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Wu-Tang Clan - News
The war within the Wu-Tang Clan
| 07-02-2008 22:46 | 0 reaction(s) | add reaction | add news |
 With a new album and tour, the rap grandees should be on top of the world. Far from it - they're at each other's throats.
Sunshine streams through the palm trees outside the Miami Beach hotel where we are waiting for arguably the world's most influential hip-hop group, the Wu-Tang Clan. But all is not well with the Staten Island collective.
Fifteen years after they shook not just rap, but pop music as a whole, to its roots with their singular mix of kung-fu mysticism, gangster poetry and spooky beats, the Clan should be buoyant. They have just released 8 Diagrams in the US, their first album as a group in six years and the first since losing Ol' Dirty Bastard (aka ODB), their most notorious and flamboyant member, to heart failure in 2004.
Getting all eight surviving members writing and recording at the same time was a feat in itself. And the result, an ambitious blend of uncompromising urban storytelling and quasi-spiritual peace paeans featuring George Clinton and the Red Hot Chili Peppers' John Frusciante, has reminded many reviewers that they can still surprise and energise.
But several Clansmen don't agree, and the group have relied on their formidable back catalogue for their new American tour, from which RZA - the Clan's producer, de facto leader and self-styled “Abbott” (pictured right) - has markedly been absent. Another member, Ghostface Killah, is involved in legal proceedings against RZA, his brother-in-law, over payments he is allegedly owed.
An interview and picture session have been promised before the group perform tonight, but the signs aren't good as two vast tour buses disgorge a stream of disgruntled rappers into the Florida glare. U-God keeps his nose in his laptop; Method Man saunters past, drawling: “I ain't doin' nothing.”
We wait glumly in the lobby. Eventually, word comes down that Raekwon and Ghostface, who make up one of the Clan's strongest internal alliances, might answer a few questions over dinner. They emerge 20 minutes later, staring darkly at their mobiles and regularly breaking off to take calls.
“I'm on strike,” scowls Raekwon, the shorter and more intense of the two. “I shouldn't even be here.” Taking photographs is out of the question until they have found a barber to shave them (Raekwon is sporting some fearsome facial hair - in 8 Diagrams he describes himself as “bearded like Taleban”).
Raekwon is a glutton for controversy, expressing his lack of enthusiasm for Hillary Clinton's presidential bid (“A man needs to control manly activities”) and his admiration for the Mafia (“I like their principles”). His rhymes are heavy with the street violence of his youth, nowhere more so than on his platinum-selling Built 4 Cuban Linx, one of the Clan's many solo spin-off albums, and its forthcoming sequel. Both were made “for people that can relate to me, for my trenchmen. I love the fact that you'll enjoy it but it wasn't made for you,” he says, pointing a finger.
And the Taleban reference? “Hair represents strength,” he says. I'm not co-signing terrorism, that's very important. But if you put it in a rap context, I am the Taleban. I'm a wise man and I'm trying to be as humble as I can, but the other side of my head is spazzed out with everybody. When I calm down, then I'll shave.”
One of his chief grievances concerns 8 Diagrams, whose most controversial track, The Heart Gently Weeps, is a reworking of George Harrison's While My Guitar Gently Weeps and features Frusciante and Harrison's son Dhani on guitar. These are influences that don't chime with Raekwon and Ghostface's purist sensibilities. “The album didn't really have that energy that everybody knows the Clan for,” says Raekwon, who has even made his disquiet clear in a vitriolic YouTube broadcast. “Plus RZA on the production, he wasn't coming with the heat. It's like giving somebody a sandwich and him saying: ‘Yo, I love the way you make those sandwiches.' Then you give the n**** a sandwich again, n**** spits the shit out and says: ‘What kind of cheese is this? This bread is all hard and crunchy.'”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” choruses the huge, bearlike Ghostface. He has a particular beef with the track Life Changes, a tribute to ODB that features verses from each of the surviving members - except for him. Why did he not appear? “Because RZA was a d***head,” he pouts, offering Raekwon a forkful of his turkey burger. “He left me out. RZA tried to be funny and not get that music to me. How you gonna do that? That's my brother's death.” Did he explain why? “No, because he knew that I'm taking his ass to court.”
