N.W.A vs. Wu-Tang Clan
The competing legacies of hip-hop’s two greatest groups.
FOR ALL OF N.W.A’s ANTAGONISM, egotism, and rage, the only rappers they ever feuded with were themselves. To find a comparably fierce case of musical infighting and betrayal, you need to leave hip-hop altogether: In terms of acrimony, they were rap’s Police, rap’s Supreme’s, rap’s Guns N’ Roses. Still, when the subject arises of crowning hip-hop’s all-time greats, it makes sense to bracket off N.W.A against the Wu-Tang Clan. The former were kaput for a year—four years if you count from Ice Cube’s departure—by the time the latter debuted, but the two crews are, in several regards, fun-house-mirror images of each other. Each originated off the rap map, as its borders were drawn at the time, and turned that isolation into an asset; each put a premium on hood verité before going on to articulate that ideal in dramatically different ways; and each was a gang of contentious, combustible, and brilliant personalities, such that an imaginary showdown between them splinters into hotly contested one-on-one beefs. Who’s the more visionary producer, Dr. Dre or RZA? Who was the more brilliant madman, Eazy-E or Ol’ Dirty Bastard? Whose solo debut was worse, MC Ren’s or U-God’s?
Today, gangsta rap’s metamorphosis into a billion-dollar marketing come on is nearly total, so it’s important to remember that when N.W.A’s 1988 sophomore set, Straight Outta Compton, came out, it was intended—and taken—as a threat. Their name, typically decoded as the slur-flipping “Niggaz With Attitude,” also shared initials with the phrase “No Whites Allowed.” These threats doubled, of course, as invitations, and when the album started selling to younger, suburban whites, there was parent-group outcry, pundit bile, and, famously, a scolding letter rattled off to Priority Records courtesy of the FBI. This five-man crew from Compton pumped many things into the pop mainstream, but near the top of the list is the Parental Advisory sticker.
Their achievement is stunning: With Straight Outta Compton (the only N.W.A LP that features the group’s core lineup), N.W.A created the gangsta-rap persona as we know it—icily Darwinist, gleefully misogynist, violently anti-authority—and made it hip-hop’s normative perspective. Earlier MCs—Schoolly D and Ice-T among them—had floated similar positions, but this was where gangsta rap took on the proportions of a worldview. Today N.W.A are venerated in hip-hop as the gold standard of sawed-off, street-certified rage, and one thing they have over the Wu-Tang in buckets is influence: The narrative they put forth 20 years ago has since been refined and amended (Tupac added pathos, Biggie virtuosity, Jay-Z capitalism), but its basic terms have held firm.
When we think of Straight Outta Compton, we typically recall its opening one-two punch: the deafening drone of the title track followed by the squealing “Fuck tha Police.” These are chest-thumping taunts and wild-eyed frontline dispatches set to breathtakingly brutal noise; in two five-minute bursts, N.W.A introduced Compton as a vivid slice of American hell and minted an AK-47 radicalism that made rap’s reigning agit-propstas of the moment, Public Enemy, seem like fusty pamphleteers.
But how dangerous was “The World’s Most Dangerous Group?” One of the most remarkable things about listening to N.W.A’s records today is the reminder of how goofy they were willing to get; the group’s self-proclaimed “reality rap” was heavily theatricalized from the jump. Following Ice Cube’s lead, Eazy-E, MC Ren, and Dr. Dre rap in precise, actorly booms (in this regard, Cube’s future as a Christmas-movie titan isn’t that hard to square with his origins); there are numerous attempts at gross-out humor, which reach a ridiculous extreme on Eazy-E’s 1988 solo bid, Eazy-Duz-It; and, on Straight Outta Compton, Dr. Dre and DJ Yella’s apocalyptic blares alternate with rubbery, comical funk and, finally, a Mighty Mouse-sampling electro jam—“Something 2 Dance 2”—that sounds as though it popped and locked its way into the wrong part of town. Today it’s accepted wisdom that gangstas don’t dance, but Dre, who began his musical life in the club-oriented World Class Wreckin’ Cru, has always nursed an instinctive desire to get everyone on the floor.
