It’s hard to say exactly what The W, the Wu-Tang Clans new album, is.
The Clan is a group that used to sell crack outside Park Hill projects in the vacant borough of Staten Island, but are now wealthy. Are they a remembrance of past attitudes and actions or a producer’s ploy to keep records moving off the shelves?
After almost 20 solo albums, the once unified hard beats and tight rhyming seem like a kind of re-visit to the `hood after making it. Wu seems to be aware of it too; Rza and Method Man both quote rhymes from the first album. The whole album carefully falls between the old and the new Wu boundaries.
The W begins with a doo-wop sample and fades to a more familiar sample: kung-fu flicks. Chamber music bashes the album’s first track open with a beat that sounds as if Rza had stolen outtakes from Gzas Liquid Swords. The kung-fu theme song with a simple snare and bass beat paves the road for a Wu-Tang parade of taunts, promises and a few pop-culture references. The song seems like something that might have appeared on Wu-Tang Forever because of the big orchestra synthetic fill-ins, but has the spirit of the old Wu because of the hardcore hooks.
The next track tricks the listener into believing the Wu has fallen, with a cheesy commercial beat. Then it turns into a rhythmical landscape created by eerie water pinking and gunshots. The hook, “Someone in the back went Clack-Clack/ Something in the street went clang-clang/ Something in the Hall went Click-Click,” with U-God occasionally reminding us that “something in the slum went rum-pum-pum-pum.” It seems the Wu is still a thug soundtrack, with reverences to weapons of the past like box-cutters.
All contradictions aside, the album is a nice change from some of the lacking Wu solo albums. Instead of a double CD with hits and misses, The W is a continuos movie soundtrack with all the sudden changes and emotional turns that a Hollywood movie might make. Maybe the Wu needs to keep their rhymes hard and stupid. It is the Wu we all loved. Now it seems unconditional.
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