On Tuesday, Soul Temple Records will be releasing Twelve Reasons to Die, the new
collaborative album by Ghostface Killah and producer/multi-instrumentalist Adrian
Younge.[1]
The record’s been streaming for nearly a week now, and it’s great. It’s
definitely the best Ghostface album since Fishscale,
and I’m tempted to go back even further and place it third behind only Supreme Clientele and Ironman. I’ll be putting up a review of
the record later this week, but in the meantime, I thought I’d look back at the
Wu-Tang Clan’s previous endeavors with bands and live instrumentation.
When the Clan first came on the scene in 1993, RZA’s warped
sample-based beats were a big part of their appeal. The dust and grit of old
records was a palpable part of their grimy sound. Throughout the initial run of
Wu-Tang solo albums, RZA gradually refined this sound, culminating in the
cinematic Only Built 4 Cuban Linx and
Liquid Swords and the soulful Ironman. When it came time for the Clan
to reform like Voltron for their second group album in 1997, RZA had begun
moving away from this strictly sample-based sound. Most of the album’s
twenty-seven songs have samples, but quite a few of them are spiced with
keyboards. Notably, “Reunited,” the first song on the album (after the extended
opening skit that is “Wu-Revolution”) is built almost entirely from some
incredible live violin.
RZA debuted a few songs featuring a new keyboard-driven
sound in mid-1998 on The Swarm
compilation, but his sample-free songs rank among the weakest on the record. Instead,
RZA’s keyboard production reached maturity on his first solo album Bobby Digital in Stereo and his
soundtrack to the Jim Jarmusch film Ghost
Dog: The Way of the Samurai, both of which came out in the year after The Swarm. RZA’s beats on these two
projects are cold and uninviting but they maintained the cinematic vibe of his
earlier sample-based work. Both are great records, and if they have any
failings it’s from the weaknesses inherent in RZA’s Bobby Digital persona and
subpar guest rappers.[2]
For close to ten years after Ghost Dog, RZA incorporated samples into his work once again, most
notably on The W in 2000 and Masta
Killa’s No Said Date in 2004.[3]
In 2007, live instrumentation became his priority once again, spawning “Chamber
of Fear” and the mixed bag that was 8 Diagrams.
On “Chamber of Fear” RZA worked with a full orchestra to craft one of his best
beats of the 2000s. The orchestra lends an epic gravity to the song that
reinvigorated RZA as a rapper and served as a perfect platform to introduce one
of the most talented of RZA’s many protégés, Reverend William Burke. This song
was so successful artistically that RZA changed the course of the fifth Wu-Tang
album in the middle of recording, dramatically changing the production and
alienating Raekwon and Ghostface in the process. Some of the songs that
prominently feature instrumentation by RZA and his buddies work really well,
such as “Campfire,” “Wolves,” and “Unpredictable” (on which System of a Down
bassist Shavo Odadjian plays), but for every one of those good songs there’s a “Get
‘Em Out Ya Way Pa” or a “Gun Will Go” that just doesn’t work. The album’s first
single “The Heart Gently Weeps,” which has guitar work from John Frusciante and
Dhani Harrison and an interpolation of the Beatles' "While My Guitar Gently Weeps," is pretty damn good, but it doesn’t sound like a Wu-Tang Clan
song at all and ends up being a jarring tonal shift in the middle of the
record. That “Windmill,” a song with prominent samples, is one of the best on
the album is telling. Even after ten years, RZA struggled when trying to
integrate his own instrumentation into his production. This would be borne out
a few years later when he stepped back into an executive producer’s role for
two compilation albums.
Before those two albums, however, an instrumental soul band
named El Michels Affair took a break from writing material for the second album
of original material to record an album of Wu-Tang covers titled Enter the 37th Chamber. Like
on 8 Diagrams, results were mixed. The
best songs on the album are “Heaven and Hell,” “Duel of the Iron Mic,” “Glaciers
of Ice,” “Criminology,” and “Incarcerated Scarfaces,” and it’s unsurprising
that all of these hail from RZA’s peak as a producer, Only Built 4 Cuban Linx and Liquid
Swords. By contrast, songs like “Uzi (Pinky Ring)” and “Can it Be That it
Was All So Simple” are stripped of most of the qualities that made the original
songs so memorable. Even worse, El Michels Affair turns “Cherchez La Ghost” and
“Shimmy Shimmy Ya” into shells of the former selves, and the latter features
perhaps the worst children’s chorus in music history. As a whole, the project
illustrates RZA’s strengths as a producer and the connection with movies that
has been at the forefront of the Clan’s music since the opening skit on Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers). RZA is
so in tune to film as a medium that so much of his music could double as
evocative soundtrack music. El Michels Affair was just the wrong band to
directly translate his beats into that form. Still, a few members of the Clan
responded positively to the project, and Raekwon even did a few shows with the
band.
