This month marks the 30th anniversary of the Wu-Tang Clan’s debut album Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers). The iconic rap/hip-hop collective’s members include Raekwon, Ghostface Killa, RZA, Ol’ Dirty Bastard, Method Man, and many more.
The Wu-Tang Clan formed on Staten Island during the early 1990s, often rapping about life in New York. Music critic Craig Jenkins grew up listening to the group on cassette tapes.
“Nineties New York City was a spooky place,” Jenkins tells KCRW. “You were hearing about all the crime and you were hearing about people getting arrested. It wasn't, unfortunately, as much of a mystery that it would have been for a kid back in those days.”
The Wu-Tang Clan’s music differed from the g-rap that emerged from the West Coast, and pulled inspiration from 1980s Hong Kong cinema, including Chow Yun-fat and Gordon Lu movies.
“That mix is very specifically New York. In the city, you would have grown up looking at those movies in the 42nd Street Cinema. You would have seen those films, and you would have heard that music from your parents. … It's just a natural synthesis of stuff that was really randomly in your purview.”
Jenkins says Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) wasn’t well-received upon release. But it helped cement the popularity of its members.
“People in the know caught it immediately, but the masses took a little while. They had to break a little ground. RZA was under the impression that … they were going to get together, and they were going to eat this one in order to make future money, which is kind of what happens. By 1995, there’s a parade of individual releases from all these guys and everyone's their own superstar.”
He argues that the group carved out their legacy on the technical and songwriting fronts, creating dark symphonies on new sampling machines such as the ASR-10 and the SP-1200.
“You could take three and four and six seconds off of an old record and make something out of it. … Wu-Tang is an advertisement for how much you can get done with that and people who have taken from that. Generation after generation are pushing it even further.”