I haven't really talked to kids that age about hip hop so I don't even have any idea how they look at it.

They don't know nothing. Snoop is the godfather of hiphop to them. They look at Snoop like he is their uncle. They look at Snoop like we look at KRS. They know cats like Mos Def, but they love Lil Bow Wow. Bow Wow is the man in my class, but oddly enough they like Jill Scott. When I taught middle school the kids heard the instrumentals to the song "Ain't No Woman" and they was like that's Jaÿ Z! The other teacher heard them and was like that's EPMD. He said ya'll don't know nothing about that. He told them 'I miss EPMD but you missed EPMD'. To them anything that comes out of mouths of people like Lil Kim is golden. Sometimes just for kicks I'll be like 'y'all never heard of Stetsasonic? UMC's?' It's so funny to me because they never heard of these people and think they know music. That's why I started that program because I have to show them what they missed. You gotta get the whole story you can't come in on part 3.

What are some of the intricate things you have planned for the program?

I have it broken up into three different sections. I have reading, music, and writing. It's very literature focused. I'll take the book "2000 Seasons", read a passage from that on where he is talking about how police officers are zombies. We'll discuss it a little bit and write a reflection about what they heard. Then they will listen to KRS "Black Cop" and one of the "Hip Hop For Respect" 12"s and we would possibly talk about Diallo. After that they might listen to Fela's song called "Zombies", about the police in Nigeria and discuss about how it's really a global problem. I'll have them come full circle after all 3 workshops and shoot em up out of there. In that period of time they've been exposed to the writings of Ayi Kwei Armah , KRS, Fela, and understand who Amadou Diallo was and other victims of police brutality. They walk out of there learning something they didn't know and relate to it easier because they listen to hip hop and respect the guy who is telling them. Little by little I can show them how it all ties in. One day they maybe reading Shakespeare, anything that relates. Othello isn't anything but the OJ trial back in the day, you just have to show them how it relates. It's easier with middle and high school kids because they can process that quicker.

How has the response been to the program?

Last year I took off to do this independently to test myself and freelanced to see if I could survive. For a year I've been doing workshops and getting money from the DC Commission on the Arts and the Smithsonian to go do it. I took a group of kids out to San Fran for the National Teen Slam. I co-coached the team, then I started doing different workshops. I got a fellowship from the Smithsonian to do this big project for the Folk Life Festival. I wrote the curriculum while I was doing that. I just got a grant in Charlottesville for the fall to work with some kids from this music resource center. Hopefully I'll be able to get another grant up here to do the same thing. That's how it all came about. So far it's been really fun, but we never had an official run of the program because it has always been different little workshops. It's really a 12-week program.

That's very impressive.

There will be recording and writing and it will be published like a little book. At the end of it we might go to the studio and record some of the pieces and songs that have been done. Then we move onto the next school or location.

I'm proud to see people doing positive things within hip hop. I like to point those heads out so that they can see there is a lot more to the culture.

I hope people see that and support our efforts because we are doing it to benefit other people. There is a scholarship fund that just got started by 7 Heads. It's another arm of 7 Heads called "Do Things for the Kids". It's a non profit organization where some of the proceeds from our sales will go towards an ongoing scholarship fund. It just got started two months ago. This year it's going to be a $500 scholarship to an incoming freshman at UVA to help with books. It's nothing big, but eventually as it goes along it will get bigger.

Where would someone get more information on the scholarship fund?

We are working on building a mini-page on our site, sevenheads.com. We are going to put it on the site a lot, send out emails and different press kits to get the word out. If people are interested in helping us out we could definitely use that help to get stuff done. It will be coming out in a month or two so you should hear more about it.

How did the song "Track Runners" with you, J-Live, and Grap Luva come together?

They just showed up. Grap was playing with some beats on the MPC, threw one in and me and J were like 'yo that shit is phat'. Wes was like 'why don't y'all go in the studio and fuck around'. We went in there and put the headphones on. We didn't even talk about how we were going to do it. The beat just came on and we were just in there rhyming. The engineer, Elliott, was just recording it the whole time. We were in there feeling the track, not even trying to do a song. It was one take, eight minutes long. We didn't do any adlibs or anything, we went in and rhymed and came out laughing. It's kinda like the old jazz tradition. Someone like (Thelonious) Monk would sit down at the piano and be like 'I'm going to do this one time because this is the rawest feeling I have right now and I don't want to lose it'. We did the same thing with "It's About Time" on the "Cosmology EP". We had about ten minutes left in the studio and we just started rhyming and we kept it. There are two big samples taken from it. I'm like how you gonna take the least worked on song, but Common sampled it and so did Q-Tip and Words on the Rawkus compilation.

Any thoughts of putting together an unofficial group or doing more singles with Grap and J-Live?

Hell yeah, I'm with that. Me and J did a joint with Pete Rock for his album, but I don't think it made the final edition. Grap, J, and myself will work on more stuff for sure.

Didn't you guys do a tour in England with J-Live a couple months back?

Yeah we went all over England. Every night we were in another city. That shit was off the heezy. I ain't seen nothing like that here. We've had some dope shows here but out there it is just bananas. They love hip hop and they aren't caught up in the illusion of it. We've been fortunate to see some nice crowds and do everything short of stage diving. We go out there with J and we're all on the stage at the same time. We interchange our sets and mix it all up. We will do a couple joints, then J comes out and does a couple, so the whole night your getting beat over the head with all these different songs. J will come out and do "Braggin Rights" in the middle of the show and crowds just go crazy. We just take them through all those different moods.

That's dope because when your watching one artist everyone is waiting on that one joint they love and to hear it randomly in the middle of someone else's set would be bugged. I could see how you play with the crowd's emotions doing that.

We used to do "Jamboree", and while we were doing the roll call J would go and set up in the DJ booth. He would get on the mic and say 'My name is J, Yeah!, I'm hot tonight Yeah!, and this next song is Braggin Rights!!'. We got four tapes from all our shows out there and every time it gets to that part you see the whole crowd goes crazy.

How do a lot of these spots come about? I know some heads have a lot of connections, but do people tend to approach you first about doing shows?

You know what happens is a cat will see you perform. We went to London for the first time last year and they were like 'I'm bringing them back out here'. The dude who brought us to Amsterdam saw us in London and another cat saw us in London brought us to Finland. Promoters hear about your show through word of mouth and call you out there.

What are some expectations you have for the new album?

My ultimate wish is for people to hear it and spread the word for others to pick it up. I noticed when Jill Scott's album dropped she didn't get a lot of publicity, but her shit spread like wildfire. She was just on everybody's lips and that's how I want it to go. It will be on a smaller level because we are independent, but in those circles I want it to have a good reputation. I think people will enjoy it for how musical it is and will be able to relate to it. I want people to feel it's a good solid product.

Will it contain mostly new tracks or work from your previous EPs?

We took a lot of the old stuff off. The only old tracks are "Jamboree", "Setting Sun", and "Smiley". Everything else is new stuff. After we listened to the first version of the album from '99-'00 we decided to put out newer material. We got stuff out of nowhere like sax and flute solos. There are a lot of live instruments and different melodies. We also have a lot of concepts and they work along with the beats so that you can listen to it a year from now and hear something different. It will be dropping around September 11th. The first single will be coming out in a month, "Elevator Music" b/w "B-Boy". Both of those songs are produced by Geology.

How many other producers worked on the project?

We got Joe Money, Ritchie Pitch, DJ Khalyl, J.Rawls, Grap Luva, Sound Providers, and DJ Spinna. We got a lot of cats to pitch in and help us out of mutual respect.