Seventeen
years since the release of one of the greatest hip-hop albums of all time. Hard
to believe. Before
Nas’ Illmatic, before Jay-Z’s Reasonable Doubt, before Biggie’s Ready to Die, came Wu-Tang’s Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers), and any student of hip-hop
knows that it was one of the definitive albums of the early ‘90s that set the
schematic for the East Coast Hip-Hop Renaissance. Being born in ’87, my bucket
list includes a time machine trip back to ’93 to experience the tremor that
jolted hip-hop when 36 Chambers
dropped, because it’s consensus that it was one of the greatest moments in
music history. RZA, GZA, ODB, Method Man, and the collective set the standard
for East Coast rap, and put into motion the machine that would churn out some
of the most iconic artists to leave their footprint on the timeline.
Enter the Wu-Tang (36
Chambers) is a primary example of the recoil artists dish out when
the industry gives them the shaft. After RZA, GZA, and ODB (working under the
names The Genius, The Scientist, and The Specialist in the group Force
of the Imperial Master, also known as All in Together Now Crew) were
split by the industry and dropped from their labels after releasing their debut
albums, RZA hooked up with Staten Island MC Ghostface Killah to develop the credo that
would go on to become the signature Wu-Tang style. The artform consisted of "Eastern
Philosophy picked up fromkung fu movies, watered-downNation of Islampreaching picked up on the New York streets, and comic
books (RZA).” With their dogma set, the duo called upon GZA and ODB for the
super-group-to-be in ’92, and collected the five other NYC MCs that would
finalize Wu.
Aside
from the utilization of kung-fu movie samples, Wu threw a haymaker into the
hip-hop scene with their unconventional lyrical style that has remained unrivaled
or mimicked over the course of their career. Rolling Stone magazine called the album "low on hype and
production values [and] high on the idea that indigence is a central part of
blackness.” Hip-hop hadn’t yet seen a collective of artists with such diverse
styles, and the raw lyricism from the nine MCs spitting over 4th Disciple’s
scratches and the various production styles set by different members (RZA,
Ghostface, Method Man, and ODB) introduced a unique East Coast underground
style that jarred the previously established systems of 80s hip-hop. I’d like
to say it best, but Steve Huey of Allmusic
laid the words that best describe the style:
"Some
were outsized, theatrical personalities, others were cerebral storytellers and
lyrical technicians, but each had his own distinctive style...Every track onEnter the Wu-Tangis packed with fresh,
inventive rhymes, which are filled with martial arts metaphors, pop culture
references (everything from Voltron to Lucky Charms cereal commercials to
Barbra Streisand's "The Way We Were"), bizarre threats of violence,
and a truly twisted sense of humor.”
As
for the title of 36 Chambers, people have contemplated
the meaning over the years, and I stumbled upon two hypotheses during
my research that are pretty interesting:
According
to Five Percent philosophy (which is way too complicated to explain here), the
number nine is the signifier of bringing something into existence. Translate
this to the nine members that established the Clan. Enter the human heart: it
includes four chambers—two ventricles, and two atria. Multiply the nine members
of Wu and each of their four heart chambers, and you get a total of thirty-six
heart chambers. I know it’s a huge stretch, kind of like the Six Degrees of
Kevin Bacon, but interesting nonetheless.
The
second hypothesis, which is much simpler and logical, is that the album title
refers to director Chai-Liang Liu’s 1978 kung fu flick The 36th Chamber of Shaolin. According to the Wu-Tang kung
fu style, the human body has one-hundred and eight pressure points, thirty-six of
which are deadly. Like I said, these are both pretty fanciful, but we’ll never
know since Wu has never explained the title.
36 Chambers was well-received upon its release, but time has proven that the album
continues to gather significance as it ages like a fine wine with no definitive
peak. Enter the Wu-Tang (36
Chambers) continues to rise in the hip-hop masterpiece rankings
published by various media outlets as the years go on, though numbers are
irrelevant when it comes to the album. The greats of the genre will always
leave their footprints cemented in the concrete of hip-hop, but Wu belongs to a
different set. Their gritty style is more comparable to the boot prints set on
the moon—immune to weathering or alteration, and exemplary of a particular
time in history. Each groove belongs to the respective modes of the individual members,
and as time passes, their unrivaled significance will remain set in their
collective mark—never to be stepped upon by any other, and immortal in music
history regardless of whatever remains in the frontiers that the genre will
explore over years, centuries, and millennia.
Comments (0)
Be the first to comment!