The 2nd half of the '90s was the era of the rap double album. They came in 3 different flavors: sprawling (Biggie's Life After Death), repetitive (2Pac's All Eyez On Me), & bloated (Scarface's My Homies). The 2-disc sophomore effort from the Wu-Tang Clan (probably the era's most anticipated hiphop release) has elements of all 3. I know I sound like a short-attention-span having broken record when I declare that any album over 60 minutes is too long, but usually these albums invite comparisons to their lean & mean predecessors. For what it's worth, I think Enter the Wu-Tang is pretty much a flawless album. So is Liquid Swords. Wu-Tang Forever is longer than both of them combined, so it can't help but sag bit under its own weight.
Looking back, the entire Wu-Tang concept was the kind of unlikely melange that only a bunch of truly eccentric artist brains can produce. After all, what do devout 5% Nation ideology & Shaw Brothers kung fu movies have in common? The answer is that the NGE posits the Black man as "Asiatic" in origin, but it could just as well be because those were 2 things that a bunch of inner-city NY kids growing up in the '70s would have been exposed to. It's the ultimate testament to the Wu's artistic integrity that everything they threw at you, however incongruous, all somehow ended up making sense. Though not as self-consciously cinematic as Only Built 4 Cuban Linx, this album is all about worldbuilding. But aside from the intro where Poppa Wu gives a straightforward primer on the beliefs of the Nation of Gods & Earths, the album does not hold your hand. With their inside jokes, private slang & insular references, the emcees throw so much content at you (especially the noun-heavy styles of Rae & Ghost), daring you to keep up. But rather than being daunted, you are attracted by the allusive style, because the world these guys live in seems so damn interesting.
This immersion is only deepened by RZA's production. Although he has added more instruments than appeared on the debut album (he seems especially enamored by orchestral strings; almost every track has them in one form or another), the production remains skeletal & cold. The album's strokes of genius tend to be the most eccentric parts, like the seemingly random pitch-shifting of the King Floyd sample in "For Heaven's Sake."
All of the emcees are reliably dope here, but special honors have to go to Ghostface, who was on a creative tear & really coming into his own following the success of Ironman, but still using the pocket flow he would begin to burst out of on Supreme Clientele--on this album we get the best of both worlds. (Even though I've never understood why he switches the vibe so abruptly on "The Projects" from the sociopolitical woes of living broke to sex boasts out of nowhere.) I also want to highlight U-God, nobody's favorite Wu member, who stepped the hell up on this album & spits what might be the 2 best verses of his career on "It's Yourz" & "Impossible."
In some ways, RZA emerges on this album as the voice of the group as well as its sound. He appears on the intro to disc 2, throwing one of the album's many jabs against "n****s tryna take hiphop & make that shit R&B." I think it's pretty clear that all the invective against the pop-rap sound is merely performative. Method Man had collaborated with Mary J. Blige, & both Tical & Enter the Wu-Tang had gone platinum. You don't move that many units without having fans in the mainstream, & indeed one of RZA's major achievements was taking the rugged sound of underground rap & making it palatable to pop audiences. Indeed, given everything I've described, the fact that this album went double-platinum & is still the group's best-selling record is kind of bizarre. They were the right group for the time & it was the right time for the group. This is not to denigrate the hard work they put in, but I've always looked at the Wu as lightning in a bottle. Like the Beatles, the combination of such a massively talented group with a milieu ready for their sound is one of those precise, irreplicable alchemies. Their rarity makes them that much more special.
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