Beyond “Fuck Tha Police,” N.W.A never advanced anything quite so coherent as an agenda, but they were unquestionably political. They needed only to scowl into a camera and it was an act of radical dissent—the phenomenon of five loud, malevolent, hyper-sexualized African-American men was more than enough to provoke, frighten, and, in significant numbers, entrance mainstream audiences. N.W.A were well aware of this. In one of their most striking press photos, they stand fully dressed on a beach, looking over at two oblivious white women; the image crackles with tension, not the least of which stems from a discomfiting sense that, if you feel a surge of protectiveness toward these two-dimensional sunbathers, you have fallen into a trap, laid craftily and cannily, to catch AmeriKKKans.
N.W.A’s evocation of rageful inner-city otherness was so powerful that when the L.A. riots broke in 1992, many observers referred back to their music as the smoke before the fire. This literally incendiary aura distracts, though, from how tedious much of N.W.A’s music can be. Time is often unkind to radical gestures, but listening to their three albums back to back—beginning with 1987’s N.W.A and the Posse and ending with 1991’s Niggaz4Life—you hear them regularly cross the line between shock and its stale, calculated imitation. They’ll push a button, then keep jamming on it until their thumbs bleed.
N.W.A’s woman hate, which they typically play for yuks, grows especially tiresome. On “Straight Outta Compton,” when Eazy-E brags about murdering a woman who “got the last penetration” and letting out “a gust of wind” at the crime scene, it’s a disturbing mishmash of sex, violence, and scatological comedy; by the time Ice Cube announces, “I think with my ding-a-ling,” on the gleefully boorish “I Ain’t Tha 1,” it doesn’t matter how much or how little irony he intends, he’s just embarrassing himself.
Despite Dr. Dre’s drive-by funk, there is a frustrating feeling of stasis to many N.W.A songs: the staccato declaratives pitched into tracks like stakes, the sense of a mission statement being laid out again and again and again. Viewed historically, this was critical work—a voice of anger and subjugation elbowing its way to the front of the room, strangling the microphone in its demand to be heard. But in the case of N.W.A that voice seems to have rapidly exhausted itself.
And not just artistically: The group soon imploded amid personal animus and financial disputes. N.W.A’s manager, Jerry Heller, famously claimed that Suge Knight, accompanied by several pipe-and-bat-wielding henchmen, threatened to kill him if Dr. Dre wasn’t released from his contract. Post-N.W.A, Eazy-E’s and Ice Cube’s solo careers were hit-and-miss (the latter’s music grew more political and more lug-headed at the same time); AIDS killed Eazy in 1995; and the last time we heard from Yella he was directing pornos. Only Dr. Dre has stayed relevant—crucial, in fact. First he downshifted, concocting the languid, luxurious G-funk sound on 1992’s The Chronic, where sex and menace waft over the tracks like heat distortion; then, in one of pop’s rare third acts, he struck upon the shiny, hard-swinging stomps that introduced Eminem and 50 Cent to the world.
THE WU-TANG CLAN PROBABLY couldn’t have existed without N.W.A, who proved definitively that gangsta rappers could enjoy major success without scrubbing up. But the Clan constituted a major leap forward in terms of musical, lyrical, and, for whatever it’s worth, moral sophistication. While N.W.A’s MCs are constantly telling us what they are (“a crazy motherfucker,” “the type of nigga that’s built to last,” “a real nigga,” “the nigga you love to hate”), the Wu-Tang prefer to talk elliptically and abstractly about what they do (“stick my Wu-Tang sword right through your navel,” “crash at high speeds, strawberry kiwi,” “keep shit stains in my drawers so I can get fizza-funky for you”) as well as what they see.
From Wu-Tang’s 1992 debut single, “Protect Ya Neck,” forward, the self isn’t expressed so much as refracted—through kung-fu and comic-book fantasies, Five Percenter speak, and acres of left-field metaphors. The nine-man posse rechristened their native Staten Island “Shaolin,” transfiguring, ennobling, and exerting narrative control over the bleakness and desperation they saw around them. In their retelling, gangbangers became samurai, living according to a complex, otherworldly code (no wonder Jim Jarmusch hired RZA to score Ghost Dog—he lifted its concept from him.) The result was a stunning, potent paradox—the Clan were hip-hop’s first magical realists.
Wu-Tang were never De La Soul-style big-tenters, but their dense, gnomic lexicon and kung-fu cosmos were, in a counterintuitive way, inclusive and inviting to both gangsta obsessives and hip-hop’s dorkiest, whitest fans. Wu-Tang offer worlds to explore, mythology to pore over, ciphers to crack. Who are these gods and earths? What is the secret significance of the number 36? In what way are the Wu-Tang like Voltron? Not for nothing are Wu-Tang the only rap group to come with their own manual. Like Led Zeppelin in Carhartt hoodies, they turned the sweaty-palmed iconography of geeks, outcasts, and sci-fi mystics into something impossibly cool.
