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.”
Born Khadimou Rassoul Cheikh Fall, Sheck Wes has already lived several lives in his 19 years. Moving back and forth between his dad in Harlem and his mom in Milwaukee during his childhood, he learned how to adapt to different environments early. In Milwaukee, he was the little kid with the New York swagger soaking up game from older men—some hustlers, some legitimate local entrepreneurs. Back in NYC, he was an alpha, the ballplayer with a penchant for mischief and an appetite for earning that lead him to petty crime like shoplifting and selling weed. Six-foot-two with a slim, muscular build, Wes’ athletic ability made him one of the best high school ballers in the city. He also has a striking look that got him scouted by a modeling agency as he rode the subway one day. Going from the basketball court to the runaway, he soon found himself walking for designers, including for the Yeezy line of his future label boss, Kanye West.
But as his star began to rise, so did his mother’s concerns about her son’s fast lifestyle. Looking to instill discipline, she sent Wes to Touba, Senegal, the religious center of the country’s Mourides Sufi sect to which Wes’s family belongs, to study Islam in June 2016. At first, he rebelled. Then, after realizing that he didn’t have much choice in the matter, he submitted. Before this trip to his ancestral home, Wes knew what he wanted to do, but it was during his stay in Senegal that he discovered the source of his motivation. He remembers thinking, “You need to do it for these people. You can help them. Being anything here is hope to them.” After about five months, he returned to the U.S. with a new mission. “I need to help rebuild Touba,” he says. “I know I can.”
Wes’ optimism can’t be dampened by practicality. When I question whether he’ll realistically be able to be a successful ballpayer, model, rapper, and humanitarian at the same time, he doesn’t miss a beat: “Since I’m young I have time for it all.”
Sheck Wes: I pick simple beats because I need space for me to work.
A lot of niggas are popping nowadays because of the beats. That’s why producers walk around with all this ice on them, because they the real stars. No shade, and shout out to Lil Pump, but on a track like “Gucci Gang” he’s not really saying much. “Live Sheck Wes” is the same type of song as [“Gucci Gang”]: One verse and the hook, and the song is over with. But the lyrics [in my song are] real! That’s why niggas fuck with it. That’s why older niggas respect my shit more. A nigga like J. Cole should never come for me! I would rap battle with J. Cole, I would diss the fuck out of that nigga. I’d diss Drake, all these niggas. Kanye, I don’t care. I been in a room with all the Migos and out-rapped niggas.
If I played the “Live Sheck Wes” beat right now, it would sound like an EDM beat—all the sounds in the beat are EDM sounds. It is amped-up, turn-up music. But I hate “Live Sheck Wes.”
Because people get lost in the energy and not my message. I’m talking about some shit! One thing I did for Kanye is just rap a lot of my songs without the beat; I was teaching him shit, and he was teaching me shit. In “Live Sheck Wes,” I’m like: “It get tragic where I live/Everything is negative/All the roaches in the crib/Elevator full of piss/Everybody grew up tough, bunch of diamonds in the rough/Police ain’t never give a fuck/They just want us in them cuffs.” Do you get what I’m trying to say?
I’m still in the projects! That’s why I did the “Mo Bamba” video there.
It’s going to be a real emotional roller coaster. When someone from my label asked what type of genre the album is, I said, “I make bipolar music.” I make music for anything, niggas can run to this shit or cry to it, it don’t matter. It’s gonna have all of the crazy shit, all the chill shit, shit where I’m telling my story. There’s going to be shit where I’m rapping in my language [Wolof].
Hell yeah! Switching it up. And I played the keys on every single one of these songs.
I don’t. I taught myself how to play piano. I know to play certain Beethoven shit. So like all the extra sounds and beats and all that—all the mixing, everything—is coming from Sheck Wes. That’s some shit that made niggas like Ye and Trav so iconic, ’cause they was producing all of their early shit and were so involved in the processes of making the music and didn’t have nobody else making it for them. That’s why I be telling niggas that a Drake session and a Travis session are different. You feel me? That’s being a mudboy, doing it all. That’s something I want to prove.
