Wu-Tang Retrospective: Me and the Wu

By Steven WrightIt’s hard to believe it’s been 20 short years since the hip-hop community first witnessed the rise of the RZA, the GZA, Ol’ Dirty Bastard, and six other miscreants from the “slums of Shaolin” to the annals of rap history with the release of Enter the Wu-Tang: 36 Chambers. Since their heydays in the mid-‘90s, the group may have waned in both popularity and camaraderie, but their popular standing as the greatest rap collective of all time has yet to be challenged – at least in my opinion.Then again, that shouldn’t really be surprising; I’ve been a Wu-Tang Clan fan since I was about 12 years old. My introduction to the clan was a largely-forgotten piece of the marketing blitz that made them a household name around the mid-2000s, a ridiculous video game called "Wu-Tang: Shaolin Style." While the game was little more than an uninspired "Mortal Kombat"-ripoff, it introduced me to both the group’s music and the entire genre of hip-hop in a way that was immediately palatable to a pre-teen boy. To me, the Wu-Tang Clan represented the intersection of two great unknowns in my life: eastern culture and hip-hop music. I still remember listening to the strange kung-fu samples that open 36 Chambers and trying to figure out what exactly “Wu-Tang” meant. Though I listened to the album while playing the game with my friends, it wasn’t until I sat down and gave the record a full top-to-bottom listen while marathoning a pile of algebra homework that I realized that the music spoke to me on a level that I hadn’t experienced before.After that, I didn’t hesitate to buy all of the Wu’s albums and the best-regarded solo efforts by the group’s members. As it goes with group efforts, some were better than others. Raekwon the Chef’s seminal Only Built 4 Cuban Linx... is still widely considered one of the greatest rap albums of the ‘90s by both critics and fans alike. Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s own first effort, Return to the 36 Chambers, was received well enough upon its initial release, but his complex rhyme schemes and his bizarre style of rapping have done nothing but increase the album’s reputation over the past decade. Some of the group’s lesser-known members, such as U-God and Masta Killa, took years to release albums of their own and paid the price, finding limited success in an already-saturated market.In terms of the Wu unit itself, the group struggled to produce content on such a consistently high level as their first album; in particular, their sophomore album, Wu-Tang Forever, was widely considered to be a slight disappointment.As such, some might accuse the Clan of being inconsistent in quality, but I’d argue that any group of nine musicians, no matter how talented, is bound to have some missteps in their repertoire. That being said, the Clan’s latest album, 8 Diagrams, is by far the most polarizing of the entire Wu canon.Featuring more singing than rapping, a return to the heavy sample use of 36 Chambers, and a reimagining of the Beatles song “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” the critics didn’t quite know what to think of the album. Now, five years after Diagrams and nine without Ol’ Dirty Bastard, the fractured group plans to release a new album on the 20th anniversary of 36 Chambers.Everyone’s asking: will the album live up to the hype? To me, it doesn’t matter. As far as I’m concerned, RZA and the Clan have created enough hits to make anyone happy; anything else at this point is just a bonus.