A few weeks ago, BET aired Wu: The Story of the Wu-Tang Clan, a documentary which promised never-before-seen footage of the Staten Island group's rise to fame. The accompanying soundtrack does absolutely nothing of the sort-- but really, that's sort of the point. Regardless of how many of us dutifully buck up every summer for Rock the Bells, there's still classic rock-style money to be made off the Wu-Tang legend. And invested parties can't always rely on merely pleasing those old enough to have skipped AP Calc so they could cop the enhanced-CD version of Wu-Tang Forever at the local Coconuts. After all, RZA told us we didn't even need to go to summer school as long as we had "Black Shampoo" and "Dog Shit" as educational guidance.
Best-case scenario is that Wu reach the rarified territory of freshman dorm rack-fillers like Eagles Greatest Hits Vol. 1, Led Zeppelin IV, or that Doors double-LP with a shirtless Jim Morrison doing the Jesus Christ pose. Not in terms of sales, but in the manner in which it inspires you to purchase every single LP from the group within the span of a week, even to the point where you find yourself paying legal tender for motherfucking Coda (translates to "Iron Flag" in Wu-speak). It's hard not to see that being the case, because for a group not known as a singles act-- and whose studio records are considered sacrosanct-- the singles are more than adequate preparation for the deeper cuts.
Judged by the music itself, Wu deserves some gaudy grade-- unsurprising, considering it contains half of Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) and neglects anything that came out after the year 2000. Time has done nothing to lessen the impact of these tracks, and though the group has viciously asserted itself as purveyors of true hip-hop, the sheer physical violence of 36 Chambers (as many people quote the intro to "Method Man" as the song itself) made it crucially appeal to people who had no prior investment in the genre. Regardless of the punk approach to communitas on the mic (outside of starmaking single "Method Man") and production (the record is rumored to have been released unmastered by Loud), "Bring Da Ruckus" and "Wu-Tang Clan Ain't Nuthing To F' Wit" are themselves broadsides against whatever complacencies are pissing you off that day. There's little left to be said about these inclusions, though leaving off the more "message" selections ("Tearz", "Can It Be All So Simple") indicates that Wu is first and foremost seeking to prove that the Clan was hook-filled if not necessarily pop in the traditional sense.
Choices from the first round of solo releases are solid as well, drawing from the most sonically compatible records-- Ol' Dirty Bastard's "Shimmy Shimmy Ya" and Raekwon's "Incarcerated Scarfaces" remain admirable in their ability to condense two very different and very dense albums into concise single servings. Ghostface Killah's Ironman (bizarrely castigated at the time as a weak link) is repped twice-- "Daytona 500" will likely always remain the definitive interpolation of "Nautilus", while 100 bars and runnin' mixtape rambles will likely always have to answer to Cappadonna's stunning turn in "Winter Warz".
Due to its chronology, Wu likely couldn't help but feel either unbalanced or oddly sequenced, but that's curiously not the case. Once Wu-Tang Forever is introduced, it feels like a completely clean break from anything before it. Deeper cuts hint at the sort of issues that would metastasize during the later part of the decade-- clashing agendas, general bloat, and RZA outsourcing beats to talented but less interesting disciples while fancying himself as more of a traditional "musician." Despite how it was held as a beacon of old-school craftsmanship in light of Bad Boy and No Limit, the strange thing about the Forever songs is how functional some of the beats sound. Can you even remember how the actual music to "Triumph" goes?
It may have been out of necessity-- as dense and visceral as the Clan was on 36 Chambers, nearly every member had simply grown too metaphysically big for another 50-minute format. Even the singles from Forever feature writing of astonishing compositional complexity-- particularly for an album that sold several million copies during one of hip-hop's more vapid stretches. Rhymes in the past weren't difficult to parse, more likely relying on blunt simile and battering ram brute force-- "I'll scream on your ass like your dad," "I make more noise than heavy metal." Meanwhile, "Reunited" and "Triumph" boast some of the most iconic introductory verses in hip-hop, the latter so intimidating in its perfection that GZA made the legendary claim that no one was initially willng to follow Inspectah Deck on the track.
After that, Wu just sort of stops altogether, ignoring the second-gen solo drops with the exception of Cappadonna's spittle-flecked "Run", a track whose thunder has been co-opted by Ghostface's song of the same name and subject matter (you can't fuck with that orange furry hat). The W piggybacked off the goodwill earned by Supreme Clientele, returning to a grimier, subterranean production aesthetic and featuring some of Ghost's most off-the-chain ramblings. Yet, its sole contribution to this disc is the embarrassingly gimmick "Gravel Pit", descirbed by RZA in The Wu-Tang Manual as "sober," a claim that its attendant video goes to great lengths to refute.
So yeah, it's easy to criticize how Wu leaves out a lot of the fun extraneous bullshit that's as noteworthy as the songs themselves-- "Wu Wear (The Garment Renaissance)", 1-900-RAEKWON, Killah Priest somehow going gold, a video game of unfathomable shittiness. Wu never had much chance of fulfilling the promise of its title within the span of a single hour (in fact, it merely steals its name from the documentary), still, as far as stocking-stuffers go, it's hard to advise against it as a smart expenditure or guidelines for a great mixtape-- just make sure you have Liquid Swords readily available when whoever you give this to inevitably asks for it.
