WU-TANG CLAN – WU-TANG FOREVER

It was the summer of 1997. I was 14, sitting close enough to my parents’ television to taste the pixels, watching MTV. Those were the days of the Spice Girls, Backstreet Boys and N’Sync (which I hated) and Wonderwall, Song 2 and Don’t Speak (which I loved).

The afternoon sun flickered through the trees outside our terrace and while my lower-middle-class house of Polish immigrants in the middle of nowhere Northern Germany was at peace and the birds outside didn’t screech in pain but were singing, the Wu-Tang Clan changed my life.

I was watching Yo! – former Yo! MTV Raps – not because I wanted to but because YouTube was launched only eight years later. This was the way. Watch what is broadcasted and deal with it. Suddenly our old TV conjured an even older TV on screen – camera zooming in like a crime drama – and I read: “SPECIAL NEWS BULLETIN”. A newscaster appeared, dead serious:

“We’ve just received a report that New York City is under attack by swarms of killer bees.“

It was the first time I saw the Wu-Tang Clan. The first time I watched a music video that ran six minutes, not three and a half. The first time I heard a song with no chorus at all, just back-to-back raps, 10 rappers deep instead of one to three. The first time I watched a dystopian, out-of-control musical anthology – violent, unhinged, from first frame to last. Was it a song? Was it a movie? What is happening? Is that even legal?

The song ended abruptly and I woke up in a different state of consciousness. I can’t overstate how impactful these six minutes were for me. I haven’t seen anything like that before, didn’t know this was even possible, let alone successful on MTV. Probably I looked quite stupid sitting on that floor processing: pale pimpled kid with no sense of style or of the world at large, jaw on the floor, confused, fascinated, and ready to fight.

The next weekend I begged my father to drive me to the mall so I could buy “Wu-Tang Forever” (he bought it for me). It was the key to enter a different world of music, my Rosetta Stone to decoding Nas, Busta Rhymes, Outkast, Gang Starr.

2Pac and Biggie had just been murdered, Michael Jordan had won his fifth championship, and I no longer felt like a child.

While every kid around me threw themselves at KORN, Metallica and Limp Bizkit, I was the only one on the Rap Journey. A lonely road, and a punishing one. Wu-Tang Forever didn’t make it easy for a kid with zero frame of reference: songs that refused to be liked, harmonies that dodged you on purpose. Why killer bees? Why retro kung-fu samples? Shaolin Shadow Boxing spliced with biblical God-talk? What were these interludes? Wait, two CDs, 27 songs, and some songs were two songs? Stories of deadly shootings, then R&B about bathing with your girlfriend? Raps that didn’t sound quite … correct? – like, not rhythmically rhymed so much as narrated, just slightly off the beat, like the meter itself had an attitude. Mysticism. Club music. Sex, violence, sermons. It took me forever to crack the code of this new world. But I was drawn to trust producer and rapper RZA to lead me to a new realm.

Re-listening now, I released a sigh of relief for the album aged rather well. Like Reunited, Visionz, Severe Punishment, It’s Yourz, Triumph, Little Ghetto Boys, Bells of War, The M.G.M., Dog Shit, Hellz Wind Staff, Heaterz, Second Coming. All bangers, every one of them – real stories in an unreal world, still dark, tough, violent, intense. And back in my rotation next to Kendrick Lamar, Clipse, JID.

This album showed me that not all heroes wear capes and smiles, that poetry packs a punch, and that knowledge is a weapon. WU-TANG FOREVER ends with Raekwon monologuing: