In his newest interview, Nardwuar catches up with Mike Dean, one of the most essential figures in the history of Houston hip hop, in the back of Dean's bus where he mixed and mastered Birds in the Trap Sing McKnight.
"Is it okay if I smoke marijuana?" is Dean's first question. Nardwuar tests his memory with questions about his earliest projects in Houston in the '90s. "Willie D is one of the first people I worked with," Dean said. "Well, the first person was Bushwick [Bill] and Scarface and Willie D all on their solo albums."
Dean described life in Houston in the early '90s, around the time when he worked on Odd Squad's I Can See It. "Before this album, I caught one of my kids smoking weed. Me and my wife back then had caught smoking weed for four years. And then I started smoking weed again before I made this so it was really good. I was really high... We smoked a lot of bad weed. Oof. Backyard Boogie."
Dean went onto to describe the Geto Boys as "the base of Houston music. The base of really all southern music" and speak on the differences and similarities between music-making in the '90s and in 2016. "We got better computers, better equipment," he said. "The weed is better. We know more about what we're doing so we don't have to be in the studio so long."