In an effort to shake some of the Law professors who have been frequenting my blog, I felt the need to have another
Wu-Tang related post. This post was sourced with files from our west coast correspondent, Mr. de Bakker.
"Here is an article about what some shithead intellectual from the
New Yorker thinks about Ghostface Killah's new album (
I know we all share an appreciation for his work). For some reason the
New Yorker is always trying to improve their "street cred" by writing these ridiculous pieces about the
Wu. The article is ok but the online edition doesn't have the same pics as the magazine. Try to get your hands on a hard copy."
GHOST’S WORLD
A Wu-Tang Clan member’s new album.
by SASHA FRERE-JONES
I own only one piece of art depicting a musician. It’s a photograph of an m.c. known as Ghostface Killah. He is smoking a cigarette and singing into an old-fashioned ribbon microphone. In his knit cap and sunglasses, he looks a bit like Frank Sinatra crossed with a jewel thief. “Fishscale,” Ghostface’s new album, is his fifth, and it is the most exciting record I’ve heard recently. This is more than a little surprising, because Ghostface is thirty-five, and rappers seldom have long careers, let alone ones in which the quality of the work steadily improves.
Ghostface, who was born Dennis Coles, is one of the nine (or ten, depending whom you count) members of the Wu-Tang Clan, a hip-hop group from Staten Island that for the past fifteen years has been one of the genre’s most unpredictable and respected collectives. The band’s début record, “Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers),” was released in 1993, and though none of the group’s four albums—or the thirty solo albums released by its members—have sold more than two million copies, the Wu-Tang Clan has accrued cultural capital rare in hip-hop. (Perhaps only the Notorious B.I.G., Jay-Z, and Tupac can claim equally august status.) The Wu-Tang style is sui generis, and seems especially so now, in the context of more popular hip-hop, which tends toward clean electronic sounds and simple, repetitive choruses.
Wu-Tang music sounds dirty—not just profane but unclean. The songs are overstuffed with cryptic slang and complex stories. A typical track contains a looped sample of an old soul record overlaid with squeals, beeps, echoes, and virtuosic rhyming that goes and goes, then simply stops. The group borrows words and images from kung-fu movies—the source of Wu-Tang and Shaolin, an alias for Staten Island—and each member has several, not necessarily intelligible, nicknames. Last year, one of the group’s founders and its main producer, The RZA, co-authored a book called “The Wu-Tang Manual,” an attempt to explain the band’s use of Buddhism and martial arts, pop-culture references, and weird nomenclature. The name Ghostface Killah, for instance, is derived from a 1979 movie called “The Mystery of Chess Boxing.” Not many hip-hop groups need a reader’s guide.
The group has not released an album since 2001, and its live appearances are limited to occasional reunion shows, the most recent in New York being an entertaining but ragged performance in February at Hammerstein Ballroom. In 2004, Ol’ Dirty Bastard, one of the band’s bawdiest and most popular members, died of a drug overdose. The RZA has lately been scoring Hollywood movies—Jim Jarmusch’s “Ghost Dog” and Quentin Tarantino’s “Kill Bill” epic—and the Wu-Tang’s first breakout star, Method Man, has been acting in films. He appeared in “Soul Plane” and “How High” and on a short-lived television sitcom called “Method & Red.”
Ghostface Killah, though, has stuck to recording and has become the de-facto Wu-Tang standard-bearer. (He is also the only member of the group to have had a doll produced in his likeness: a limited-edition, five-hundred-dollar action figure that comes with a paisley print robe and a tiny gold chalice studded with Swarovski crystals.) Ghostface embodies the Wu-Tang dualism—the tension between the accessible and the esoteric. Some songs, including one of his highest-charting hits, “Cherchez la Ghost,” from 2000, incorporate long samples of familiar old songs (in this case, Dr. Buzzard’s Original Savannah Band’s 1976 hit “Cherchez la Femme”); others are larded with dissonant machine noises. Both styles complement his lyrics, which alternate between candid autobiographical vignettes and delightful non sequiturs. His voice is a gorgeous instrument, mellifluous even when he’s yelling, which he does an awful lot.
His 1996 single “All That I Got Is You” was a tearjerker about growing up poor: “Seven o’clock, pluckin’ roaches out the cereal box, some shared the same spoon, watchin’ Saturday cartoons. Sugar water was our thing, every meal was no thrill; in the summer, free lunch held us down like steel.” By contrast, “Nutmeg,” the lead track on his 2000 album, “Supreme Clientele,” contains so many unrelated images, laid over a silky 1977 soul record by Eddie Holman called “It’s Over,” that what you take away is mostly Ghostface’s joy in the sonorous possibilities of the English language: “Swing the John McEnroe, rap rock’n’roll, Ty-D-Bol, gung-ho pro, Starsky with the gumsole. Hit the rump slow, parole kids, live Rapunzel but Ton’ stizzy really high, the vivid laser eye guy.”
