At this point, twenty years to the day after Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) came
out, using the word ‘grimy’ to describe that album or anything that the Wu-Tang
Clan has done since has become the hoariest of clichés. Yet watching the video
for “Protect Ya Neck,” the group’s first single, it’s clear that no other word
so perfectly encapsulates what they were doing. Anything resembling
professionalism, like proper lighting or good cameras, is nonexistent,
everything looks like a first take, and they apparently couldn’t be bothered to
remove the camcorder time stamp from most of the color shots. A bunch of the
group members’ names are misspelled (Inspektah Deck, Ghost Face Killer, the
Jizah). It’s impossible to really tell, but my guess that there are about forty
people in the video seems like a conservative estimate, and all but a few of
them are completely unrecognizable.[1]
Just how many of them are actually in the group? It isn’t clear from the video.
A bunch of them have swords, and there are scary-looking guys lurking in
project hallways and alleys in the back of most of the shots. The video is five
minutes of menace and a dizzying array of lyrical styles over an intoxicated,
haphazardly mixed beat the likes of which had not been heard before.
A few months before the “Protect Ya Neck” video started gaining
traction on Rap City, the Wu-Tang Clan got their first break in a way that fits the menace that
they projected in that first video perfectly. During an episode of the Stretch
& Bobbito Show, which aired every Thursday night on WKCR 89.9FM from one to
five in the morning, a few members and affiliates of the Clan either snuck or
broke into the WKCR offices, unmarked white label 12” in hand.[2]
If threats were made they were no more than implied, but the message was clear:
it was in Stretch & Bobbito’s best interest to play the song. “Protect Ya
Neck” got its first radio play that night, and it earned the group’s members spots
as semi-regular presences on the show until 1998 when it went off the air.
Muscling in, getting heard in exactly the way they wanted by
making exactly the kind of music they wanted to make, that was the Clan’s MO.
GZA and RZA had been burned before, with GZA putting out the pretty good but
artistically compromised and mostly ignored Words
from the Genius on Cold Chillin’ in 1991 and RZA, as Prince Rakeem, putting
out one 12” single “Ooh, We Love You Rakeem,” on Tommy Boy later that year.[3]
RZA was especially bitter about his treatment at the hands of Tommy Boy, and he
was not going to make the same mistakes again. The two had no desire to
affiliate themselves with any fake ass A&Rs or any A&Rs that spent
their time mountain climbing and playing electric guitar. As much as possible,
they wanted to work for themselves, with no creative input from label
executives. They recruited the six best rappers from Staten Island’s Park Hill
and Stapleton Projects[4]
and pitched them the now famous five year plan: hand their careers over to RZA
for five years, and he would take them to the top of the rap world.
The group was unprecedented in its size, and the contract
that RZA demanded from Loud Records was downright revolutionary. They signed to
Loud as a group, but all of the group’s members were free to pursue solo
contracts with other labels. The Wu-Tang brand spread across hip-hop while
remaining intimidatingly insular. Features for and by people outside of the
Clan were almost nonexistent during the five year plan. The Clan was one
shadowy unit with one purpose, like the faceless ninjas on the cover of Enter the Wu-Tang.
Those ninjas, who perfectly encapsulated the Clan’s group
identity as a cabal of verbal warriors while also keeping everything about them
hidden and mysterious, attracts the eye to the album, but it couldn’t hope to
prepare you for the sounds on the disc within. The samples, culled mostly from
45s from the Stax and Hi Records catalogs, were familiar to many hip-hop fans,
but on Enter the Wu-Tang they were
warped and covered in a sonic grit that they seemed to have picked up while sitting
in the dark, dusty corners of the RZA’s studio. This mixing is actually
disorienting at times, with vocals actually drowning out the drums during parts
of a few songs. This would be a disaster for pretty much anyone else, but it
only adds to the grubby basement vibe of the whole record.
And then there are the voices. Everyone is so vocally
distinct, but they all share an urgency and a ferocity that creates a
compulsively listenable environment. It doesn’t even really make sense to
single out individual verses since there isn’t a dud in the bunch, but every
member has at least one career-defining verse on Enter the Wu-Tang. Even U-God and Masta Killa, who only had a verse
or two each,[5]
manage to completely express who they are as rappers before the album is over.