After the Raekwon/Ghostface/RZA spat surrounding the release
of 8 Diagrams, it was kind of
surprising that all three would appear on an album together so soon after, but
that’s exactly what happened with Wu-Tang
Chamber Music in early summer of 2009. Chamber
Music is not an official Wu-Tang Clan album. Instead, it’s probably best
classified as a compilation album featuring most of the generals (GZA, Masta
Killa, and Method Man are noticeably absent) along with a cast of great NY
rappers who all had their respective heydays in the nineties. A soul band
called the Revelations provided the music which was then chopped up and
fashioned into beats by Fizzy Womack (aka Lil’ Fame from M.O.P.), Noah Rubin,
and Andrew Kelley. The resulting beats have the fuzzy grit of sampled beats
while still sounding like they were performed by a live band. RZA oversaw
things as executive producer, controlling the overall direction of the project
while letting others handle the actual performance. The results are great. The
album is broken up by too many RZA skits—the skits are all pretty cool, but
there are more of them than there are songs—and while the album barely hangs
together as a cohesive whole as a result, the songs are almost all great. None
of the generals drop a weak verse,[4]
and with the exception of Sadat X, none of the guests do either.[5]
The beats are the album’s main draw though, showing that RZA’s best place these
days is as an executive producer.
When the Revelations, Womack, Rubin, Kelley, and RZA reunited
in 2011 for the sequel Legendary Weapons,
RZA was so busy making his movie The Man
with the Iron Fists that he really phoned in his executive producer duties.
It shows on pretty much every song on the album. The main problem is that the
songs sound much less like the product of a band than Chamber Music does. Without that live vibe, we’re left with a bunch
of fairly average Wu-Tangesque beats. The best thing about the record (and Chamber Music, for that matter) is that
Ghostface is all over this thing, turning in more of his reliably good verses.
Also, Legendary Weapons features the
triumphant return of Killa Sin, former member of Killarmy and arguably the most
purely talented Killa Bee. On “The Black Diamonds,” he more than proves that
the years he spent in prison throughout the 2000s did nothing to diminish his abilities
as a rapper, as he ably holds his own against Ghostface and Roc Marciano, who
has been one of the rap MVPs of the last few years. Along with RZA, Killa Sin
is the only person to get a solo track, and while he spits venom across the
entirety of “Drunk Tongue,” the beat is an insubstantial retread of the more
muted tracks on Chamber Music. I listened
to Chamber Music a lot in the first
few months it was out, and it still gets play on my iPod to this day, but while
Legendary Weapons is two years newer
than its predecessor, I was struck by how little I remembered of it when I
returned to it this week. Without RZA taking control, the remaining producers
were unable to put together a memorable record.
The Clan’s history with bands and live instrumentation has
been spotty to say the least. When it was announced last year that Ghostface
was recording an album with Adrian Younge, it was cause for both concern—for all
the reasons listed above—and excitement, as RZA was executive producing the
album and it was hinted that the album would be a concept record. Outside of
the Black Dynamite soundtrack, Younge
mostly struggled with his projects, with the results often sounding flat and
forced, as if he didn’t yet know how to translate his musical goals into great
music. He overcame that problem on his collaborative album with William Hart of
the Delfonics, and refined his abilities even further on the Ghostface record.
Apparently having an older artist such as Hart or RZA to guide him is exactly
what Younge needs to create his best material. Moreover, his desire to build on
the work of soundtrack and library music musicians from the sixties and
seventies makes him a natural fit for the Clan, whose best work, as stated
previously, is heavily cinematic. With Younge, the Clan has come full circle
back to the filmic sounds of Only Built 4
Cuban Linx and Liquid Swords, and
the storyline of the album—which I’ll tackle in depth in my review—has given a focus
to album guests Inspectah Deck, Masta Killa, U-God, and Cappadonna that they
haven’t had on their recent projects. Like Younge, these generals have
struggled to create solo projects of lasting quality in spite of their obvious
talent, and they benefit greatly from some executive production. Younge seems
to be growing into his musical vision and he could really help some of these
guys attain the same career revitalization Ghostface has had on Twelve Reasons to Die. Take Younge’s sound on Twelve
Reasons to Die, and especially on the last track, and throw in a dash of
Goblin and other Italian horror soundtrack masters, and Method Man could tap
into the old Tical headspace for a
horror/crime concept record.[6]
Masta Killa could put together a subdued kung fu story record along the lines
of The 36th Chamber of Shaolin.
GZA could either follow the sci-fi muse that he’s tapping into for his upcoming
Dark Matter project or return to the Shogun Assassin darkness that fueled so
much of Liquid Swords. What I’m
saying is that the Younge/Wu-Tang combination, with RZA serving as the abbot
overseeing and teaching without directly involving himself unless it’s
absolutely necessary, is such a winning formula that it would be a damn shame
if more of the Clan didn’t try to make lightning strike twice.
[2]
Why Islord was allowed to rap on so many songs is a mystery to me.
[3] The
incredible “I Can’t Go to Sleep” which features a sample from Isaac Hayes’ “Walk
on By” and guest vocals from Hayes himself, and “Hollow Bones,” which has a
killer Syl Johnson sample, are the best examples of RZA’s sample beats in this
era. Unfortunately, these were increasingly few and far between.
[4]
Although U-God probably could have avoided comparing himself to Seabiscuit on “Sound
the Horns.”
[5] Sadat
X is my favorite member of Brand Nubian, and for my money his first album Wild Cowboys is the best Brand Nubian
solo record. Still, over the last few years the most obnoxious aspects of his
voice and flow have been amplified on too many of his verses and too much of
his stuff has been basically unlistenable as a result (see Wild Cowboys II). Thankfully, he’s balanced out on this record by
Cormega, Sean Price, and the other guests.
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