(#573: 14 June 1997, 1 week)
Track listing: Wu-Revolution/Reunited/For Heavens Sake/Cash Still Rules-Scary Moves (Still Don't Nothing Move But The Money)/Visionz/As High As Wu-Tang Get/Severe Punishment/Older Gods/Maria/A Better Tomorrow/It's Yourz/Intro/Triumph/Impossible/Little Ghetto Boys/Deadly Melody/The City/The Projects/Bells Of War/The M.G.M./Dog Shit/Duck Seazon/Hellz Wind Staff/Heaterz/Black Shampoo/Second Coming/The Closing
"Rappers have been telling us for decades that they are not on the side of good guys and now we surprised at Snoop and Nelly. They've been inching towards Trump for so long that if you namecheck for Trump references in rap songs it will take you the whole weekend. From I was 15 I've had to come to terms with the fact that as much as I love hiphop, hiphop was never going to love me back. That's a long time to be in an abusive relationship, yo."
(Marlon James, Facebook, 1 February 2025)
"The systems we oppose are systems of oppression, and thus inherently systems of cowardice. They work best in the dark, their essence tucked away and as unexamined as the great American pastime was once to me. But then a writer told me a story and I saw something essential and terrible about the world. All our conversations of technique, of rhythm and metaphor, ultimately come down to this - to the stories we tell, to the need to haunt, which is to say to make people feel all that is now at stake."
(Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message. New York: One World, 2024. Part I: "Journalism Is Not A Luxury," pp 19-20)
The two most important tracks to listen to on Wu-Tang Forever are its first and last. "Wu-Revolution" features only two mentors of the Clan, Poppa Wu and Uncle Pete, and no members of the Clan itself, and as with the opening minutes of The Manchurian Candidate and Vertigo, if you miss it you might as well not bother with the rest. The two gentlemen outline in detail the moral mission behind the Clan, and may well be doing so to the collective itself. "I can't even see no more," Poppa Wu gasps at the beginning, "I'm calling my Black woman a bitch." And so, over howling Mandela, King and Malcolm namechecks, they explain that "Heaven and Hell exist within/Heaven is what you make it and Hell is what you go through." Candi "Blue Raspberry" Lindsey's backing vocals move the music into bitonality as they tell their audience that the Biblical notion of God is a rich White lie, designed to keep the "lesser" (a.k.a. the real rulers of the Earth) embedded in the mud. At the same time they counsel strongly that those qualities erroneously valued by too many are helping to bury the valuers - "Leave all the cigarettes and guns, the alcohol and everything," "To all you fake-ass n****s who think you gonna survive out here without your Black woman, you're wrong - they have attraction powers on this planet."
The final track is a speech by Raekwon in which he states "Cause don't think we doing this just for anybody. We doing this for certain n****s, kid. Certain people, rather...certain, certain fans, certain supporters, certain delegators...word." They may even have done this for themselves, but do not think that this is music for "everybody," least of all wan, ageing liberal observers like me - and that applies to the 61-year-old me now as strongly and unambiguously as it did to the 33-year-old me who bought the second Wu-Tang Clan album from Harrods on the Monday of its release.
The triumph of Forever had evidently been long-awaited. Enter The Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) may have been an album that changed everything in hip hop - or, probably more accurately, changed it all back - but Britain, or at least the Britain most loudly trumpeted by the media, was largely bemused by it. Arriving here some six months after its American release, good words were said about it in Melody Maker - as ever, it was down to the late Neil Kulkarni to explain exactly why Enter The Wu-Tang was such a revolutionary record - but it was conspicuously absent from the NME's 1994 end-of-year albums list in favour of such Ian Indie-placating cultural giants as These Animal Men, Senser and Dodgy (although N****mortis by Gravediggaz, in part produced by RZA, did make an appearance at #22). The album appeared in our charts for a fortnight, peaking at a hesitant #83 (although it was unlikely ever to be stocked in Woolworths).
