The uproar surrounding pharma bro Martin Shkreli’s Once Upon A Time in Shaolin, a Wu-Tang Clan album pressed in an edition of one in 2014 and stored in a safe at a Moroccan hotel, was illuminating. Barely a year after A Better Tomorrow, the Clan’s first wide release album in seven years, went largely ignored, Shkreli bought the only pressing of Shaolin for $2 million at auction. As the latter was certified the most valuable album in existence, the former struggled to sell 50,000 copies. While listeners complained about not being able to hear the mythic Wu-Tang Clan album Shkreli dangled over their heads like a carrot for years, they largely rejected the Wu-Tang album that was already easily accessible, which was telling: With Wu-Tang Clan, now, it’s more about the idea, the legacy than the actual music.
Wu-Tang Clan lore has long been so significant that a prospective juror in Shkreli’s fraud case admitted they couldn’t be objective because of it—sure, Shkreli’s bad business denied access to medicine to many but he’d also tarnished the sacred Wu emblem with his petty posturing. “It’s my attitude toward his entire demeanor, what he has done to people,” a transcript of the jury selection process revealed. “And he disrespected the Wu-Tang Clan.” They’ve become a symbol, a “Chappelle’s Show” skit. Recently, Bloomberg reported that Shkreli himself may even have been seduced by the Wu-Tang Clan mythos; the very rare Wu-Tang artifact he thought he paid millions for could just be an unauthorized side project later repackaged and marketed as a crafted and prized collectible (Shkreli admitted in the album’s eBay listing that he never really listened to it), which led to an argument about what the working definition of a “Wu-Tang Clan album” even is. The status of that exclusive, and the crew’s new release, The Saga Continues, begs the question: What even makes a Wu-Tang album these days?
Before even releasing The Saga Continues, the project’s architects made clear that it isn’t a canonical Wu-Tang Clan album; RZA has pegged the offering as a curated collection of treasures from the Wu collective, and the project is billed to “Wu-Tang” and not “Wu-Tang Clan,” which is apparently an important distinction. So what is The Saga Continues? It can firstly be classified as a compilation, and secondly as a showcase for longtime Wu-Tang producer Mathematics. RZA executive produced the project, but Mathematics “crafted” it. (At the end of “Lesson Learn’d,” Redman, who is not a member of the Clan but gets more airtime than six living members, intimates as much, introducing Math as the show’s star.) The project has all the moving parts of a Wu-Tang album, but the gaps in posse cuts are filled by affiliates like Killah Priest and Streetlife. On average there’s one official Clan member per song, almost as if sharing space is a chore. Where Wu-Tang Clan once felt like a cohesive unit made up of diverse voices and personas, the group now seems like a dysfunctional family begrudgingly reconvening for reunions.
No matter how this is billed—group or collective, album or anthology—the project is a self-fulfilling prophesy: The Saga Continues feels like an unnecessary continuation of a Wu-Tang adventure growing more and more tedious, only persisting out of some misplaced sense of loyalty to the brand. They’re still trading on the name, yet they don’t even want to commit to making music en masse. The Wu-Tang group efforts are largely unimaginative affairs now. They’re mostly rapping in circles. They ignore the conditions that forged some recent solo work worth visiting. There’s none of the panel-by-panel storytelling of Ghostface’s Twelve Reasons to Die series, or the dramatic flair of the last few Raekwon albums. Ghostface is the least illustrative he’s been in some time. And Raekwon sounds flat-out disengaged. The project is packed with extremely dated references, and outdated rhetoric. On “Why Why Why,” RZA chastises strippers dancing for rich showmen like Floyd Mayweather, Jr. (“And she wonders why, why, why she can’t keep her husband?”) but doesn’t condemn or even mention the boxer’s history of domestic violence. In a guest spot, the late Sean Price proudly pronounces “I don’t weirdo with queer clothes.” Later on the same song, RZA raps, “Bobby Dig convert Lady Gaga/Back to heterosexual,” which aside from being problematic, misunderstands both Gaga and how sexuality works. Everything about this feels dusty, suspect, and archaic.
Anyone who comes in expecting a throwback is rewarded with a workable period piece: This is a spin-off in every sense. The Saga Continues is full of competent if forgettable rapping straight out of the Wu-Tang manuscripts, and each Wu rapper does a serviceable job mustering up shades of their primes, in function. The verses don’t do what they used to, but at a distance they move in the same ways. Songs are sketches using old Clan templates. There are skits. Mathematics knows the Wu-Tang blueprint well and is more than capable of executing; he supplies their staples: sample-heavy soul, knocking drums, and the usual snippets from martial arts cinema. But nothing notable or consequential happens inside. And worse still: nothing unpredictable happens. Why listen to a bargain bin Wu joint when 36 Chambers is readily available? Outside of servicing the most diehard Wu-Tang fans, this album has little to no utility.
As pointless as the project is, The Saga Continues isn’t a complete drag. Method Man and Redman, longtime partners in crime, come away as the standouts. They’re consistent, delivering the best verses on “People Say” and reuniting as a tag-team for the loud-mouthed “Hood Go Bang!” But early on, Redman all but provides the compilation’s thesis: “At my age it’s all about bread/Tryna be nice at 40, you can have it all shawty/I’m tryna make history, and history say: ‘Fuck rap,’ I divorced her, the bitch bore me.” More than anything, The Saga Continues seems like a lazy way to cash in on Wu-Tang cachet. This wouldn’t be the first time.
