Smif N Wessun
So what’s your passion other than hiphop?
Tek: It’s some of everything. I like driving fast cars, fucking around with pretty, big tittied women, being with my son, and being with my niggas. That’s it. It ain’t too much other than that. I don’t do much man.
Steele: We from the hood so you experience everything we played sports, did a little bit of graffiti. Me personally I just love everything about music. Being able to create music is another level of power. That’s a god given thing that you have to be able to cherish and nurture. The other thing is just watching life grow.
What artists out are you really feeling?
Steele: I’ve always been checking for who’s out. I never been one of them cat’s like I ain’t feeling him or him. I like cats that’s out. It’s a lot of different artists that’s doing they thing. Then you have the new ones that have one song and one video and the next thing you know they on the cover of XXL. That shit makes me tight or you see Biggie on the cover of XXL. It’s like what the fuck ya’ll don’t have nothing else to report on right now? Most of these publications are like when you watch cable and every other month they got a special on JFK. They keep your mind focusing on the unknown and the shit you can’t change. When you get the people in that zone they’ll never be aware of the accomplishments of right now. I’m fucking with Dead Prez hard right now. There’s a lot of cats doing they thing right now. I try to take everything and see how it affects me.
How did you run into Buck and all them cats and start building?
Tek: Well, me and Buckshot’s sister went to night school together. I never knew Buckshot was her brother but then Buck and Steele hooked up before that and since we was all running together we got introduced. They was doing they thing and we was doing our thing and he was like if I ever happen to get on I’ma make sure I got ya. We running around acting wild and we was like whoever do it first it’s they responsibility to put the next one on they back to bring them in. That’s how the groups O.G.C. and Heltah Skeltah came along because everything was a piggy back off of something. Once you do it I’m gonna set it up where you can come in and do what you do. We all met through the streets.
Steele: Once they heard us on the album, they was open to work with us anyway. What’s real is when we did the songs on the album bitch ass motherfucking Michael Weiss and Sam Weiss told Black Moon they couldn’t put the song on the album because we wasn’t signed. Mike Weiss he’s stupid. He ain’t know we coming from nothing, so we like what’s cracking sign us then. But at the same time we felt he was trying to put that muscle out so it’s like you don’t even know we want to be signed anyway. We know it ain’t a perfect situation but we ready to go through this. We in the streets, in courts and in jails it ain’t nowhere for us to go but up. Then when we did our album and we put O.G.C. on there Mike Weiss tried to do that shit again and it backfired on his ass. We like that shit ain’t going down patna. You ain’t signing these cats and you ain’t telling us we not putting it on the album, you crazy I’ll fuck you up and that’s how it went down. As you can see, none of them signed and shit was still on the album. First of all D-O-G is my brother, so it ain’t no way you can tell me I can’t feed my brother. I’m putting him on and I’m giving him some bread, and the same thing with the rest of my camp. The game we in is funky.
I remember watching Bucktown on Rap City and Video Music Box shit was so ill.
Steele: Look at the shit they show now. There’s no diversity. When’s the last time you seen a Talib Kweli video. You can’t even see a Dead Prez video. They got a video out called “Hell Yea” that nobody will play. What’s so real about hiphop is, just like the sixties, when people across the nation see the racism in rap for lack of a better term they start to react. They are like they not gonna show the video? Why not? And we have a wonderful thing now called the internet and you can go on the internet and hear about the video. That actually empowers the artist. Rap City, we grew up with Tigger and its nothing but love to this day but they have become so entrenched in the power structure that they can’t do nothing. They like the program director says this or I can’t play this but I got the next one or a whole bunch of other shit. The program director from BET, who is a cool cat, on the last Black Moon video he told Dru we can’t play your video. He’s like I love Black Moon, I grew up on this shit but he’s like we going into a different direction and said we trying to show different type of videos. He basically not taking the blame for not playing it and he not standing up like play this video. Now dudes is so comfortable with they job right now they look at us like ya’ll just need to make the right song…
(something is going on in the background)
Steele to person in background: That’s why I told you to bring the fucking camera we have to have that shit with us at all times.
Steele: Right now, I’m watching the police rough this nigga up. Police are slamming him up against some shit. While I’m standing on the corner they searching up mad niggas. They just threw dude in the car. It’s right on Martin Luther King.
As artists, we start to get compromised. Like with Rawkus the most underground label of this day talking about putting Smif N Wessun with Jah Rule.
We did an interview with Kool G. Rap and he was saying they was trying to get him to work out so he could take pictures with his shirt off and how he wasn’t sexy enough.
Tek: (laughing)
Like I told Buck when Bootcamp came out ya’ll brought the real shit. You can wear ya fatigues, your nappy hair, and your tims. It made people want to intentionally do that. A whole other revolution came out of that.
Steele: That’s right. It’s funny that you say that because at one point some of us in the Boot Camp started to look at that as a bad thing. As we started going to different places we started getting turned away. We wasn’t the flossy cats. We was always deep. In the beginning we did what we did and they had no choice but to respect us. The things we was coming with was how we were living. We were speaking for the poor people. We wasn’t on some fuck money we were trying to get bread but we was on some family. That’s what I appreciate about fans. The fans ain’t fans they’re family. They took the conversation just how it was supposed to be taken. Then it took us to another place because we felt the industry was trying to separate us from the people. Then it kinda got funky with everything when I think about Buckshot having to make a song like “I Got Ya Opin.” That was a remix was designed for him to get some type of love on the radio. It was crazy because we were getting little spurts of love but then we started getting familiar with DDS spins, Billboard magazine and charting here and there. Then we would start seeing how labels were treating us due to the charts. They wanted charts. We were charting in the beginning because the time was good for it but as we started going along we became those camouflage timberland boot guys. It almost made cats look at us like we the bummy cats out of the crew. I don’t know I think it got kinda funny for all of us in the Boot Camp. A lot of people ask what really happened but that was a little strange time for us because we felt what we were doing was right and we couldn’t understand why we got treated like crazy.
