Conducted by May Blaiz
For those of you who know and for those of you who should know, General Steele along with Tek – collectively known as Smif N Wessun – released a #1 Rap Album, selling over 300,000 copies. This was Dah Shinin’. Remember the powerful uplifting anthem that would brand New York’s concrete Brooklyn “Bucktown”? The trumpet intro followed by Steele’s first verse… “I walk around town with the pound strapped down to my side…”
Little did he know at the time, a 1975 blaxploitation movie was already out there featuring Fred Williamson, Pam Grier, Thalmus Rasulala and Tony King, named what else? Bucktown! “It took about 5 years later, around 1999, when we seen the movie and we realized that something was out already”, Steele mentions.
Bucktown trailer
Inspired, General Steele samples dialogue from this film, in “Welcome to Bucktown”, the first official release off the Bucktown USA imprint. With the goal to portray life in Brooklyn through his eyes and through the eyes of a number of Brooklyn emcees and producers, he states, “I didn’t try to copy the film or the soundtrack, but the concept and feel of it. I was able to relate to what they were going through with the police and with their own comrades and I wanted to depict that vibe & energy with the songs and the artwork.”
In an interview with MVRemix, General Steels shares the making of the soundtrack, his thoughts on modern day Brooklyn, social media outlets such as Twitter, upcoming projects and a sneak peek into what we can expect from his Bucktown USA imprint.
MVRemix: “Welcome to Bucktown” is your first official release for the Bucktown USA imprint. Can you tell me a bit about the making of the soundtrack? You stated at one point that Bucktown is a modern day Brooklyn. Can you describe what that means?
Steele: Smif N Wessun started with “Bucktown”. So, it was only right. I think that it’s important that artists speak about what they know about. Whether it’s from experience indirect or direct. Having direct experience with Brooklyn and me saying that Brooklyn is Bucktown and then having indirect experience travelling throughout the states and saying “Wow, there’s a Bucktown in Chicago. There’s a Bucktown in L.A. There’s a Bucktown in Texas. There’s a Bucktown everywhere. Everywhere is Bucktown” You know what? This ain’t right. Let’s pull it all together, and say OK, this is what we’re dealing with, what is this thing we are dealing with?
Before you listen to the album, it asks you, “Do you believe in God? If you do, then you in the wrong place”. If you come into a sort of place, you’re gonna need more than God sometimes… most times. God is not going to get you through, or whatever Savoir you may believe in or may not believe in. A lot of work has to occur with the individual that’s willing to step into the arena.
Music sometimes has a visual aspect, and if it doesn’t, then we don’t get it. It’s just rap. We are trying to incorporate that feeling of what you get when you listen to Curtis Mayfield or Barry White, without saying we are going to take all of these tracks and make these over. It’s been a long time we’ve been able to listen to an album as opposed to just saying that, “I like this album, this artist and I like these 3 tracks”. So now you have an album which we choose to call a soundtrack due to the question that you asked initially. I want you to feel full. Hopefully you can get into the whole story of knowing why music is an intrical part of our day to day.
MVRemix: You stated that you wanted artists and producers who fit the cast, artists who could carry that 70s energy naturally through their personal contributions.
Steele: As a 70s baby, I was brought under a certain kind of vibe, a certain type of music which fuelled what I’m doing right now. So I have to give credit to something of my birth, into the industry. What’s so great about the 90s was that some people chose to call it “the Golden Era”. You had such diversity within that that you could be a regular person and still listen to a Kool G rap, or listen to a political rap or a hard core rap without somebody saying that you are hard core, political or that you are this or you are that.
We had a time in that era where we can just listen to music and just say that I like this tune. And because we put so much restrictions to that now, some people are saying “I don’t listen to hip hop because hip hop is this” and they haven’t even experienced the full scope of it, they just listen to what’s on the radio or what’s being shown to them on BET or MTV and we all know that what’s on BET or MTV and the radio stations don’t really represent what’s going on. It’s too vast for them to cover that.
MVRemix: So when you did the album and you approached Brooklyn emcees like Shabaam Sahdeeq, Smoothe Da Hustler, Buckshot, Sean Price, and producers like DJ Revolution and Da Beatminerz, did you approach them first with a vision?