Raekwon is now floating the idea of a splinter project, Shaolin vs Wu-Tang. Which of the group will feature on that album? “Everybody,” he mutters. RZA? “Nah. This is Operation Teach-the-Abbott-a-Lesson. Not to belittle him, just to show we ain't lettin' anybody take us down with them.”
And the future of Wu-Tang Clan? Long silence. “We takin' it one day at a time.”
If Raekwon and Ghost are the Clan's firebrands, then GZA, its oldest member at 41, could be described as the cerebral diplomat. The youngest of six children, he co-founded the group with two of his cousins: RZA and ODB, whose “humour, charisma and bluntness” he greatly misses.
He became known as GZA (pronounced “jizza”) because of the way his nickname, Genius, sounded when scratched on a turntable. He talks engagingly about the 1970s, when the three of them would travel on the subway to be awed by the Bronx's hip-hop pioneers. As Staten Islanders they were on the fringes of the scene, but that insularity only added to the Clan's mystique when they emerged in the early 1990s.
GZA admits that he was unsure about 8 Diagrams at first, but it has grown on him. The Clan has always been a close family of conflicting personalities, he insists: “A lot of us have history with each other. Some of us are family; others are linked through marriage. One may have a lot of female fans [Method Man], one might have intellectual fans [himself], some might have 'hood fans [Raekwon and Ghost]. That's what makes Wu-Tang so great.”
They tussled, of course, “as siblings do”, but the battles were always private. “A lot of groups used Wu-Tang as an example of what a group should be like, how we never fought with each other in public.”
Not any more. How positive does he feel now about the group's future? Another long silence. The Clan are good at silences. “Positive? Hmm.”
Several hours later, GZA takes to the stage alongside his seven colleagues and three auxiliary Clansmen. Most of the ecstatic, largely white, crowd are in their teens, and would have been in nappies when the Clan's debut LP, 36 Chambers, was released in 1993. But songs from that era feature most heavily, including arguably their most famous track: C.R.E.A.M. (Cash Rules Everything Around Me). Fifteen years on, it's still about the money. Which brings us back to RZA (pronounced “rizza” of course), who masterminded the group's 1990s commercial dominance. As the rest of the Clan leave Miami the next morning, pausing briefly to pose for a relieved photographer, he is hundreds of miles away in New Jersey. It takes a week to reach him on the phone. But once I do, boy can he talk, expounding in his inimitable lisp about territories and percentages with the fluency of a natural businessman.
The legal dispute with Ghostface Killah pains him “because he's my brother-in-law and I love him”, but RZA insists that he was paid more than he should have received and that it was Ghost's “absence from class” that caused him to miss out on the ODB tribute track. “We were in the studio for 60 days,” he says. “Ghost maybe came in for five.”
And what of his colleagues' allegations that 8 Diagrams strays too far from the group's roots? “I love hip-hop's egotism and aggression, but it's also a way to get a message out,” he explains. “I thought they pre-judged the album too quick.”
The album opens with a kung-fu sample urging the importance of honesty, kindness and justice. “Who don't wanna be part of that?” RZA laughs. “The 'hood don't get you nowhere, man - it gets you in jail.”
With his second career as a soundtrack composer (for films such as Ghost Dog and Kill Bill) and a new solo album, he is unperturbed about a Wu-Tang project without him (“They been doing albums without me for years”) and points out that those records have done poorer business than the ones he produced.
Nor is he devastated at missing the tour, which, he says, was due to family commitments and not being given enough notice. The shows' reliance on classics has not enthused him: “I want to be part of something powerful and new.”
What, then, does he see as the future of the Clan? “I'm not going out on a pilgrimage to make them come back to me,” RZA says. “But the Abbott will be sitting in the temple waiting for whoever comes to get some enlightenment from him.”
8 Diagrams is released by Bodog on Monday
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