Wu-Dunit: Wu-Tang Clan

Raekwon, set it off: Yo Yo What up Yo Time is running out It’s for real though Let’s connect Politic Ditto. Once upon a time hip-hop was something we did out of necessity and not boredom. Being down demanded urgency, like an emergency, because the shit gave you agency and currency. Like a four-alarm fire, you ignored hip-hop at your own peril. Once upon a time we thought hip-hop was the fire next time or at least the spark. Once upon a time we believed in the Easter Bunny too. Your moms got the pictures to prove it too. Just look at de chile. Sitting up there grinning at the Great White Rabbit. Hippety-hop. Grow the fok up. Hip-hop baby, your bunny been cooked.

Can you relate? It’s like this you know: If not for RZA and the WuTang Clan, commercial hip-hop would be irrelevant and unlistenable. Like Frank Zappa said, hard-core isn’t dead. It just smells funny. For months heads been dying to know: Wu-Tang Forever-sophomore slump or sophomore triumph? If it’s wack where does that leave us? All alone with DJ Shadow? Homey don’t think so. GZA sez, “Rhymes filter through the neck before the words hit the chrome/Pro Tools editing tracks that’s rough/A jam without a live MC isn’t enough.” RZA sez point-blank “This is true hip-hop.” In the purest form. MCing! Lyrics! “This ain’t no R and B. Wack nigga taking a loop thinking it’s gonna be the sound of the culture.”

Everything you read about hip-hop these days reads like a requiem or an obituary. How did we get here? You want to talk about your culture? Got your culture right here. Back in the day of innocence and wonder and a little will to power. Back when the song mattered more than the video hoochie. Who knew that one day hip-hop would come to this: Tupac and Biggie shot dead in the streets behind some bloodclot Bloods and Crips business? Who let the gat out the bag? Gangsta rap had to prove Bob Marley a liar: “One thing about music, when it hits, you feel no pain.”

Let’s blame it all on Ice Cube: two-parent-family-reared, architecturaldrafting-school graduate turned gangsta rap Pandora. Updated Ralph Ellison’s archetype from Invisible Man. The crafty, charismatic, middle-class Black boy who incites the lumpen proletariat for fun, profit, and street credibility. Brer Rabbit motherfucker. How many tar babies will choke on his mythology while he scampers away to see another West Side day? (You might want to read the early careers of Stokely Carmichael, LeRoi Jones, and Louis Farrakhan as Invisible Man dub versions. Then again you might not.)

The trajectory of Straight Outta Compton to Biggie in a casket is a straight line. We had to declare hip-hop dead after Biggie’s death because we killed him; take out a moment of silence.

Now exhale.

This has been the history of hip-hop from the get-go: soon as you declare hip-hop dead, hip-hop reanimates. Michael Myers style. So let’s get it straight: Death Row died, not hip-hop. And as of Wu-Tang Forever it’s clear RZA and the Wu are on some Mitsubishi corporation-type shit. This is a thousand-year plan in motion. Afrika Bambaataa once predicted rap will be around as long as people are talking. But the Wu do more than talk. Nine young Black men in the music business who roll like a guerrilla corporate culture rather than subdivide for the dollar.

How could we not be impressed? Not since George Clinton has anybody sold the same band to every major label in the book. The Wu are masters of camaraderie, Black unity, collectivity, and mad strategy. Chess Master Drunken Master Kung Fu Swordsman Five Percent Nation strategy.

They’re not trying to wake up one morning and find themselves victims of the industry. What sense does it make to beat the odds, survive the crack game, as most of these Staten Island project exiles have, then go out like a roach in the record business? Get your shit together ‘fo’ the fucking Illuminati hit. Our everlasting essence stays fired over Egypt.

Rappers aren’t just the outlaw folk heroes of wigger wet dreams, but the press agents for those vertical slave ships and maximum insecurity skyscrapers, the Projects. Picture this: Dante Alighieri with a Rover, a RZA, and a pager. Or tell the brother not hip to the Wu who asks, “What are their issues, what is their message vis-à-vis that of, say, Public Enemy?”: Black Male Redemption in the Projects Now. The Wu illuminate the abyss of government housing while pointing a way to the exit sign. If you never been there, they’ll show you voyeurs around. If you’ve been there and never want to go back, they’ll remind you refugees why. If you’re dodging death on the daily up in that piece, they might be your Harriet Tubman.

“Part of the lasting power of Greek drama lies in the vividness with which it presents extreme love and (still more) intense hatred within the family. Duty to the family and duty to the state may come into conflict. But no Greek tragedy is secular. Although the dramatists normally focus on the actions and sufferings of human beings, the gods are always present in the background.”

Clocking in with ninety-plus minutes of gloom, doom, rumpus, and ruckus, Wu-Tang Forever is like the Greeks. Back in the day, Brer Plato’s folk used to hold theatrical “tragedy contests.” Drawn-out battles where those bold Lyricists Euripides, Sophocles, and Aeschylus strived to beat out the next man at composing tales of woe and enlightenment. Occasionally the mood would be lightened by a hypersexual “satyr play.” Over the course of WuF’s twenty-seven cuts, the Wu borrows from this organizing principle-contrasting philosophy with metafoolishness and missionary work with sexual debasement. Method Man: “Build a devil mindstate/Blood kin can’t relate/No longer brothers/We unstable/Like Cain when he slew Abel.” Ol’ Dirty Bastard: “Pardon me bitch as I shit on your grass/Ho! You’ve been shitted on/I’m not the first dog to shit on your lawn.” Inspectah Deck: “Not a role model/I walk a hard road to follow/I sold bottles of sorrow/Then chose poems and novels.”

