Pitching the Wu

Wu-Tang Forever creates
a new hip-hop world order

by Carly Carioli

To appreciate fully the nine-member slang-slinging dynasty known as the Wu-Tang Clan -- Method Man, Ol' Dirty Bastard, Ghost Face Killah, Masta Killah, Raekwon, U-God, the RZA, the GZA, and Inspectah Deck -- you must first be willing to accept that one of the most vital groups in hip-hop could take as their subject matter a patchwork quilt of crypto-mystical allusions that would have made Led Zeppelin blush. Forget "Stairway to Heaven"; the Wu's self-made mythology posits themselves as living gods, keepers of secret truths and sacred paths, inheritors of ancient traditions and prophecies that are revealed only in the course of a labyrinthine discourse combining Muslim five percent cosmology, kung fu folk wisdom, numerology, street-hustler mystique, and Illuminati-fearing apocalyptica. And in absorbing their new double album -- Wu-Tang Forever (RCA/Loud), a gothic, brooding piece of sonic architecture -- you come away convinced that the brashest and most expressive voice in hip-hop is not a voice at all but the combined studio effects of a producer who weaves backing tracks with stunning emotional breadth and piercing, subtle intimacy. In effect he's standing in for the tremble in a soul singer's moan, the bend of a string in a bluesman's strummed lament.

That voice is the RZA, Wu-Tang's in-house producer and musical soul. And the force of his aesthetic vision makes him the man most likely to expand hip-hop's emotional vocabulary. On Forever, the RZA elevates hip-hop production to heretofore unreached levels of composition -- string quartets essaying a stern, pensive authority in short sharp strokes, then veering off into bouts of shrieking hostility; crimped piano figures and cut-short arias haunting cavernous beats, evoking a domain in which resolution and certainty are difficult to come by, and fleeting when they arrive.

What sticks in your head on the first disc's third track, "For Heaven's Sake," isn't the lyrical flow but the crackling sampled chorus, a warped 33-1/3 album being played at somewhere around 42-1/2, sped up and breaking down and lapping the beat, a babyish, breathless wail over plinking toy piano, "Oh baby, for heaven's sake." The pitch on the vocal rises as it gets faster, mocking the headbanging beat and fuzzed-out bass, undercutting the song's ominous, ethereal keyboards. The sample rises out of the ether like a ghost, a portent of untouchable sadness and loss, like the voice you might hear after the bomb drops and the camera fades out on humanity, the last crank-up phonograph laughing and crying all at once.

The mood swings into Wagnerian grandiosity at the beginning of disc two, as Ol' Dirty Bastard jumps out of the woodwork to introduce "Triumph." "I'ma rub yo ass in the moonshine!" he barks. "Let's take it back to '79!" And with a breezy, smooth soul vocal cooing, you take it for granted that he's talking about a return to the sound of hip-hop circa 1979 -- until the RZA kicks in with insistent martial violin drama and you realize they're gonna take hip-hop back to 1779. "I've always been into orchestra music, Mozart, Amadeus, and all that," the RZA told MTV News a couple months back. "I feel like I'm the hip-hop Mozart, you know what I'm saying?"

Is there room in the genre for a Mozart? Recent hip-hop has been dominated by the influence of Dr. Dre, who saw the commercial possibilities in cleaning up West Coast gangsta style, reconnecting it to mainstream black pop, and marketing the result to a worldwide audience. Dre is the Berry Gordy of his time -- the more so since his departure from Death Row. He's written off "negativity" entirely, and his disciples have opted for a sterilized, listener-friendly strain of artistically stagnant (if commercially lucrative) remakes of urban radio staples. The RZA's style is the antithesis -- elemental, basement-damaged convulsions bubbling up from a hip-hop underground that swears allegiance to rap's street-corner roots, uneasy melodies and song-length drones that cultivate a fragile equilibrium between artful disorder and outright chaos, all punctuated by moments of complex and disarming beauty.

"A lot of niggaz try to take hip-hop and make that shit R&B -- Rap and Bullshit. Or make that shit funk. Fuck that," the RZA rants in the introduction to Forever's second disc. "This is true hip-hop you're listening to right here, in the purest form. This ain't no R&B, wit a wack nigga takin' a loop, be loopin' that shit thinkin' it's gonna be the sound of the culture."

