A Wu-Tang Album in Name Only — The Deception of “The Saga Continues”

If a (supposedly) new Wu-Tang Clan album doesn’t move the needle the way it once did, it’s largely because it’s easy to be skeptical about new material coming out of Shaolin.

Not since 2001’s Iron Flag has it seemed like everyone in the group was on the same page and you’d have to go back another year, to 2000’s The W, to find a Wu-Tang album that pleased both the majority of critics and fans.

While they have no problem forming like Voltron to tour and perform their classics, there’s been internal strife for the better part of a decade. Ghostface Killah called their 2007 album 8 Diagrams “wack” and, at the same time, Raekwon referred to Wu-Tang founder and producer RZA as a “hip-hop hippie” because of his new age beats and increased focus on live instrumentation as opposed to samples with knocking beats. This disagreement continued in the run-up to 2014’s supposed swan song, A Better Tomorrow:

In early 2013, RZA began work on new Wu-Tang songs, doubling down on his organic approach to production: Instead of sampling old R&B songs, as he had on early Wu-Tang records, he would make his own vintage-flavored tracks from scratch. RZA worked in L.A. with producer and classic-funk guru Adrian Younge. He also headed to Royal Studios in Memphis, and hired some of the session men who…