Lyricists and lyrics the Wu have in overabundance, perhaps to the point of overkill, but that’s probably the point-Wu comes in waves.

Raekwon, Method Man, and Ol’ Dirty Bastard (Wu’s answer to Flavor Flav, if not Dolemite) possess the most readily identifiable voice prints among their stylists. The poetically peripatetic gully-glimmer twins Raekwon and Ghostface Killa as well as philosophical point man GZA are, line for line, the most ingenious of the Wu scribes, but Meth, the group’s sex symbol, possesses a voice that’s pure erotica. Coming up fast are Inspectah Deck, whose diction screams Vulcan logic, and Capadonna, whose relish for pornography rivals Larry Flynt’s.

If you got Wu fever you’re likely to suspend judgment as to whether WuF is good or evil, dope or wack. If you’re too old for such mindless idolatry and want solid tracks, WuF got a few instant classics for your ass. In terms of continuity and quality, disc one is hit or miss, and more miss than hit for a good half, a been-there-bought-the-Wu-shirt retread. Disc two is such a tight, fluid and demolishing show of skills that other hip-hop crews will be picking shrapnel off their tongues for months. (Especially when they see the numbers-WuF sold 612,000 copies in its week of release.)

It’s not until track six drops on the first disc, “As High as Wu-Tang Get,” that you stop feeling lethargy has set in. Suddenly there’s a party going on. Ol’ Dirty sets it off, GZA grinds metrics to the floor, Meth pours on the raspy charm like lava. RZA dub-theory getting you mad-lifted once again. This man gets more mileage out of two shots of bass than anybody since Lee “Scratch” Perry. (Bet you money an RZA instrumental album would go gold. Why? Because Wu cuts minus vocals equal babymaking music.)

RZA’s lush and haunting string sections turn up elsewhere, and this time with an anonymous violin soloist in tow. (Word is she’s Karen Briggs, on loan from Israeli New Age artist Yanni.) Not since Isaac HayesRZA’s number one influence, we’d wager-has any Black pop artist used strings in a sexier or spookier manner. Cinematic is a term overused to describe RZA’s production but it’s accurate ambience, atmosphere, mise-en-scène all matter as much to him as beats, and sometimes more so. His dramatic and profligate use of kung fu dialogue and Wu-member repartee affirms this. On most albums such material would function as cute skits. On Wu projects they play like the Zen moments in a bloody action flick.

If Public Enemy brought microsurgery to hip-hop collage, RZA brings a sculptural hand closer to the source than Cubism. Like an African carver, his Orientalist exaggerations of old-school soul song forms sounds organic rather than grafted. In this respect Tricky and RZA are similar: they both use samplers in a way that suggests they’re working with flesh rather than found objects.

As Darius James said of Pam Grier and blaxploitation, the Wu-Tang are their own genre in hip-hop. They have their own sound and their own themes. Like P-Funk, Public Enemy, Ishmael Reed, and Thomas Pynchon, the Wu aren’t just a band but a context, a self-referencing encyclopedic narrative. Every particle of noise invites reading as oblique commentary on the whole program. Whatever the Wu quotes, the Wu consumes and colonizes. You hip to John Woo or kung fu? Step back, son-that’s now the cultural property of the Wu.

All the Wu aura in the world, however, can’t salvage the lame tracks that lend WuF’s opening disc a less than auspicious air. Save for two gems, the aforementioned “As High as Wu-Tang Get” and “A Better Tomorrow” (what I tell you about John Woo?), I’d consign it immediately to the dustbin of hip-hoprisy. “A Better Tomorrow” is the most PC and pathos-saturated song the Wu has ever cut. Dig the chorus, a hard-core round robin that strikes the right cautionary note before slipping into sermon mode: You can’t party your life away Drink your life away Smoke your life away Fuck your life away Dream your life away Scheme your life away ’Cause your seeds grow up the same way. In this tearjerker, Method Man maximizes the melancholic possibilities: Momma says take your time young man and build your own Don’t wind up like your old dad Still searching for them glory days he never had. Those babies looking up to us The Million-Man March MCs get on the bus.

On the other hand, some of RZA’s lines here-Y’all bitches love dances And pulling down your pants While your man is on tour you spend up his advances Your friends ain’t shit All they do is drink smoke and suck dick The whole projects is trapped in sin-beg the same old tired question, and as always, I got to be the whinybutt who raises it: Why do brothers get more amped blaming poor project-incarcerated sistas for the state of Babylon than the dread Illuminati (a Wu-phemism for white supremacy)? To Black nationalism’s long-standing dialectic of pimpsup-ho’s-down, the Wu remains true. (Yes Nequanna, heads get confused trying to decide what’s more diabolical-the ’luminati or the punanny.) It’s like in The Mack where the pimp Goldie gets mad at the white man for selling heroin to the little brothers but got no problem with sistas hooking until they drop. As the biographies of Pablo Picasso and Miles Davis point out, you can loathe woman and still be a motherfucker in the manly modernist canon. Perhaps there’s a connection between misogyny and the manly modernist muse. Perhaps we need to know where Wu-type brothers stand on the position of the woman in the revolution. Just pray your daughter doesn’t bring one home for dinner, or that your son doesn’t mistake their female problems for chivalry. (Per “Fuck the pussy/Give me the money and the weed.”)