In the beginning, there was RZA and Ghostface.
Back in 1992, the Staten Island roommates recorded “Tearz,” cwhich
became the first official Wu-Tang Clan song and later appeared as the
most overtly emotional cut on the group’s debut, Enter the Wu-Tang (36
Chambers). Though the conceptual DNA of the clan had been germinating
among RZA and his cousins GZA and Ol’ Dirty Bastard, “Tearz” was the
moment of crystallization, the year zero for the Wu-Tang Clan. This
month finds releases from both founding fathers: Ghostface Killah’s
third solo record in two years, The Big Doe Rehab, and 8 Diagrams, the
first record by the Wu-Tang Clan—as directed by RZA—in six
years. Keeping up the momentum, Raekwon’s Dr. Dre–helmed Cuban
Linx 2 is forthcoming in 2008. Fifteen years after Wu-Tang changed the
face of hiphop, a new Wu golden age
is underway.
Ghost’s Big Doe Rehab marks another chapter in his recent
streak of excellence, following last year’s Fishscale and
More Fish. His skills have elevated to a constant, relaxed
greatness and the record displays all his steely intelligence,
head-busting vitriol, and screw-faced humor. The problem arises with
the beats: With much of the production handled by Puff Daddy’s Hitmen
consortium (who also manned the bulk of Jay-Z’s recent American
Gangster), they’re soulful and head-nodding but ultimately feel
workmanlike and forgettable. The music lacks the bombastic violence
Pete Rock and Just Blaze provided to Fishscale or the
scuttling weirdness MF Doom and Madlib dropped on More Fish.
It’s more a strong volume in the Ghostface canon than an arresting
event album. It’s also better than most anything in contemporary
hiphop.
To paraphrase the late Apollo Creed, Ghostface raps great, but
Wu-Tang are the greatest rap group of all time. RZA has heralded the
new album as a genius piece, an assertion that Wu-Tang is for the whole
world and that, again, they are the one true remedy to humanity’s
cultural and spiritual illness. The record arrived on Earth cometlike,
in a swarm of difficulty and confusion. There has been much of the
requisite Wu-Tang chaos in the weeks preceding its release: Reported
first single “Watch Your Mouth” doesn’t even appear on the album; the
reported posthumous ODB verse appears only on a live-sounding
European-only track; and most dramatically, both Ghostface and Raekwon
(a pair that traditionally forms a subset within the Clan) have voiced
grievances about the record’s content and method of delivery.
Ghostface’s primary issue—that 8 Diagrams had been
pushed back so far that it landed on the same date as Big Doe
Rehab‘s release—appeared to be a beef with the Wu business
management and has apparently been remedied by RZA’s diplomacy.
Raekwon’s gripes are more serious.
In a very long public dissent via an online interview with New York
gossip maven Miss Info, Rae decried 8 Diagrams as being too
musically diffuse; too littered with guitars, singers, and orchestral
effects; not hard hitting enough. He seemed resentful of RZA’s
dictatorial stance in the record’s final vibe and hinted that the
album’s nonadherence to Wu-Tang’s sonic roots could seriously damage
his reputation. At his most petulant, he called RZA a “hiphop
hippie.”
Understandably, these are emotionally high-pitched times for the Wu
generals, with 8 Diagrams a potential marker of how all of
their artistic lives will move into their respective middle ages. While
there’s truth in Rae’s lament over the album not containing another
“Triumph” (quite possibly the best rap song ever), his complaints smack
of an anxiety that dudes as brilliant and accomplished as the Wu-Tang
Clan should be immune to: an aging artist’s fear of not being
accepted.
For a group whose entire tenure on this planet has been as chaotic
as the Clan’s, it’s only fitting that 8 Diagrams is divisive
among the public as well as the members of the Clan themselves.
Fortunately, the record is astonishing. RZA’s beats strike a balance
between his musical past and future, using hypnotic, grimy, one- and
two-bar loops on the stampeding “Rushing Elephants” and “Wolves” and
more extended song forms on stunning opener “Campfire” and the dopesick
Beatles adaptation “The Heart Gently Weeps.” The old-kung-fu-movie
samples are better integrated than on any previous Wu album (the first
song’s condemnation that “Money cannot buy you courage” seems a direct
attack on modern hiphop’s wealth-equals- power ethos) and nearly
everyone is in the fiercest lyrical form since Wu-Tang
Forever.
The Clan is entering a place unprecedented in hiphop—all
around 40 years old, they are making the most vicious and vital work of
their careers. As a collective effort, 8 Diagrams offers a
vision of hiphop’s future nearly as dramatic as Enter the
Wu-Tang, a path to artistic longevity that Ghostface and the rest
of the crew have yet to achieve individually. That path is one of
freedom: freedom from expectations, from the need to imitate old glory.
RZA would have you believe that path leads to global domination. At the
very least, it’s an example of how great artists should age—not
with fear for their own future but with fearless vision for the entire
world’s. 