When I was a freshman in high school, just four short years ago, I hated rap music. It’s easy to dismiss the entire genre as thumping, monotonous garbage-the ring-tone rap that blares out of radios and club speakers everywhere is little more than mindless mysogeny yelled over dreadfully repetitive drums. But my perception changed when a friend gave me a burned copy of the Wu-Tang Clan’s debut album, Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers). I discovered a whole new side of hip-hop through a group that revolutionized the genre.
For those uninitiated in the ways of the Wu, the Clan is composed of nine MCs from Staten Island, New York, who fancy themselves as samurai warriors and consider rapping to be an art as precise and distinctive as swordplay. The centerpiece of the Clan, producer RZA, creates dark, gritty beats interspersed with samples from old kung-fu movies, while the other MCs, sporting cryptic nicknames, dexterously weave complex lyrical narratives rife with assonance, rhyme, allusion, and metaphors. But none of this was evident to me the first time I popped the disc into my CD player.
See, 36 Chambers, despite its subtle genius, is a bit rough around the edges. The beats are not only dark; they’re dissonant and clanging. The imagery isn’t just vivid or real; it’s vulgar and uncomfortably explicit. The Clansmen detail life as they know it, and though they do it with unparalleled energy and style, the tales they tell are violent and criminal. Some of them worked selling crack before joining the group, and it shows in their lyrics. When I gave the album the first of many listens, all I heard was the same gangster posturing that had turned me off to rap in the first place.
But when I returned to the album a few months later, I found new layers of meaning beneath the hard-hitting bass and steel drums. The MCs play off each other like a team of soccer players, each one holding the mic for only a short time before passing it off to another, setting each other up with rapped introductions and mid-verse ad-libs. They seemed like one organism, never bragging about their own prowess but rather of the power of the Clan as a whole. The effect was unlike anything I had ever heard before-a musicianship not relying on melody or even rhythm so much as on the distinctive personalities of the rappers, who characterized themselves as warriors or gangsters, sporting stage names like “Ghostface Killah” and “Inspectah Deck.” I was hooked on the Wu’s inimitable blend of lyricism, swagger, and camaraderie.
The realization that rap could inspire and move me just like the rock albums I was digging at the time sent me on a journey through the annals of hip-hop history. As I discovered through countless hours spent browsing Wikipedia, in 1993, the year 36 Chambers dropped, New York was the epicenter of a hip-hop golden age, and I just couldn’t get enough of it. With the Clan as my starting point, I moved on to Pete Rock’s legendary collaborations with rapper C.L. Smooth, Nas’s classic Illmatic, Mobb Deep’s Hell On Earth, Jay-Z’s Reasonable Doubt, and the underground Siah and Yeshua Dapoed. Nothing could grab my attention like the witty, poetic lyrics and lush, deep beats of this newfound genre.
I still can’t really put my finger on what exactly turned me on to hip-hop as a whole. Perhaps it was the realization that there was room for emotion within the hard-hitting drums and shimmering samples, or the discovery of layers of allusion and assonance in between the lines of arrogant self-promotion. I was surprised, too, to find that there was such a wide variety of styles within the genre-the raw, hardcore realism of the Wu-Tang is a far cry from the jazzy ambiance of Pete Rock’s prolific productions. Whatever the reason, I was soon listening to hip-hop as much as anything else. I started to recite verses along with tracks, to go searching throughout the Internet to find the samples used on my favorite songs. I had become a hip-hop head.
In these days of Kanye West’s superstardom and “Lil’ Wayne for President” t-shirts, rap as a genre needs little defense. During our generation’s coming of age, hip-hop was brought out of the streets and onto the airwaves, but it gained the same cookie-cutter commercialism and predictability of pop music, even if it is more edgy and profane. So next time you hear T-Pain robotically whining about throwing money at strippers, remember the time when rap was dominated by the gritty beats and crazy characters of the Wu-Tang Clan.