Was Ian Indie afraid because he found the slums of Staten Island - Park Hill, Grymes Hill, Clifton, Rosebank - less relatable than, say, Burnage? What the Wu-Tang were not, for better or worse (I'm ambiguous, as were, in the end, themselves), were rubbed-down jazz or roughed-up R&B. Enter The Wu-Tang was neither Midnite Marauders (my most played and beloved album of the nineties, but I'm the last person who should be asked about this type of thing) nor The Chronic. As Kulkarni said, it set rap's stopwatch back to zero, presented the most coherent collective in hip hop since Public Enemy and, thanks to RZA, reshaped rap's building blocks in ways that had not been dreamed of, let alone attempted, before.
Some argue that the nine main Clan rappers knew each other from childhood; others say that they were recruited from various oppositional Staten Island (a.k.a. for their own sakes Shaolin) gangs, then made to get along and look how good and strong you all are together (RZA said that). Nevertheless, following Enter The Wu-Tang's initial impact, all of the Clan went on to make names for themselves as individual rappers, and so there followed a swarm of other album releases - Method Man's Tical, Ghostface Killah's Fishscale, Genius/GZA's Liquid Swords (in its way as encyclopaedically inclusive and stylish in delivery as Sonny Rollins), most profoundly Raekwon's Only Built 4 Cuban Linx and, most played in this house and never guiltily so, Ol' Dirty Bastard's Return To The 36 Chambers: The Dirty Nation, an uproarious slapstick hospital nightmare of a record.
Their reputation suitably built up, expectations of Forever became immense and perhaps unrealistic. There was the argument that they only got together again for a second album because they needed the money, but all parties involved have angrily denied that - the gradual build-up had been deliberate, and wouldn't you just love to hear them all at once, if not quite as they had been in 1993, nine men stood practically shoulder to shoulder in a tiny studio, awaiting their verses.
Indeed RZA and the Clan had a lot more money and resources to expand the ideas initiated on Enter. What degree of motivation remained was another question. Since Forever seemed to have been taking, well, forever to put together, RZA elected to relocate the crew to Los Angeles, away from easy temptations and diversions, and well over half of the album's songs were partially or wholly recorded there. Was G-funk too tempting a spectacle?...hence the moves away from obvious samples (other than Saturday afternoon television martial arts movie reruns).
In addition, RZA, the closest thing to a Sun Ra authority in this particular Arkestra, felt that his own reputation and power were slowly eroding or being eroded by the increased profiles of the other Clan members. He might have felt tired, and farmed some of Forever's productions out to Inspectah Deck and protégés 4th Disciples and True Master. Interviewed by the British writer Angus Batey in 2004, he admitted that, for him, the quality of the Clan's music declined the more "democracy" superseded his own "dictatorship" (which, in the early days, apparently also involved either giving or receiving "physical threats"). Now it was as if Parker, Davis, Coltrane, Rollins, Dolphy, Shepp, Sanders, Ayler and Shorter were all blowing at once.
Nonetheless, Forever is for about two-thirds of its self-allotted time an absolutely terrific album - at least, musically. The one-two knockout of "Reunited" and "For Heavens Sake" instantly made most other 1997 music seem arthritic and prosaic. Karen Briggs' violin playing on the former is every much the equal, and in places plainly exceeds, that of Scarlet Rivera on Dylan's Desire; the latter plays with timing and tonality in ways which made its contemporaries sound stiflingly conservative. "Cash Still Rules," essentially a rejig of the first album's "C.R.E.A.M.," buries Skeeter Davis' "End Of The World" in its green avalanche. "A Better Tomorrow," which quite fantastically utilises elements of the titular John Woo film and a piano/harp loop reminiscent of a ribcage being gently reconstructed, preaches strongly against indulgent and destructive ways - whatever you're hearing from people, including some of us, DON'T follow, or the circle of anger and pain will remain unbroken.