Not to mention fun. N.W.A delighted in a sort of abject hedonism, but the Wu-Tang, who resuscitated some of the old-school, crowd-rocking values N.W.A shoved aside as frivolous, suffused their music with a far more exciting sense of play. The immense character in Ice Cube’s voice notwithstanding, he and MC Ren could be oppressively stentorian in delivery and unvarying in cadence; Eazy-E worked a shambling, twerpy charisma, but Ice Cube ghostwrote most of his rhymes. Whereas N.W.A’s best songs ride relatively straightforward AABB rhyme schemes, the Wu-Tang internalized the jazzy, syncopated innovations of their East Coast compatriot Rakim, and the flow of their verse is continually, dazzlingly ruptured: Their rhymes ripple with bursts of laughter, internal rhymes, snatches of song, coughs, and onomatopoeic interjections. (Sometimes, especially in the case of the marvelously unhinged Ol’ Dirty Bastard, that is all the rhymes seem to consist of.) The Wu-Tang rappers vary in talent, but all are capable of stealing a song, and all are fascinating just to listen to. The smoldering Raekwon; the drunkenly mellifluous ODB; the smoky Method Man; the creased, bristly GZA; the weeping Ghostface; the excitable Inspectah Deck; the narcotically laid-back Masta Killa; the rumbling U-God; the viscous RZA: The latter’s ear was in fine form not just when he assembled samples, but when he assembled the group itself.
The MCs’ gifts, of course, aren’t just formal. On Wu-Tang’s 1993 debut, Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers), the song “Can It Be All So Simple” is a devastating assault on back-in-the-day nostalgia (“My pops was a fiend since sixteen,” Raekwon raps, describing a distinctly un-Edenic childhood); “C.R.E.A.M.” is a 360-degree inner-city survey in which our gun-toting narrators are anything but invincible; and “Tearz” stands as a grim elaboration on (refutation of?) N.W.A’s narrowly conceived “reality rap”: In two little morality plays that offer no easy morals, a corner boy faces the violent death of a loved one and a pussy-hound is infected with HIV. Wu-Tang were professed comic-book geeks, but it’s in N.W.A’s music that supermen act brazenly and without consequence.
Women barely appear in 36 Chambers’ lyrics—the album is a (passingly homoerotic) boys-only tree-house. As Wu-Tang Forever’s scuzzy “Maria” or Ghostface’s wrafthful “Wildflower” would later demonstrate, the Clan had their share of girl troubles, but they also suggested that deep scorn for women didn’t need to be a gangsta tenet. In Method Man’s sublimely eerie “You’re All I Need to Get By,” a love object is addressed adoringly as “my nigga”—fairly transgressive gender politics for an avowed thug. (Between that song and Ghostface’s “Camay,” the Wu-Tang were great at shadowy, idiosyncratic love songs long before “ladies’ jams” became a market-tested must.)
As a producer, RZA is hip-hop’s great experimentalist—too enamored with unfinished edges and loose ends, too uninterested in hooks and traditional song form to ever make much of a dent in radio playlists. (“C.R.E.A.M.,” Wu-Tang’s biggest hit, topped out at No. 60 on the pop charts.) For him, samples aren’t meant to play in simple, endless loops: They’re raw material to be dismantled and skewered, often past the point of recognition. The savings accounts of Timbaland and Pharrell prove that there’s ample room in hip-hop’s mainstream for alien sounds, but there’s always been something unassimilable, off-kilter, and atmospheric about RZA’s beats, which is why his work on movie soundtracks makes sense, and why his popular influence is much harder to track than Dr. Dre’s: The most prominent example of RZA’s legacy is the early production of Kanye West, who turned one of RZA’s most haunting tricks, the sped-up, dusty vocal sample, into a brilliant commercial gimmick.
