Words by Jesse Serwer, Illustration by Brian Finn—
If you’ve been reading LargeUp for a while— or if you came up on ’90s rap—you know about Brooklyn rap duo Smif N Wessun’s long history of dabbling in reggae and dancehall. When it comes to bringing authentic soundclash vibes into rap it doesn’t get much more classic than “Soundbwoy Bureill,” from ’94’s debut LP Dah Shinin‘. We’ve weighed in on that one a few times and, in fact, we kicked off our hip-hop x dancehall department Heds & Dreds back in 2011 by linking with Tek and Steele for an interview and a roundup of all their reggae-themed material.
For their latest project, Born N Raised, the Brooklyn duo have teamed with producers K-Salaam and Beatnick for a full-on reggae-meets-rap EP featuring Junior Reid, Junior Kelly and Jahdan Blakamoore, amongst others. It probably bears mentioning we brought up this very concept to SNW in the aforementioned 2011 interview—read what they had to say about it then here.
“Solid Ground” featuring Junior Reid is the first single and, a day after premiering it over at Federation Sound’s East Village Radio show, they’ve hit the Internet with the audio and a video shot in Brooklyn—where else?
Stay tuned for more on this project…