Smif-N-Wessun Interview: Hellucinations In Heaven

Smif-N-Wessun (TEK and General Steele) sat down for an interview recently with Mindbender at Kevin Nottingham. Check the interview below.

Mindbender – What up, fam!

Steele – What up, its General Steele next to…

Tek – Smoky La Tek. We in there, let’s go.

Mindbender – In 2010, what do you want to do to hip hop?

Steele – Ooh! We want to smack hip hop with a fifth album in 2010 from Smif n Wessun. It’s gonna be a commemoration of greatness. We’re hooking up with the homie Pete Rock for production. He’s adding on to the legacy that we are a part of, as far as the Bucktown side of things, and we’re just trying to keep up that classic name, that classic, legendary music. 2010, expect some of that. Probably gonna see another Boot Camp album, cause we’re working on that as well. You’re probably gonna see some hella mixtapes from Steele and Tek, and a couple solo projects. You gotta stay tuned. Duck Down.com and also check my company BucktownUSA.com. We movin’, baby.

Tek – It’s coming. We’re just trying to put our hands in every aspect of that, behind the cameras, behind the boards, with the engineers, the design of the album covers and everything. We’re just taking it by storm.

Mindbender – I been around since the early 90’s, and I love to see it grow. Most importantly, I love to see that Duck Down still exists…

Steele – It feels good. It does feel good. We started with this family, and it’s still together. Love never lets love die, feel me? Like when we’re coming to T Dot. When we first came to T Dot we got mega love. Monumental love. It just continues to grow.

Tek – Straight open arms.

Steele – So we just do our part and make sure the love is reciprocated. But yeah, Duck Down is on my back, baby! I got the tat! We striped up right now.

Mindbender – I’m glad, cause its important, and it would be great to see another collab album. But what would make it different from any of the other ones?

Tek – Truthfully, I think… the fans. I can honestly say they stopped fuckin’ with us for a minute, and then we put some shit out… and we got them back. We went and grabbed our people that was in the fields wondering what direction we was gonna go. And we put that out that they wanted, along with Smif n Wessun, along with Sean P, along with Heltah Skeltah’s third album, and the new Black Moon and 9th Wonder, and they came back faithfully. We even gained a little bit more. That’s what’s gonna make a difference. They are with us now, and we are steadily gonna be picking them up as we’re going.

Steele – You know hip hop put us on, so we gotta be grateful. That’s it. That’s how we do our thing.

Mindbender – Word up. So, how do you approach your new beats now differently than before? You got 15 new Pete Rock beats just sitting there. What do you do now?

Tek – I go off the vibe thing. I have a natural high, I don’t smoke no more anyways. Once he blazes up, I’m easy still catching the contact high and it’s not hard for me to get into a zone, get into my lane and do what I do, feed off my PNC, feed off my dude, feed off Pete Rock. Each beat has its own words that need to go with it that are there to make the vocals stand out, and each track has its own feeling. And I think we’re still learning that as artists to see which joints, which lyrics sync up with which music, and I think that’s how artist learn and grow and make great timeless music.

Steele – We LIKE to do this shit. When we get that beat, what does it tell us? We definitely do not want to overshadow none of the tracks. We want to make the marriage proper. We are actually in the streets so we got a lot of stories to tell. Yeah, we either gonna give you something you can meditate on or we are gonna give you a tale about what happened around the corner the other day.

To read the rest of the interview, check it out at KevinNottingham.com.