Wu-Tang was also one of the first brands in rap to diversify. It set industry trends by turning the massive-rap-posse concept into a lucrative act. The group's members toured constantly, while its hits banged in clubs and on radio stations nationwide. "To get several record deals, and hold publishing, and still to produce for others - that's straight-up control." They changed it for their crew," he says. "Nobody changed the game the way the Wu-Tang Clan did, because they. RZA's business model still amazes rap critic Malone. Those deals protected the Wu-Tang Clan as a group and allowed each member to have a solo contract with another record company. The Wu-Tang Clan bum-rushed microphones and video cameras, going platinum in large part due to the sheer volume of its hip-hop thug theater.īehind the scenes, RZA negotiated unprecedented deals for the group. We just believed in what we believed in, and we ran with that, and we became this cultural group." "We wasn't thinking about, 'Yo, we gonna take over the world,' " Raekwon says. In the Wu film, Raekwon the Chef remembers reclaiming the rap crown for New York City. In the early '90s, New York hip-hop had taken a back seat to Dr. I told everybody in the crew, 'I been in the industry for a few years, and I don't think nobody could f- with us,' you know what I mean?" RZA says. "After doing more songs with everybody and having more good times together. RZA rallied eight of the tightest young rappers around him - including his cousins the GZA and Ol' Dirty Bastard - and the Wu Tang Clan's war for hip-hop supremacy was on. I'm going back to my homeboys and crew, and see who wants to sign to my record company. "Like, yo, I'm gonna go start my own record company. And, like any kung-fu-monk-obsessed producer would do, RZA meditated daily, conceiving his comeback power move. RZA was determined to keep making music, even after his brief stint as a solo MC left him bitter about the dark side of the music industry. In the pre-Wu-Tang days, many of the young men who would later form the Wu passed through RZA's basement studio to cut their own demo tracks. The whole thing - the vocabulary, the beats and most of the Clan members themselves - came from there. It came from being on Staten Island and being kind of secluded from the other five boroughs and developing our own slang." Together, they aimed to parry and thrust their way to the hilt of the hip-hop game. Each of those nine MCs - to continue the metaphor - had his own lyrical "fighting" style. RZA's crew would wield its collective rap skills just like that mighty saber. Once upon a time, a warrior clan shared the Wu-Tang sword. RZA lifted his ideas from the labyrinthine mythology of kung-fu flicks. And I was like, 'Who the hell is going to follow that?' " "But I remember laughing like hell, and he was telling me, like, Staten Island was Shaolin, and the name of the group is called Wu-Tang Clan, and just what the ideology was. "I thought it was incredible," Malone says. RZA had stopped by Malone's office to play him the Wu-Tang's first single - a spare, rough-hewn track called "Protect Ya Neck." Premiered on BET and now out on DVD, Wu: The Story of The Wu-Tang Clan traces the rise, disintegration and ongoing saga of the band. "I gotta be honest," he says, "as much as I love those dudes, I did not understand what the hell they were trying to do at all. In a new documentary film, Malone says he doesn't remember RZA being quite so clear about the Wu-Tang Clan in the beginning. Veteran rap critic Bonz Malone worked for Island Records in the early '90s. Method Man and de facto leader RZA have also launched successful acting careers. The Wu-Tang brand spread into fashion and even video games. Today, Wu-Tang's debut album, Enter the 36 Chambers, is considered a hip-hop classic. The rap collective's gritty mix of Staten Island slang and kung-fu film imagery drove fans wild. It was that hyperactive brand of energy that made the Wu-Tang Clan hip-hop's first true empire in the mid-1990s. "I come rough, tough like an elephant tusk / Ya head rush, fly like Egyptian musk." "Catch the blast of a hype verse / My glock bursts, leave in a hearse, I did worse," Ghostface Killah raps in "Bring da Ruckus," the album's opening track. From the very beginning of its first album, the Wu-Tang Clan told us exactly how it planned to hit the hip-hop world.
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