I certainly didn’t know it at the time, but a chance encounter I had a few years ago with the Ghostface Killah ended up being something of a life-altering experience. I use the term “chance encounter” because I didn’t really go out of my way to check him out. My friend had given me a few albums that he recently acquired and Ghostface’s 2006 album, Fishscale, happened to be one of them.
As a casual hip-hop fan, all I knew about Ghostface was that he was a member of the Wu-Tang Clan, the martial-arts-obsessed hip-hop collective whose heyday was back in the early 90s - around the time I was going through puberty. I thought it was odd he was still even on the scene, much less getting good reviews for Fishscale.
Needless to say, I was hooked from the get-go. It’s tough rationalizing why and when I take a liking to something, but there was no doubt he was on a completely different plane than pretty much any other rapper when it came to his storytelling ability, lyrics and flow.
It’s not that his subject matter of street life, drug deals, MC bragging and female encounters was all that different from many other MCs. But his bizarre free-form, stream-of-conscious story rhymes coupled with a hyper, over-caffeinated delivery was unlike anything I had heard. It was like the hip-hop version of reading Beat generation writers like Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs.
I couldn’t get over how this guy had been rapping since I was in sixth grade and I didn’t discover him until I was close to 30. Naturally, I wanted to check out some of his older stuff. I figured if this is what Ghostface sounded like when he was approaching 40, what he was doing 15 years prior was probably even better. And I was not proven wrong.
But my musical expedition didn’t stop with him. In fact, Ghostface was just the tip of the iceberg. What started with him became an obsession that grew to encompass the rest of the Wu-Tang Clan and a whole slew of other MCs and producers from New York’s early 90s hip-hop scene.
With a little online research, I kept discovering more and more artists I previously had never heard of – Big L, Organized Konfusion, O.C., Smif-n-Wessun, Showbiz and A.G., etc. And they were all sickeningly good compared to just about any hip-hop I've heard. For a music geek like myself, it was like discovering a lost city of Atlantis.
Truth be told, for hardcore hip-hop fans, none of this is a revelation. “Discovering” that the Wu-Tang Clan’s early years were amazing is sort of like a new rock fan remarking that Led Zeppelin were actually pretty good. But the beauty about it was that it was all new to me.
I was always ahead of the curve as a teen when it came to the “cool alternative bands.” Thanks to the knowledge of an older cousin and friend, I was discovering bands like Modest Mouse and Kraftwerk years before most of my peers. But I’m not too proud to admit I was a bit of a dunce when it came to hip-hop, for reasons I will detail below.
Nevertheless, I am a dunce no more. In an ironic twist of fate, the music I felt was far too stupid to listen to as a 13-year-old I’ve become enamored with as I approach 30 with a wife and newborn baby. I certainly don’t like all hip-hop - most of my favorite albums center specifically on the stuff that was coming out of New York circa ‘92-’96. But I have much more respect for it, to say the least.
The whole process has turned me into something of an amateur hip-hop historian. From the Old School to the Golden Age to the rise of gangsta rap and beyond, I’ve learned what I was hearing on the radio for most of my life was just scratching the surface of hip-hop. I may have spent the majority of my early music-listening years actively avoiding this type of music, but I now listen to almost nothing but.
The Early Years
My adolescent years coincided with the heart of the East Coast vs. West Coast hip-hop rivalry in the early 90s. As far as I knew, that’s all hip-hop was – rappers from L.A. threatening to kill their rivals from New York and/or sleep with their wives and girlfriends. For whatever reason, the rivalry was a big deal at the time with boys my age.
I remember ridiculous lunch room debates at my suburban, mostly white, junior high in the Twin Cities over which side people supported. Personally, I didn’t care much at the time because I didn’t listen to rap. I was heavily into grunge and alternative bands and rap just seemed stupid to me.
But as I got older and into more genres of music, my opinion mellowed a bit. In college, I retroactively discovered songs like the Notorious B.I.G.’s “Juicy” and Nas’ “The World is Yours” and started to grasp that there was actually was an art form to putting together verses and crafting beats out of samples.
My CD collection grew to include a few of the staples that are in any casual hip-hop fan’s diet – The Chronic, Doggystyle, Illmatic, Ready to Die and a few more. But much like owning Bob Marley’s Legend album doesn’t make you an authority on reggae, I was still a relative lightweight.
The other thing I was exposed to in college was a slew of “socially conscious” MCs, like Mos Def, Common, The Roots and Talib Kweli, who sat a little outside the mainstream. Though I like many of these artists, they've never had quite the visceral impact on me I've found with other MCs.
At times I feel like I’m getting a lecture when I listen to them, whether it is about a political issue, the lack of pureness in modern hip-hop or something else. Hip-hop, like rock n’ roll, is generally best when it isn’t overly pretentious.
It wasn’t until I heard Ghostface and subsequently the rest of the Wu-Tang Clan did I find something that combined the wit and verbal dexterity of the socially conscious MCs with the wish-fulfillment fantasy of gangsta rap that draws many suburban-raised folk like myself to this genre in the first place.
Entering the 36 Chambers
The Wu-Tang Clan are one of those odd phenomenons where just about everyone has heard of them, but not many can name more than one or two of their songs, if that. For newbies, here are the basics:
The clan consists of nine MCs from the slums of New York who “formed like Voltron” in Staten Island in the early 90s. Though large posses are not uncommon in hip-hop,most of the time they consist of one or two skilled MCs and about four or five other “rappers” who happened to grow up on the same block as them.