In 1995, critics saw in Only Built 4 Cuban Linx... the same things that fans of the record celebrated. It invented “mafioso rap” and glorified mass criminality; its songs were paeans to those hardworking souls ducking RICO charges. The album was a blueprint for narrative in gangsta rap albums. It profoundly influenced Jay-Z, Nas, and the very sound of New York rap, thanks in part to RZA’s extraordinary beats and the introduction of Raekwon and Ghostface as a legendary rap duo. But the record could be all those things, could be influential, without being widely listened to today. It could simply be an artifact of its time. Cuban Linx remains relevant not because of its violence or the way it changed rap history, but for what it really is: an anthology of brotherly love stories, framed by the deep connection between its two stars.
You don’t need to have taken a course in masculinity studies to acknowledge that American men have been socialized to avoid overt displays of emotionality. So to tell stories like the ones that Raekwon and Ghostface Killah tell on Only Built 4 Cuban Linx..., you needed to disguise the narrative. The plot needed to be cryptic and bloody. All the gangsterisms, everything that made the album so palatable to many fans, those violent elements color the story. But they are all deeply intertwined with the tenderness at the record’s core, which stands in contrast to the gritty image associated with the Wu-Tang Clan.
That said, in 1995, Raekwon had no problem talking about what Ghost meant to him. “That’s my heart right there,” he told Jeff “Chairman” Mao that year, shortly before the record was released, the third Wu solo album to follow 1993’s group debut, Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers). “We think so much alike. Like I’ll say something and he’ll be like, ‘Yo, I was just gettin’ ready to say that, son.’” RZA brought the pair together. The sage of the Wu-Tang clan had known Raekwon since second grade and was living with Ghost in the early ’90s. He saw the couple as a natural fit, notorious stick-up kids, former rivals raised in different parts of Staten Island, Ghost from the Stapleton projects, Rae from Park Hill. “They kinda hooked up and seen that similarity in them, and that’s how it went down,” he told XXL. “They didn’t know each other as well as they knew me—it was my concept.”
For RZA, the concept of Cuban Linx was business-oriented as was so much else with the Wu-Tang: the order that solo records would be released, who would appear on each song, and countless other decisions were made with the bottom line in mind. (In 1996, a Harvard Business School professor, James Cash, said the Wu were at “the head of the class in terms of strategy development.”) The album was to be designed for a specific demographic, the street guys, who the Clan had never addressed quite so directly. And for Raekwon, a full-time rap career was simply the sensible option. He had been a hood, and he was tired of that life. “I had a name for myself on that street, so my time, my sand was running out,” he told Mao. There was ample opportunity for a lateral move. He had honed his skills through battle rapping and was already recognized as one of the strongest MCs in the crew. He and Ghost took the first pair of verses on Enter the Wu-Tang, and his leadoff verse on “C.R.E.A.M.”—“I grew up on the crime side/The New York Times side”—was a minted classic.
Raekwon established a unique rhyming style on Cuban Linx. He uses short staccato bars laced with internal rhymes to deliver fragmented stories, ones for which there is a range of interpretations. His lyrics are precise and diffuse, digressive and focused, thematically consistent but constantly roving. It’s not that the narrative doesn’t add up, it’s that two dedicated listeners can disagree on exactly what happened in a verse, bar or song, without one of them being proven wrong. (It was 2016 when the rapper finally cleared up whether he had said “who sons who” or “who Sun Tzu” on “Incarcerated Scarfaces”.) On “Knowledge God,” in one of the greatest rap verses that exists, he describes a rich man named Mike Lavonia in intimate detail. It only takes Raekwon 150 words to give him a soul.
The lyrics don’t always look like much laid out: “Mafia flicks, tying up tricks/Was his main hobby/Teaching his seed, Wu-Tang karate/Mixing drinks in clubs, hairy chest with many minks.” But they are alive on record, and you come away from the verse aware of Raekwon’s affection for and knowledge of this petty emperor, Lavonia. He names his pipe Sandra (which is kind of adorable!) and claims that New York is ancient Babylon. What you may not realize is that Raekwon’s character has killed Lavonia by the time the verse begins. This man—portrayed lovingly, wistfully, and in full—is already dead.
Only Built 4 Cuban Linx... is stacked with little stories like this, more an anthology than a record with a master narrative, though RZA would tell you otherwise. His inspiration for the album came from The Killer, the John Woo film in which an assassin and a police detective team up (dialogue from that film and Scarface (which was partly where that began) is sampled throughout the album). RZA has said that the narrative of Cuban Linx follows a similar path, as two characters from rival neighborhoods team up to pull off one last job before leaving the criminal life forever. But Rae and Ghost only halfway engaged in that narrative, which makes RZA’s enduring contribution not his concepts (which could be dicey!), but his ability to bring like-minds together over the most finely tuned collection of beats he ever provided for a single album, recorded in the basement of his Staten Island home. As a producer, he refused to let a simple loop carry any given song, and so classic tracks like “Criminology” and “Wu-Gambinos” are laced with additional instrumental flourishes, separate melodies that guide the tracks to a higher plane. The loop on “Ice Water” is already perfectly proportioned and RZA still can’t help but to drop scratches, switch up the rhythm of the vocal sample, and play with a half-dozen other ideas, granting the listener the simultaneous pleasures of minimalism (in repetition) and maximalism (in the number of elements at play).