Put roughly, RZA’s beats yearn; Dr Dre’s sound satisfied. RZA fills even the sparest tracks with beguiling sonic riddles: voices that moan unintelligibly, minor-key melodies that never quite resolve. Most Dre beats convey an instant, magisterial gravitas—his signature device these days is an imperious, well-hammered piano chord. RZA has spent sixteen years teasing out the surprisingly expansive possibilities of a single aesthetic; Dre has not only kept up with hip-hop’s ever-shifting styles, he’s done much to dictate them. Among those who agree is RZA himself: “Nobody’s got a better ear in music than Dr. Dre,” he once told MTV. Still, it bears noting that RZA’s music for Wu-Tang has held up far better than Dre’s music for N.W.A—his greatest innovations happened after 1991.
The Wu-Tang Clan’s most lasting contribution to hip-hop might, however, be extra-musical: namely, the way they re-envisioned the rap group as a business. They boast one of music’s most elegant and iconic logos, which came in handy when they launched rap’s first clothing line to speak of. The Wu-Wear flagship store opened in 1995 on a busy boulevard in Staten Island’s Tompkinsville neighborhood, and in a few years their skullcaps, sweatshirts, and jeans were in malls nationwide. This was long before Sean John and Rocawear (and Formula 50 and Pimp Juice, for that matter), and when Wu-Wear opened, this kind of foray into “brand extension” was considered anything but global— a sister enterprise called Wu-Nails set up shop across the street, reinforcing the round-the-way vibe. In retrospect, the Wu-Wear storefront, now shuttered, was something like the first Starbucks or the first Wal-Mart: a trading post pitched ambitiously yet modestly on the outer frontier of hip-hop’s global push.
The Wu-Tang Clan’s business sense manifested in another important regard—their odds-defying longevity. From the beginning, it was shrewdly stipulated in the group’s contract that every member had the right to sign a solo deal with whichever label he pleased—no pipes and bats necessary. Until fairly recently, the Clan’s relationship has been free of the disputes that hastened N.W.A’s demise, and the result, to date, is five group albums and something like 40 solo albums.
This makes for a surfeit of music to navigate. If you want to explore N.W.A’s solo afterlives, you can pick up Eazy-Duz-It, AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted, and The Chronic, download “It Was a Good Day,” and ignore the rest with a pretty clean conscience. With Wu-Tang’s non-group output, you’ll be remiss if you never hear GZA’s Liquid Swords, Raekwon’s Only Built 4 Cuban Linx, Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s Return to the 36 Chambers, Inspectah Deck’s Uncontrolled Substance, and anything with “Ghostface Killah” on the cover. On the ODB disc, the MC’s bizarre manias dovetail, in the production, with an avant-garde warping of hip-hop physics, and the best Wu-Tang projects in general are the ones that concern themselves least with the demands of the market. Ghostface in particular has fruitfully embraced his role as a niche pleasure, delivering fantastically scatterbrained takes on evergreen material (“Shakey Dog” and “Maxine,” true-crime nail-biters delivered with cubist perspective jumps and breathless verve) or ditching the evergreen, outright, for the uncharted (“Underwater,” where he daydreamed about hanging out with SpongeBob SquarePants and couture-clad mermaids.)
N.W.A ARE LONG gone, and Wu-Tang have drifted further and further from the mainstream—their excellent 2007 album, 8 Diagrams, featured some of their strangest sounds to date and made a correspondingly fleeting impression on the charts. But the differing visions that each crew advanced as to what “real” could and should mean are still alive and under debate. The lines dividing the group’s descendant camps are highly porous, but in one—50 Cent, Young Jeezy, Chief Keef, Pusha T, and Rick Ross come to mind—there are rappers who present themselves, more or less, as down-the-line, no-nonsense purists. Artists in the other camp—a category that includes OutKast, Lil Wayne, and, more recently, Lil B, A$AP Ferg, Future, Young Thug, and the Odd Future collective—make a Wu-Tangish case for the badass extraterrestrial.
There’s no question which group had the bigger impact. N.W.A can claim credit for harnessing rap’s confrontational powers like no one before them, and for establishing hip-hop’s “true” locus as the drug-ravaged, dog-eat-dog, dead-end street: To this day, any other perspective is routinely (if spuriously) considered a deviation from the norm. Wu-Tang’s achievement wasn’t nearly as totalizing, but it’s profound nonetheless, and it’s cast an astonishingly long shadow. They made room for abstraction, escapism, and liberating flights of fancy within gangsta rap’s hardbound rulebook; they never lost sight of the dead-end street, but they made it a richer place.
This essay was originally published in the book Rock and Roll Cage Match: Music’s Greatest Rivalries, Decided (Three Rivers Press, 2008). It has been slightly revised.
