SongO’TheDay

I’ve been meaning to post to SongOTheDay for a long time now, but just couldn’t take the agonizing first step of actually choosing a song to write about.  I knew this could be my only posting, and plus I’m a recovering perfectionist, so it felt like I had to choose the one song that defined my entire life- or changed it.  That’s impossible for myself and most other people, of course, so I was stuck…then, as with many things, the real kick in the ass was a sudden deadline- when Chris let me know the end of the year was it.

I was almost sure it would be Wu Tang, but again- what song??  No amount of careful reasoning could narrow it down enough, even to an album (36 Chambers? ODB’s first solo album? Liquid Swordz?)

It was the Wu Tang themselves that helped me decide.  As I stood about fifteen feet from the stage at Ruby Skye last Thursday night, listening to Inspektah Deck personally reminding me and the enthusiastic crowd that he smokes the mic like Smokin’ Joe Frazier / the hell-raiser / raisin’ hell with the flavor, I was struck by that “can’t believe I’m actually here” feeling and remembered a day back when I never imagined I’d be seeing this.

When I was in eighth grade, I was just a couple years past the transition from a kid who likes listening to the radio to a teenager whose identity was based on three things- skateboarding, my friends and, of course, the music I listened to.  We all listened to metal- I had maybe two pairs of jeans and exactly seven t-shirts; six of them were black and three of them were of the same band (Pantera).  Rap was MC Hammer and some other stuff we’d grown out of.

How was it that in that same year, a friend handed me his headphones and I was completely blown away by Nas’s Illmatic?  And by OutKast’s Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik?  That I don’t know if I can describe.  But by pure coincidence, that same year I bought Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) from the BMG music catalog, having never heard it or anything about it, just because the cover looked cool.  I didn’t immediately like it- I liked the “Method Man” track, but it took awhile for the rest to sink in.

I don’t remember how it happened so quickly, but by early freshman year all of my heavy metal-worshipping friends became hip hop fans and stopped dressing like me.  Specifically, they wore Nautica, Polo, etc.- even while they were skateboarding- and they wore their hats sort of crooked (not quite forwards or backwards or even sideways).  I couldn’t afford to keep up with the clothing, but I did learn a lot more about what was going on in East Coast hip hop… and borrowed some great CDs.  The early-to-mid-nineties were sort of a golden age (especially looking back and comparing to now) when A Tribe Called Quest, Nas, Mobb Deep, Notorious B.I.G., Redman, The Roots as well as a lot of lesser-known groups were bringing fresh energy to hip hop and really reinventing it.  Although most of us were white, we did go to school in a rough inner city neighborhood, so we didn’t feel it was ironic that hip hop became sort of the soundtrack to our lives.  I didn’t find out until I went to college that white kids in the suburbs listened to hip hop too.

Wu Tang was different though- they weren’t just part of what was going on and they sounded markedly different from everyone else.  On 36 Chambers in particular, Wu Tang’s beats and aura are palpably gritty, and not just dirty but “unclean”.  Their beats could incorporate anything from a door slamming to a kettle whistling or even just what sounds like fingers snapping.  Their rhymes are clever and sometimes funny but usually simple- almost like slightly refined freestyles (call me the rap assasinator / rhymes rugged and built like Schwarzenegger).  They sound like a bunch of friends who have nothing in the world but hip hop and Kung Fu movies and decided to form their own group where they get to bring them together.  They were from Staten Island (they renamed it Shaolin Island), which was not exactly where hip hop lived in people’s minds at the time- Brooklyn, the Bronx, Queens, Manhattan, maybe, but not Staten Island.  They actually did have trouble getting a record contract- they wanted to be able to perform and record both together and separately, which wasn’t really done back then.  I think the fact that they actually made this work is part of how they got such a cult following- the close connection between members and the kung fu mythology (and cool symbols- the W, Method Man’s M, etc.) made it big and gave it momentum but the loose association between the members and then the extended Wu Tang family (Brooklyn Zoo crew, Sunz of Man) gave you so much to choose from.  Where our parents might have had their favorite Beatle, we could argue over whether Raekwon or Ghostface had better rhymes or if Method Man or Gza were more quintessential members of the Clan.

The Kung Fu movie thing is sort of cheesy but in a way that made it cool.  So much of hip hop is the same few messages: I’m the best rapper; I’m going to kill you; I used to be poor; now I have lots of money.  Wu Tang has plenty of “I’m the best rapper”, and “I’m going to kill you”, not yet so much “now I have lots of money” on 36 Chambers (Raekwon raps about his Champion gear… I mean seriously… the inside cover is awesome, they are all standing under a bridge in sweatpants, t-shirts and dirty sneakers), but it’s more fun because it’s enveloped in martial arts storytales and totally random association, so the messages that come across are more like: I am going to slice you up with my ninja sword, we are killer bees and we are going to swarm you, etc.  A verse could pull in whimsical, free-association references to anything from the Emancipation Proclamation to Fright Night to the explosion in Waco, Texas to Lucky Charms.  In later albums they had comic superhero and/or mafia-sounding names, and even those morphed into other different nicknames.  They talk about the same things as any other rappers but they are having fun with it so it doesn’t feel like they care what you believe about them and are trying to impress their audience or critics.

I was supposed to see Wu Tang on tour with Rage Against the Machine at the Gorge in Washington, but Wu Tang dropped off the tour.  I did see Rage (with The Roots subbed in), but I missed what I thought would be my only chance ever to see Wu Tang.  Seattle’s reputation in the 90s as a music mecca didn’t extend to hip hop, so I didn’t get the chance to see a lot of the groups I was listening to until 10 years later when I moved to the Bay Area and realized that those groups actually DO leave New York and tour (I had just assumed they never left the East Coast).

Although I’m seeing a lot of concerts here I don’t know many other people who listen to hip hop so I tragically never heard about the Rock the Bells show in which the whole group was briefly re-united on the West Coast.  When the group got back together in early 2006- sans ODB- for a short tour of the East Coast, I figured it would be my only chance- so I used all of my United miles and found a friend I could crash with in Manhattan and had the thrill of seeing them IN NEW YORK.  It was a great show, but seeing them in a smaller venue last Thursday was probably the best I’ve seen (including two subsequent Rock the Bells shows), even without the RZA and Ghostface (I ran into Meaghan’s boyfriend Cameron, who knew the person putting the show together, and learned that each member has their own agent to be negotiated with… it’s amazing the group did as much together as it did before ODB died; can you imagine dealing with that many famous and legendary rap artists?).

“Protect Ya Neck”, it turns out (I’m reading this on Wikipedia right now), wasn’t just the song that jumped out at me Thursday night- it was their first single!  It also has all eight original members on it.  So if you’ve never heard Wu Tang, and wondered what they’re all about, take a listen… and if you don’t like it at first, remember, neither did I

-Eric Rynerson

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