Steele: Absolutely. I picked all the tracks first. I picked the producers and said “I think I can hear Buckshot on this track”, “I can hear the whole Bootcamp, this is a Bootcamp song”. And certain producers provided me with the mood as is parallel with the track. As opposed to giving you a track and saying “here’s the beat, rhyme to the beat”, we say, “here’s the scenario, improv to the scenario”. That’s what we try to accomplish. Most rappers already do this but sometimes, unfortunately, rappers get so engulfed with their character that they forget what they are actually doing. People be knowing though. We say they fake, or we say they real.
MVRemix: So with the album, the soundtrack, I should say, what is your message? What do you want the listeners to get?
Steele: That you have an option. It’s always good to express yourself, so long as you have the forum to civilly express yourself, you should utilize that. We have the Patriot Act 3. We don’t want to have Patriot Act 7 where everybody gotta be silent and if you talk in public you’re going to jail.
Now we have something that’s called hip hop where we can basically express ourselves. I can be talking to somebody in Africa today and then be talking to somebody somewhere else in the world tomorrow, through my affiliation with hip hop. It’s a political structure, as well as cultural structure, as well as a social structure. Big up to Zulu Nation, Afrika Bambaataa and Kool Herc.
We do our part when we add on to it and we have to make sure this thing keeps going.
MVRemix: You’re last song are “Things are Getting Better”. Tell me about what that means.
Steele: I want people to know that it’s no secret that Brooklyn has a notorious history, but at the same time it also has a beautiful history. Within the struggle comes great accomplishments, comes great benefits, great glory and if you’re not willing to struggle with it, you’re not willing to receive it. If you thought that Bucktown is crazy and that people are dying, there’s guns, weed and Timberlands and ronchy people who don’t care ‘bout nobody, there’s a different side to that. Things are getting’ better in Bucktown says that if you real and willing to go through things, you ultimately will see the benefits of it. It’s a struggle, it still is.. but like Talib Kweli says… It’s a beautiful struggle.
MVRemix: I want to talk to you about Bucktown USA. Can you tell me about the birth of that?
Steele: People who are familiar with Dah Shining and for those who watched the movie, Bucktown, you’ll see it’s all about overcoming obstacles. Some that you saw, some of them you didn’t and that’s what we do basically in life. We can identify with that if not so much, the pimps, the pushers, the players, and the gangsters…it’s not so much of that, that’s basically the positions that people play, they’ve got mad positions. So the outcome of that is who’s going to withstand through the storm. That’s really what it’s all about.
With Bucktown USA, I ask, you really want to keep going forward in life? You gotta be willing to work, to go through certain things. Some people go through things and say “Oh my god, that’s so hard, I don’t know I can’t do this. I can’t go through this.” If that’s your vibe, then hey, that makes it better for the rest of us.
MVRemix: So you have some films that you’re also working on.
Steele: Yeah. “Band of Brothers” is a docudrama about the Bootcamp Clik. We are working on the album right now. We’re also taking tracks, you can print that! We need tracks. If anybody wants to be a part of history, it’s the story of Bootcamp. I think people are going to enjoy this because it’s not really a rap story, it’s a story about friendship, about the ups and downs and a little romance, but not much. It’s really about friendships and how important friendships are.
MVRemix: You’re branching off into Bucktown USA, doing interviews, television work, how does this impact the day and the life of General Steele?
Steele: I think that as we go into more of the information age and technology is expanding, you have to give. So for example, for the people who know about Dah Shining, what more can I give them? I can bring them to my house, through technology. I can literally say, “You want to come eat breakfast with Steele? Tune in with me at 9am Central and we can have breakfast together” through the technology. The power is at our fingertips.
I mean, we from the hood but we didn’t know that we have stuff in tune with the refugees from Stockholm , the refugees from Africa, from Russia, they from everywhere. They just regular kids, just like us. I really appreciate the fact that like, I’m from Brooklyn. I don’t know the struggles of other people. But when I can say what I’m saying and then other individuals can identify with me because they had a similar struggle, this just empowers me even more.
MVRemix: What are your thoughts on social media, like, Facebook, Twitter?
