the buzz, though, so Jay-Z wasn't banking on a totally unknown quantity. "They're a record label. They're looking for something they could sell," Cole says. "I wasn't necessarily bringing all that every day, but you could not deny the movement that was happening with these fans."

These fans, as Cole puts it, are way more than just the small pockets in North Carolina and New York. Cole has become an international entity, spurred by successful appearances on tracks with monster-selling artists like Jay-Z and B.o.B., and opening slots with Rihanna.

To outsiders, what North Carolina offers hip-hop is honest, Southern charm set to simple soul samples, like the Supremes bit Cole used in "World Is Empty," one of the stand-out tracks on The Warm Up. But to grow up in the Carolinas is to know that age and geography determine the subtleties of one's hip-hop influences. It all depends on which interstate corridor is closest to your town, as well as the era in which you grew up there. For example, Charlotteans are nearer to I-85 and I-77. That means music fans here who are in their mid-20s more likely take their cues from Atlanta and Memphis: OutKast, Pastor Troy and Three 6 Mafia rather than Nas or Jay-Z. It's an entirely different thing for kids who grew up in the eastern part of the state, nearer to I-95, the famous New York-to-Miami route.

"Oh yeah, y'all were Three 6 Mafia'd out," Cole jokes about Charlotte hip-hop fans, pointing out that he was inspired more by the heavier New York influences. Not that Cole wasn't also inspired by some Southern hip-hop, as well as whatever music the military families were bringing in from other parts of the country and world. "Fayetteville is a mixture," he says. "Fayetteville always had a crazy balance, and that's what was dope for me."

Regardless of the ingredients that form Cole's creative scope, he's undeniably a product of the South. He could tackle the same things Mississippi's Big K.R.I.T., New Orleans' Lil Wayne or Atlanta's T.I. rap about, but Cole has something they don't have: He was born here, moved to New York knowing no one, completed a four-year degree and waited outside Jay-Z's studio in the rain hoping to hand his idol a CD. Cole has played the game differently, and he doesn't fit snuggly under the typical Southern umbrella. He says this mix of experiences is his advantage. It means he can rap about anything from a coming-of-age Southern drama to being a fish out of water in Manhattan to being a college student trying to hustle a rap deal.