Back in October ‘96, when Black Moon’s Diggin’ In Da Vaults first dropped and everyone I knew copped the vinyl from Beat Street, my friend Mike couldn’t finish one forty without hearing “Six Feet Deep” six times over—probably the best relief for any 15-year-old hip-hop fan who suddenly got tired of hearing “Stakes Is High” and “Beats, Rhymes And Life.” By the end of November, we had all worn our record needles down on that joint alone, and then bought new needles to play out the rest of the album—half of which we‘d heard on “Enta Da Stage” in ’93. Diggin’ In Da Vaults was the new improved Black Moon LP that put fans who overlooked their first album onto Buckshot, 5 FT, and DJ Evil Dee; right around the time that Heltah Skeltah and O.G.C. began to make names for themselves, and Smif-N-Wessun had already landed a spot on the map. That’s why Duck Down label head Dru Ha re-released half of “Enta Da Stage” with new tracks, verses, and remixes in the first place. Of course, older fans wrekonize that Boot Camp Clik really took off with Black Moon’s “Who Got Da Props,” but starting from there would turn this into a full-length novel, and Mike and I still pump “Six Feet Deep” like time doesn’t exist.
"At that time, everything was a lot more local in terms of how we represented ourselves," says Buckshot. “It was all about our blocks, our avenues, our projects. We were the dudes from the streets of Brownsville, the streets of Bed-Stuy, making music for the people who understood what we lived. Steele had a record out back in the day before ‘Dah Shinin,’ so when Black Moon came out with ‘Who Got Da Props?’ it was basically just a way for us all to ignite, like ‘Ok fellas, one of us is on, let’s go!’”
“I used to have this Black Moon mix on a black cassette, and that’s how I kept it separate from all the other tapes I had that weren’t labeled,” adds Ruste Juxx, Boot Camp’s newest recruit from Crown Heights. “I was like 16, watching their videos, constantly writing my own joints, trying to get on.”
While Black Moon was setting the stage for one of hip-hop’s most underappreciated acts outside of Brooklyn and the greater Tri-State, Smif-N-Wessun started gaining clout with the single “Bucktown” in ’94, which made it up to #93 on the Billboard charts. That was part of the bigger paradox—both groups always seemed more prominent when they were putting out tracks individually. I remember this rowdy girl at my high school would constantly sing the hook to “Bucktown” in our science class and, at that time, I didn’t think Smif-N-Wessun were as good as Black Moon, so I told her to shut up. Then I heard the rest of “Dah Shinin” in early ’95, and apologized the next semester. That year, up to the release of Heltah Skeltah’s Nocturnal in June of ’96, followed by Diggin’ In Da Vaults four months later, was the highest point for Boot Camp in terms of sales and mass appeal.
One thing that’s been perfectly preserved since ’93 is how Buckshot, Dru Ha, Evil Dee, Tek & Steele, Ruck & Rock, Starang Wondah, and Top Dog & Louieville Sluggah have always treaded a fine line between commercial success and underground ambiguity without ever actually hitting rock bottom or making it to the top. Back in the heyday of gritty raw New York City hip-hop, Wu-Tang Clan snatched the limelight and Boot Camp Clik was the other crew. Both families had artists featured on the soundtrack to Soul In The Hole, but the two Wu-Tang tracks quickly overshadowed Tek & Steele’s “Won On Won.” Sean Price, a.k.a. Ruck, reminded listeners on the track “Like You” off of Jesus Price Supastar, that “Wu-Tang Clan ain’t nothing to fuck with / Boot Camp Clik ain’t nothing to Wu-Tang.”
For a long time, BCC were like the best of street ball players who could take on nearly any competition, but rarely got picked for major tournaments. And they never let that stop them from moving forward, even if it deflated their egos every once in a while. Now, in this year’s news: Lil’ Wayne is the almighty king of hip-hop, Cam’Ron’s career is seemingly shot, 50 Cent is starting to slip as well, the Wu are nowhere near their former prominence (Ghostface aside), and, bizarrely, Boot Camp Clik are unbelievably close to where they started fifteen years ago—with the added help of 9th Wonder post 2005: continually building up a buzz.
Of course they’ve all had their ups and downs like every other extended hip-hop family. Tek & Steele changed their name from Smif-N-Wessun to Cocoa Brovaz due to a copyright lawsuit on the part of Smith & Wesson in the later half ’96. Black Moon broke up and got back together more than once between then and now. Priority Records dropped Boot Camp’s signature label, Duck Down, in ’99, leaving them without a home base for over two years. Then most of the original members came back in 2002 with The Chosen Few on Koch, and quickly reestablished more than half of their former fan base.
“We had to fight hard to make that adjustment from being supported by a major label to being independent,” Buckshot explains, “but once we did, it became a great opportunity for us. Even before Koch, we put out BDI Thug through a tiny distributor called K-Tel, which nobody had heard of, and that record sold 60,000 copies, which to this day is a lot of copies for a fully independent project.”
Around the same time, Rock, the deep rumble from Heltah Skeltah, left the crew during Duck Down’s two-year hiatus. After that, he joined up with Lethal Records to put out a solo album titled Planet Rock, but the label went under and whatever was recorded for the album seemed to fans like it had fallen into one of those black holes that A&R guys like to take pisses in. Left without his other half, Ruck morphed into Sean Price in 2003, and suddenly became the most bugged out, mindlessly intelligent rapper since Dr. Octagon. Then Rock joined back up with Boot Camp for their third collective album, The Last Stand, in 2006, while Ruck decided to keep representing on the side as Sean P. Now that the crew as a whole are just as close to and far from being famous as they were at their peak in ’96—but no longer under major label support—Tek and Steele are publicly known as Smif-N-Wessun again, which is good because Cocoa Brovaz always sounded like a generic R&B group.
“In all honesty, even with the peaks we had in ’95 and ’96, I still never grasped that feeling of ‘Ahhh, we’re here, we’re big!’” Buckshot says with a self-content smirk. “Doing this hasn’t really been about highs and lows as much as it’s been about a constant effort. It’s like a person digging through a tunnel and they never really notice how far they get, or how far they are. They just keep digging and digging and digging. Someone might go ‘wow, you dug really hard or you dug really fast,’ but how much does that matter in the long run? ”
Over the past fifteen years, the great eight original Boot Camp emcees have been through more obstacles than the first sandhogs. And while it often seems like too many people outside of Bucktown have asked “Who is Boot Camp?” or “Why does that name sound so familiar?”—even those who claim they “love real hip-hop”—the irony is that with every popular artist those hip-hop fans listen to, a reference to Boot Camp can easily be found.
“Even with all the label changes we went through though, the marks we made’ll never go away,” says Steele, as he takes a long pull from a fresh blunt at Duck Down Entaprizez. “Our names might not always be written down, but we’re definitely in everybody’s scroll. You look at how much people still mention Bucktown, you hear 50 Cent kicking ‘Don’t front, you know I gotcha open,’ you see P. Diddy come to the B.E.T. awards and his whole camp got on camouflage, and it’s like, yo, we started all that.”
by Damian Ghigliotty
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