You can hear in the RZA's work the heavy responsibility of representing "the sound of the culture," knowing as he does that such a sound must encompass more than just a pop memory. It's the ache he injected into "Motherless Child" from Ghost Face Killah's Ironman with a sample from the spiritual of the same name -- a track that not only reconnected rap with with the world-weary resignation of the blues but did so by building its own melodic form out of dissonance. Whereas limp alterna-scavengers cut-and-pasted B.B. King's ragged moan to fit a European-based, Beatles-esque pop format, the Wu's sonic collages make melodic connections that sound a bit wrong -- roughly the same caliber of tension that animates the likes of an R.L. Burnside or a Sonic Youth. It's present in the chamber-classical-inspired tracks on Forever -- the severed seesaw violin and piano on "Maria" repeated over and over until they become one long rhythmic drone -- but also in the Wu's most minimal excursions, like the doomy three-note keyboard coda in "Severe Punishment," the crooked piano plunk on "Deadly Melody."

And though the RZA may have "the sound of the culture" as his inspiration, his music is quickly being recognized outside the confines of hip-hop -- he's already tried his hand at rock production (on a remix of a song by the New York hardcore band Dog Eat Dog) and is scheduled to remix tracks by such heavyweights as U2 and Björk by the end of the year. Meanwhile, the Wu's ability to wring civilized soundscapes out of underground noise will make them the perfect link between Atari Teenage Riot's lo-fi hardcore electronica and Rage Against the Machine's post-industrial metal on a bill scheduled to make its way across country later this summer.

But if the RZA's soundscapes are headed for mainstream consumption, the thrust-and-parry of his lyrical swordsmen is still firmly planted in the underground. Their ragged tag-team freestyle (a circular, stream-of-consciousness "poetry whirlpool," as they have it on "Reunited") jumps all over the map. To figure it all out (and as they've often said, not all of it is meant to be figured out), you've got to be versed in their peculiar slang, which is entrenched in the ancient legend (and popular chop-socky topic) of the Wu-Tang Clan, a renegade offshoot of swordsmen from the warrior monks of Shao Lin, and in "mathematics," a cultish form of pseudo-scientific numerology. Even so, the subject matter is still familiar hip-hop territory -- times was bad, times is still bad, we're better than you, stop bitin' our shit, and by the way, we gotta stop killing each other.

Even within those confines they're often able to transcend the genre's limitations. For one, they offer their own variation on the precepts of Five Percent Nation, working the theme of black man as living god into a kind of radical self-help recovery program. But they also incorporate Shao Lin as a business model for collective gain in the music industry -- which might sound hoky until you consider that the model has worked almost perfectly in spite of conventional wisdom to the contrary. After signing en masse to Loud/RCA in 1993, they took a cut in their advance in exchange for the right to sign to other labels as solo artists. Four years later, five members (Method Man, Ol' Dirty, Raekwon, Ghost Face Killah, and the GZA) have all released chart-breaking solo efforts, with more (including sophomore solo albums by Meth and Dirty) scheduled by year's end, and a slew of Wu-associated/produced/managed artists (including Sunz of Man and Killarmy) on the way.

In the end, the heart of the Wu's lyrical attack comes from Ol' Dirty Bastard. Unfairly maligned as a simple joker, ODB is perhaps the most underrated rapper in hip-hop, and certainly its most distinctive stylist. After surviving a bullet to the chest a couple of years ago, he started calling himself Osirus, after Osiris, the ancient Egyptian king who was murdered by his brother Set and later pieced back together by his sister/wife Isis to become the lord of the underworld and judge of the dead. Osiris was also credited with conquering the world in order to civilize it -- which no doubt plays into the Wu's fascination with spreading their new order the world over.

But Ol' Dirty, if he's out to conquer the world, is out to un-civilize it. With gruff, nasty, psychotic rants somewhere between Drunken Master and Screamin' Jay Hawkins (or like the hip-hop equivalent of Hasil Adkins or Lux Interior), he's the chaos that threatens to break out throughout Forever but that the RZA never lets explode, the physical manifestation of the Wu's underground roots, the basement grime come to life. They keep him mostly under wraps until midway though disc two, when he pops up huffing and singing off-key and stealing the show on "Dog Shit" -- in which ODB takes his revenge by taking a dump on someone's lawn. In an album about living gods and magnificent traditions, Ol' Dirty's antics keep their feet on the ground, a reminder that the point is to be civilized, but never civil.