Sheck Wes is sitting in the courtyard of a posh boutique hotel in the Lower East Side, just seven miles south—but a world away—from the one-bedroom apartment in Harlem’s St. Nicholas housing projects he and his family call home. It is early evening during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, and Wes, the son of Muslim Senegalese immigrants, has yet to eat today. That’s not because he’s fasting—the blunt slowly burning between his fingertips attests to that—but because he has been busy and simply forgot to.
His current activities include modeling, basketball, designing clothes, and, yes, making music. “My whole life, I’ve always tried to be a star,” he tells me. “That’s why I tried to do everything.” Restlessness becomes him. Through his nasal baritone and between bites of pizza, he lays out his master plan: “I want to win Nobel Peace Prizes, as many Grammys as I can, Emmys, Golden Globes, VMAs, everything.” He is youthful exuberance personified. “I want to play in the NBA,” he says. “I’m dead serious.”
His music is as kinetic as he is. Wes makes mosh pit rap: The lyrics are simple but meaningful, the choruses lend themselves to raucous sing-alongs, and the beats—by budding producers Yung Lunchbox, Redda, and 16yrold—are lo-fi, bass-heavy, and made to be played at deafening levels. After grabbing attention with a handful of frenzy-inciting songs like “Live Sheck Wes,” “Lebron James,” and “Mo Bamba,” the viral hit named after his childhood friend and NBA rookie, he’s now putting the finishing touches on his debut project, Mudboy. The project will be a joint release on Travis Scott’s Cactus Jack label, Kanye West’s G.O.O.D Music, and Interscope. He says the title refers to “the stage right before becoming a man, when you just got out of a whole lot of turmoil and you’re figuring it out.”
[Timmhotep Aku for Pitchfork, July 2018]