Raekwon was capable of living within those intricacies, angling his words to fit pockets created by the instrumental churn. And while Ghost was his equal in terms of pure ability, he was more liable to just bulldoze through everything, letting his intuition, aggression and unmatchable sense of humor guide his bars. While many of Rae’s verses are relatively stoic (see “Incarcerated Scarfaces”), Starks brings an unparalleled energy: On “Criminology,” he talks about being “trapped by sounds/Locked behind loops,” and his verses often feel like he’s giving his all to just get the hell out of the booth, out of the basement. Even on the relatively peaceful “Wisdom Body,” ostensibly a love song, Ghost’s vibe is all wrong for the lyrics, his need to be over and done with everything just bleeding through the track, poisoning what should be a smooth, relaxed, loverman take. He was drunk when he recorded the verses to the song—as he was while recording much of the album—and you can hear him slurring. Several times, the track seems to flinch, as RZA substitutes one take for another. Even fucked up, you can hear why Ghost is a match for his partner; lines like, “Your eyes sparkle/Just like glass in the sun,” are beautiful, piercing, and sad. “I was going through a lot of real internal shit during Cuban Linx” Ghost told XXL. “I was drinking my pain away every day.”
Cuban Linx makes explicit use of that pain on songs like “Rainy Dayz,” on which an agitated Ghost spells out his troubles, fuming after he’s just been robbed. On tracks like these, his chemistry with Rae is most obvious. After he calls himself ungodly at the end of his verse, Rae extends a helping hand, kicking his verse off with wisdom from the Nation of Islam and eventually guides Ghost away from the edge of total derangement. “Half of us’ll try to make it, the other half will try to take it,” he reasons, and his rational acceptance of the random gyres of misfortune that life throws at us is the yin to Ghost’s agitated yang.
You might think, given their chemistry, that other features might slow the momentum of Cuban Linx. But fraternal affection isn’t a zero-sum game and the posse tracks on the record are as strong as the solo performances. There are sterling features from the Wu-Tang underclass, Cappadonna on “Ice Water”; U-God on “Knuckleheadz.” And Cuban Linx features the first cameo from a rapper outside of Wu Corp. on “Verbal Intercourse.” Nas shows up, in his prime, holding forth with the roving camera eye that was already familiar from his 1994 debut, Illmatic, the one New York album that consistently outranks Cuban Linx on the list of all-time great rap records. You can see why. Illmatic’s verses are far more straightforward, which makes them more accessible. Take “One Love,” where everything Nas writes to his friend in prison is intelligible to the casual listener. Compare it to the opening verse of “Knowledge God,” where the idea of writing to a friend in prison comes in halfway through, Rae reflecting on club nights when he remembers that Cousin Reek is upstate, and pivots to address Reek directly.
This is Cuban Linx: so much is jumbled, digressive, filled with ambiguous meaning, down to the title itself, which was shorn of an extra word. It’s a code, a puzzle, and a bible. Much like the slow pace of baseball was perfectly suited to the era of radio, the album owes much of its reputation to its release in the mid-1990s. This, of course, was before the iPod, when listeners who had purchased individual records wanted to sit with them, get their money’s worth, and would spend weeks if not months listening to an album, deciphering every last word. It was also before Twitter, where Rae could just solve the record’s decade-long riddles. Because the prophets weren’t available to interpret their scriptures, the members of early online forums devoted hours to hashing out the record’s Talmudic qualities, and in doing so, spread the Wu gospel.
There was a religious aspect to Rae’s raps. His slang was borrowed equally from Staten Island and the Five Percenter movement, which branched off from the Nation of Islam in the 1960s and which Raekwon associated with when he was still a kid. But he certainly wasn’t looking to alienate listeners; he was simply trying to make enough money to eat. Rapping for him was about escaping the life he had lived, exchanging criminality for criminology, and poverty for a full belly and a flute of Cristal. He was happy to move away from authenticity, and he says as much several times on Cuban Linx. “I’m out,” he says on “Knuckleheadz.” “My raps play the part like a ‘Get Smart’ secret agent,” meaning, essentially, that he was happy to be a fake James Bond, if it alleviated the risk and he could make some ends.
And then there was the added joy of having partners, people who could help you up and hold you down. Listen to the beginning of “Wu-Gambinos,” where Rae is jubilant to have an extended crew around him. Method Man’s chorus reflects that delight in the posse’s presence: “Wu roll together as one/I call my brother Son cause he shine like one.” The song is famous for the crew names, the AKA invention that would soon sweep rap. (A year later, Nas was already calling himself Nas Escobar on It Was Written.) As Rae put it to Mao: “People seen that we came in with nothin’ and left with something…. If you one of them niggas that’s just all about money, there gotta be love first. Love your niggas that you rollin’ with. Love them.”
The record ends as the crew disappears and Rae and Ghost are together, the partners rhyming in tandem, reminiscing about old robberies. Raekwon addresses the overlap directly, acknowledging their closeness: “We connect thoughts.” As the outro rolls, they lament the fragility of life, mourn dead friends, and shout out their collaborators. The guns, the bullets, the semi-fictionalized dispatched enemies: They fall away, leaving only the real world, and the realest fact of their world is love for their brothers.