Steele: Twitter is cool, but it’s more local, it’s like one big party line. Facebook is more personal, more global. I was reading that Twitter, I don’t want to misquote but, it was speaking about how it just makes people feel less emotion, less time to respond. Everything is quick, quick, quick, quick, quick!!
It made me think about music, like the microwave era we live in. Everything is fast. Like, we don’t even want to hear nothing. If you hear Bob Marley havin’ a jam session in the studio with Peter Tosh, he was just jamming cuz sometimes you didn’t have tracks in the studio, you have a jam and everything you did, you had to speak through a microphone. If you hear one of those tapes right now, you hear the involvement of each individual person and each individual instrument.
Today we live in such a modern microwave age, that you just want to hear all that shit put together, quick. “Put it together for me. I don’t have time to sift through it.” We gotta make things fast. It gets kinda crazy where we gotta make music and people don’t want to hear it, so you gotta make something that people want to hear because we know they don’t already.
MVRemix: So you like the touring and meeting people?
Steele: I love meeting people, cuz just when you thought you knew everything, you meet somebody and then you’re like wow.
MVRemix: So, what’s in the future for BCC? Any upcoming tours?
Steele: We’ve been doin’ a campaign called Tribute to the Classics where we do a live show. Black Moon and Smif N Wessun performs with a band. Sean Price is still touring promoting the Heltah Skeltah album and we gonna be making some dates for Welcome to Bucktown where we be doing what I like to call a “broadway play”. We will be doing different things with the show, coming up this year. There’s a Bootcamp album, that I spoke about earlier. There’s also a KRS/Buckshot album out right now. The album is done. They are working on the next level on that. Heltah Skeltah, Ruste Juxx, Torae, Marco Polo is out right now. B-Real album is out right now, DJ Revolution. I don’t know any record label that has as many records out right now other than Duckdown.
MVRemix: I understand that Smif N Wessun is coming out with one as well?
Steele: Yeah, I was going to get to that. That is classified information. I didn’t want to reveal that but since you brought it up…
MVRemix: Is it true that Pete Rock is the only one producing it?
Steele: We’ve been kickin’ it with Pete. We just makin’ sure everything is taken care of, red tape and all finalized.
MVRemix: Why just one producer?
Steele: I think that as an artist, we want to make it meaningful and sometimes when you get a whole bunch of producers you kind of get away from the picture. There’s one producer for the album. Like when we did interviews for Dah Shinin, the only producer that worked on the album was Da Beatminerz. I’m not sayin’ anymore, next question.
MVRemix: Do you have any last minute words for your fans in Canada?
Steele: I love you Canada! I look forward to seeing you guys very, very soon with the entire Boot Camp. In the mean time in the between time, check us out and stay tuned on www.duckdown.com
You can also join us on www.bucktownusa.com and if you just want to see some footage of what’s goin’ on here in the Brooklyn side of things you can go to www.mogulus.com/bucktownusa or www.mogulus.com/bucktownusatv. You can see 24 hours of footage interviews. I have a television show with Cynical Smith. We going on the 5th year and we want to keep the hip hop culture going.
Be on the lookout for the documentary that we are working on on the assassination of Malcolm X. We are doing a day by day documentary on one of the individuals who was convicted on his participation in the assassination and he’s saying he’s innocent.
He’s trying to get exonerated and we doing the documentation of the whole process. It’s more than hip hop, so stay tuned. Salute to everybody out there.
If you were wondering where the Boot Camp Clik has been the answer is very simple and evident in the music, the studio. Known for getting caught up in label and distribution ordeals, the Camp is back on Duckdown records making hip-hop music independently and always for the people.
It was dubbed the East Coast Renaissance. Wu-Tang brought the ruckus with 36 Chambers. The world was ours when Nas released Illmatic. Big L, the MVP, came out with Lifestylez ov da Poor and Dangerous. Temperatures rose in clubs when Mobb Deep came out with The Infamous and Brooklyn’s finest Jay-Z released Reasonable Doubt. And when big poppa B.I.G released Ready to Die things done changed. This snapshot in time? 1995. The Hip Hop Revival. Yet let’s not forget – out of the trenches also that year- was the birth of Smif n Wessun. 
