This Shaolin carnival especially played well across the pond, in cities like Amsterdam, Tokyo, Paris and Berlin where unvarnished, eccentric, authentically African-American music-wild jazz, deep blues or true school hip-hop-is embraced enthusiastically even when tastes change back home. Fellow underdogs and misfits from all over the globe were embraced and encouraged to wave the Wu flag, echoing the cult followings of acts like the Grateful Dead, P-Funk and Insane Clown Posse. Throughout their rise through the ’90s and the aughts, in a small-town dive bar, big-city theater or with any luck, a stadium or festival, there was always at least a handful Wu-Tang Killah Bees rocking a thugged-out, often hilarious and bewildering show.īut the fights with the soundman, defiant drinking and drug use, and promiscuous passing around of mics both dead and alive only reinforced their brand of unruly “realness.” It helped that, given their own personal histories of hustling everywhere from Ohio to Georgia, the crew happily hit the open road at any occasion.
The sheer viral, exponential, force-multiplying nature of their many members and boosters, in stores, on stages and even in street teams and Internet message boards, flooded first America and then the world.
Just as the NFL relentlessly markets the mystique of the Shield, the Shield, the Shield, the Clan put that bright golden “W” brand right in “da front,” daring you to “let your feet stomp” at any and every opportunity. Like the embattled gang from The Warriors, they battled and beat their way out of small-time obscurity, embracing the grimy, the gritty, the chaotic and stripped-down, and rejecting pop and polish as much as the Sex Pistols or the Ramones ever did. From the beginning, RZA and the boys wanted to own their own brand, market their own clothing and merchandise, control their own Internet presence, and develop their own artists and producers with as much authenticity and as little input from the record companies cutting the check as possible. Where hip-hop’s childhood friend, the punk subculture, yelled “D.I.Y.” and “no sell-out,” the Wu reached back to Marcus Garvey and Malcolm X, responding with “Do For Self” and “no sell-out!” in kind, fighting for autonomy at every turn. RZA and his fellow hustlers Power and Divine famously sweet-talked Loud Records into putting out their whole roster on album after album, while retaining the right to shop any individual master of ceremony to any of the many labels clamoring for their new Afro-Asiatic flavors. Most rap guilds expressed their unity via guest spots, collabs and remixes. How did they avoid the business pitfalls that befell gifted predecessors like the Native Tongues or the Dungeon Family, where record-label intrigues often disrupted the loose, unrestrained chemistry that breathed life into their collaborations? (See: “Show Business,” “I Am I Be” and “Mainstream.”) In the Wu guild, Staten Island upstarts cliqued up with veteran survivors of bad deals with “cold killer labels” in the ’80s to forge an iron ethos of brotherhood, loyalty and excellence. And no rap family ever hammered into shape finer and sharper lyrical swords, or swung their songs more joyfully as a platoon, than the legendary Wu-Tang Clan. Their workshops bore enigmatic names like the Dungeon, D&D, Chung King or the Booga Basement. These teams came together around artisanal ideals and freewheeling studio sessions, suspicious of the hard, bright political borders of labels like Interscope or Columbia or Universal, and confident in their own creative processes.
Dre, DJ Premier, Scarface, the late Chris Lighty, Erick Sermon, KRS-One, Paul C, Rico Brown, Wyclef, Del the Funkee Homosapien, DJ Muggs, Fat Joe, Buckshot and many others banded together “families” of artists, dedicated to crafting their own idiosyncratic takes on high-quality hip-hop. transition into a 21st century Gilded Age where routine multiplatinum success fueled hedonistic excess, hip-hop flourished in an Age of the Guilds. Four decades in, the ’90s are still hip-hop’s most special epoch, the one most often cited in various “Golden Era” arguments.
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