Wu-Tang Is For The Children… and Everyone Else

Though Kanye West’s notorious bum rushing of the VMA stage in 2009 will go down in the pantheon of bizarre award show moments, it still plays second fiddle to the granddaddy of all podium-jackings. Next month marks the 14-year anniversary of O.D.B.’s proclamation to a stunned Shawn Colvin and an international Grammy contingent that, regardless of how you saw it, Wu-Tang was the best. Let me repeat that. Fourteen years ago this happened, and the full-length that lost the Best Rap Album award (to Puffy no less) was Wu-Tang Forever, far from their best work. But who’s laughing now? Who’s managed to singlehandedly keep the spirit of posse cut alive in an era of me-first rappers who myopically extol the virtues of popping bottles and not much else? The Wu. That’s who.

Say what you will about their best years being behind them, but the fact that the Wu-Tang Clan are still touring and producing albums speaks volumes about the group’s ability to come together in the face of seemingly insurmountable creative differences and rip the hip-hop world one mic at a time. The pictures you’re looking at were taken during a gig at the Royal Oak Music Theatre on January 4, the halfway point in the group’s latest Wu Fest Tour. Pay special attention to the crowd shots. The group’s first album, Enter The Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) hit record store shelves in 1993, smack in the middle of what many consider to be hip-hop’s golden era, and if you’ve been reading up on our latest series of hip-hop articles, you know what that particular time period represented to youth culture in America.

It didn’t matter if you were from Brooklyn, Los Angeles or Duluth, Minnesota, the words of Method Man, the RZA, Raekwon, Ghostface and the rest of the crew bounced around your brain like super balls with concrete centers. Battle hymns, kung-fu analogies, drug deals and the O.D.B.’s esoteric pillow talk were all there to be deciphered and studied by young monks looking for something darker and dingier than mainstream rap and R&B. Like NWA before them, Wu-Tang covered dangerous, uncharted territory, but 19 years later, their music remains a hip-hop touchstone, and their presence on stage is legend.

The last time I saw the RZA in concert, he spritzed the crowd with champagne—his preferred beverage—and everyone within five feet of the stage probably sustained a moderate contact high. Par for the course at your typical Wu-Tang show. But you won’t find that bottle-popping mentality in his rhymes, and while your average Wu member has a Ph.D. in flossing, they still know how to keep it grimy. Word is the Clan has a new full-length in the works for this year. Hearsay will abound, members will beef in the press about not having enough control, and RZA will probably make an appearance in someone’s film in the midst of it all, but it will come out, and like everything they do, it deserves to be given its due process.