Few hip-hop artists can squeeze as many words onto an album as Ghostface, and on “Fishscale” he charges into every track, including the romantic numbers, with harried force. His lyrics sound unedited and unrehearsed—he frequently changes his mind or corrects himself from one verse to the next—but the songs aren’t rushed or sloppy. He has an ear for prosaic details (what time it was when the police busted in, what show was on TV) that bring freshness to hip-hop’s often rote tales of drugs, guns, and girls. “Barbershop,” for example, begins with Ghostface complaining to his barber—over a female chorus crooning “You better believe it”—“Didn’t I tell you don’t touch the sides? I’m going bald on top!” His griping is interrupted when the police raid the shop. The customers scatter, and Ghostface raps: “And out of breath, I tossed the burgundy Tec in the bushes where it landed on the side of the ’jects. I hope the pigs don’t find it; it will fuck up my rep.”
The point of the song isn’t what happens but that nothing much does. In “Run,” a duet with the gravel-voiced New York rapper Jadakiss, which appears on “The Pretty Toney Album” (2004), the police also show up, and Jadakiss and Ghostface take off, though Ghostface isn’t sure why they’re fleeing: “Running through the pissy stairwells, I ain’t hear nothing, bugging. Only thing I remember was a bullshit summons.” (In an aside of the kind that makes Ghostface’s songs great, Jadakiss adds, “I’m asthmatic, so I’m lookin’ for somewhere to hide at.”) Like “Barbershop,” “Run” evokes a sense of permanent environmental instability.
That anxiety permeates “Fishscale.” The first song, “Shakey Dog,” suggests the gory opening scene of “Pulp Fiction,” in double time. With an accomplice named Frank, Ghostface enters an apartment building, where he smells plantains and rice; Frank proceeds to shoot a pit bull and “put two holes in the door man’s Sassoon.” In “Kilo,” Ghostface describes the process of producing crack cocaine in brilliantly casual dialogue, backed by the sound of a spoon stirring something in a bowl: “Yo, Sharifa, go to the store for me. I need some razors and a fresh box of baggies, the ones with the tint in them. Yo, son, turn that water down a little bit, just a little bit. Thank you. I need two waters, a Dutch, and a cranberry Snapple.”
His reactions to his violent surroundings are as unexpected as his observations. In “Whip You with a Strap,” an uneasy song built from a long sample of Luther Ingram’s “To the Other Man,” he tells of being beaten as a child by his mother. “Mama shake me real hard, then get the big gat—that’s called the belt. ‘Help me,’ as I yelled, I’m in the room like ‘huh, huh, huh’ with mad welts. Ragged out, bad belt, yes, her presence was felt.” And yet Ghostface apparently approves of corporal punishment: “She was famous for her slaps, and to this day she’s on it. But when I was a little dude, her son was a little rude. . . . Nowadays kids don’t get beat, they get big treats—fresh pairs of sneaks, punishment’s like ‘Have a seat.’ ”
And what to make of “Underwater,” a lighthearted and goofy song produced by the rapper and producer MF Doom, who is responsible for four of the album’s twenty-three tracks? The sound is odd and noisy, reminiscent of early Wu-Tang songs produced by The RZA. Flutes swoop around the beat and gurgling water punctuates Ghostface’s ungangsterlike reverie of being “lost underwater”: “Amazed that I’m not drowning, butterflies took control when I arrived. I opened the door—No, I knocked first.” (Ghostface likes to interrupt himself.) He swims past fish, ogles “pearls on the mermaid girls, Gucci belts that they rock for no reason, from a different world,” and sees SpongeBob SquarePants sitting “in the Bentley coupe,” listening to the Isley Brothers. It’s not exactly a song for kids—a more commercially minded rapper might have made it less weird—but Ghostface doesn’t seem to care about tailoring his music to the market.
Last fall, in the middle of a riveting show at B.B. King’s, Ghostface asked a member of the stage crew to turn on a blue light. The d.j. put on “My Ebony Princess,” a 1977 single by Jimmy Briscoe & the Little Beavers, and Ghostface began to sing along: “Your eyes are dark as the night.” He stopped, listened to the record for a few seconds, and began talking about how his parents had conceived him while listening to this kind of soul music. Then he told the d.j. to stop the music. “For those that don’t have no soul, y’all wouldn’t really understand or know where the fuck I’m coming from when I play shit like that,” he said. “See—I was born in 1970, yo. You know what, I’m a seventies man, a Taurus and shit, and I love, like, shit like that. I’d rather write to shit like that than hip-hop any day.”
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