Review: Ghostface Killah & Adrian Younge - Twelve Reasons to Die

Since Ghostface Killah’s Supreme Clientele dropped in 2000 and essentially closed the book on the Wu-Tang Clan’s near-unimpeachable nineties run, there have been only a handful of serious landmarks in the Wu-Tang catalog: Masta Killa’s No Said Date in 2004, Ghostface’s Fishscale in 2006, Raekwon’s Only Built 4 Cuban Linx… Pt. II in 2009.[1] With the latter, Raekwon knocked Ghostface out of the top spot in the Wu-Tang pantheon, and since then Ghostface has been spinning his wheels a bit, releasing the ill-advised but amazingly titled R&B project Ghostdini: Wizard of Poetry in Emerald City, the good but undercooked Apollo Kids, the tossed off Ghost/Rae/Meth collaboration Wu-Massacre, and the painfully generic Wu-Block with the LOX’s Sheek Louch. On Twelve Reasons to Die, Ghostface is reenergized and focused, and he sounds hungry again for the first time since Fishscale. Ghost has given the Clan their fourth landmark album of their second decade.

Masta Killa and "Glaciers of Ice"

I was just listening to this song a bunch earlier today and I’m struck by two things that make this one of the best tracks on Raekwon’s nearly perfect Only Built 4 Cuban Lunx. First, it took some serious audacity for RZA to flip the same sample twice on the same album, but he did just that with the rugged strings that drive “Guillotine (Swordz)” and underpin this song. Second, Masta Killa was unstoppable from his first verse on “Da Mystery of Chessboxin’” through everything he did on Wu-Tang Forever, and this song is no exception. He was unstoppable enough that he could show up between Raekwon and Ghostface in their primes on a song and still be the illest by a wide margin. Inspectah Deck and U-God were similarly astounding during this five year period, and it’s a shame that all three didn’t get RZA-produced solo albums during the five-year plan. A Masta Killa album in 1996 would have undoubtedly been a classic since RZA didn’t make a bad beat during this era and Masta Killa was capable of verses like this. It probably would’ve even surpassed No Said Date.