The same goes for the group’s aesthetic. The album opens with a sample from the
1983 kung fu classic Shaolin & Wu
Tang, and the record is littered with samples from other kung fu VHS tapes
that RZA had accumulated. Between the movie samples and the frequently
hilarious skits (the torture skit alone is worth the price of admission), RZA
was able to stitch the ragged songs together into a coherent and cohesive whole.
Unlike so many of the people writing about Enter the Wu-Tang this week, I can’t say
that I heard the album when it came out. Sure, songs like “Wu-Tang Clan Ain’t
Nuthing ta Fuck Wit” and “C.R.E.A.M.” were inescapable in the mid-nineties, and
I was certainly aware of the group and some of the bigger members (Method Man
and ODB, specifically) during elementary school. I remember some of my friends
being really excited when Wu-Tang Forever
came out in 1997, but outside of the Beastie Boys and Cypress Hill, who both
got play on the alternative rock station in Chicago, hip-hop didn’t really make
it onto my radar until The Chronic 2001
and The Slim Shady LP two years
later. I missed out on the Wu almost entirely for far too long. I first sat
down and listened to Enter the Wu-Tang
a little over ten years after it came out. It was one of those too rare album
experiences where you can feel your entire perspective on music shifting more
and more with each song.
No other group hip-hop or otherwise rewards my obsessive
tendencies like the Wu does. Their discography is seemingly endless, and
hunting down every affiliate, every side project, and every loose song is
incredibly rewarding in spite of all of the chaff. After I worked through every
group and solo album by the original nine, I had all of the Killa Bees, many of
whom put out great stuff. Every Heavy Mental
or Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars made
sifting through all of the garbage worth it, and the best of the best offered
unique takes on the basic Wu formula. But it’s that original formula in its
undiluted form that remains the most appealing, and that’s only found on the
original five year plan albums.[6]
The basic formula did more than set out a roadmap for the Wu
going forward; it shifted the New York sound as a whole. While there were a few
precursors (Black Moon’s Enta Da Stage
from the month before being probably the most important), the dark, streetwise
sound that came to define New York in the mid-nineties can be sourced almost
directly back to that first Wu-Tang album. The jazzy, upbeat sound of New York
at the turn of decade spawned more than a few classic albums, but it was
clearly losing out to the west coast in terms of both influence and sales. The
sonic shift brought on by Enter the
Wu-Tang and carried further by Ready
to Die, Illmatic, and many others
tipped the scales back in New York’s favor.
Even with the sea change that Enter the Wu-Tang caused, to this day no other album sounds quite
like it. Even the two Wu-Tang solo albums that come closest, Tical and Return to the 36 Chambers, already showed RZA moving toward the more
controlled, less dusted menace that he would perfect on the two best Wu solo
albums Only Built 4 Cuban Linx… and Liquid Swords. The album is so of its
time and of the artist’s ages, so much the product of a borough that had mostly
been left alone by the hip-hop community at large, that trying to duplicate it
would be a fool’s errand. So while Liquid
Swords and Only Built 4 Cuban Linx…
have been ripped off so many times that they almost qualify as subgenres of
hip-hop themselves, people have mostly left Enter
the Wu-Tang alone. I doubt even the RZA could recreate that sound at this
point. It’s just as well. Enter the
Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) is like a perfectly self-contained movie. A sequel
would just be a waste of film.
[1] Hi
Cappadonna! He appears briefly during Rae’s verse.
[2]
It’s not clear who actually showed up at the studio that night, but people who
were there are pretty sure that Ghostface was among them, and ODB and RZA were
probably there too.
[3]
Cold Chillin’ pressured GZA, then known as the Genius, to record the sub-LL
Cool J sex jam “Come Do Me” for Words
from the Genius and then released it as the first single. It’s the worst
song on the album by a pretty wide margin, and it’s no wonder that the
otherwise pretty good album sank like a stone.
[4]
Masta Killa didn’t join the group until near the end of the recording process
for Enter the Wu-Tang so it was an
eight-man group at the start.
[5] I’m
counting U-God’s “Protect Ya Neck” bridge as a verse, otherwise they’d both go
down as having one.
[6] Those
albums are Enter the Wu-Tang and Wu-Tang Forever, plus the solo albums
that Method Man, Ol’ Dirty Bastard, Raekwon, GZA, and Ghostface put out between
1994 and 1996 and 6 Feet Deep, the
great first album by RZA’s side project the Gravediggaz.
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