The lyrical ingenuity and cultural inclusivity gets in everyone from Frankie Avalon through the Sex Pistols to Raphael Saddiq. Note how the first CD concludes with cheers and applause in imminent danger of transfiguring into a "Ghost Town" howling wind of nothingness, before the second CD sweeps away any doubts with the self-explanatory "Triumph," where all nine core Clan members solo, one after each other, and the unassuming Inspectah Deck proves the man of this match ("Ultraviolet shine blind forensics" - who cares what it means; it WORKS!). This is succeeded by the album's most stark and sober cut, "Impossible" in which, after two verses of gnomic polemic, Ghostface Killah pours cold, angry and scared water on the proceedings and narrates the simple but piercing story of watching his shot friend Jamie die. His verse is the record's most profound. The "Little Ghetto Boys" are tormented by the nightmare-induced, speeded-up and electronically-treated ghost of Donny Hathaway ("What you gonna do when you grow up and have to face responsibility?" That could be Forever's central question, to both its listeners and itself).
The album then moves through a relatively barren farrow, highlighted only by the crossword puzzle acoustic guitar and violin of "Bells Of War," Raekwon's outraged "...the FUCK?" after attempting to speak to God at the beginning of "The Projects," and the trip hop backdrop to the (again Raekwon-dominant) "Duck Seazon." Oh, and ODB's "Dog Shit" which is either inexcusable or hilarious (it could be both but then he never got to grow up or face responsibility).
Because something is needed to counteract the homophobia of "Duck Seazon" and the misogyny of "Maria." It is entirely possible that, like the sad moneyed man of Geordie Greep''s "Holy Holy," these are portraits of personas we really ought not to emulate, and that this is indeed what much of the rest of the album frowns down upon. And yet we have Ghostface Killah's final and fairly direct verse to "Bells Of War." This is what occurs, fellow white liberal fence-sitters, when we fancy adopting a culture like it was a tameable pet, only to find that the culture is never going to be our friend - this is the unexpurgated dirt, and both the Clan and its mentors are fully and palpably aware of it.
Still, "Hellz Wind Staff"'s occasionally otiose nature is nicely and swiftly undermined by the martial arts sound-effects and tinfoil rhythms, and the sampled orchestral maximalism helps "Heaterz" churn along agreeably - at least until the concluding dialogue. "Black Shampoo" is a mostly spellbinding post-Barry White sex fantasia borne along by rogue state elements - melodica, eighties 808 conga settings, backwards Fender Rhodes and sideways-sloping strings - which even the silly coda cannot defuse. Finally, "Second Coming" suggests that the Wu-Tang Clan might represent the return of the sons of the true (African) man, although its paraphrasing of "Macarthur Park," set with the defunctioning toy train keyboards and percussion, imply a soul newly drained.
Wu-Tang Forever isn't necessarily for you or me. Neither is its predecessor, nor the four collective Wu-Tang albums of variable quality which succeed it. It renders most of what Then Play Long has dealt with so far in 1997...timid. It is supremely knowledgeable and insanely idiotic - yes, it's coming - sometimes at the same time. But it isn't meant for "us" in the way that it's really meant for everybody. Here is a world - you might even call it the world - where its shit and diamonds are in equally plain sight. How "we" assess it doesn't matter. What the certain people for whom the record was meant - people who are on their own side, and take that as you must - intend to make of it is a far more thorough and honest quest. Ta Nehisi-Coates again (ibid.):
"...we are plagued by dead language and dead stories that serve people whose aim is nothing short of a dead world...soon enough you will find yourself confronting not just their myths, not just their stories, but your own. This is difficult, if only because so much of our myth-making was done in service of liberation, in doing whatever we could to dig our way out of the pit into which we were cast. And above us stand the very people who did the casting, jeering, tossing soil into our eyes and yelling down at us, 'You're doing it wrong.' But we are not them...and are charged wirh examining the stories we have been told, and how they undergird the politics we have accepted, and then telling new stories ourselves (italics mine)."
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