Is Wu-Tang Really Forever?
Nothing is more frustrating than being a Wu-Tang fan. The ones who’ve been around around since the group’s early years know that the nine members have had their fair share of ups and downs over the past two decades.
Last week, I sat down with Raekwon the Chef for a candid chat about his new LP Fly International Luxurious Art, and he told me that despite what RZA has said about A Better Tomorrow being their final commercial project together, the Wu would definitely be back.
“Wu-Tang, like we always told you, it’s going to be forever,” said Raekwon. “Wu-Tang will make another fucking dope album again. I have no doubts and no questions about that.”
The question is — does anyone care?
Most hip-hop fans would agree that another LP wouldn’t hurt, but Raekwon himself was only able to move 7K copies of his new record last week, and though sales are a woefully outdated metric for measuring success, they still do play a part in determining how business transacts moving forward.
And when it comes to Wu-Tang, the business is very important. If you’ll recall, the holdup on A Better Tomorrow came down to business — specifically, RZA and Raekwon not having the money right to make the record work.
Raekwon himself admitted that’s partly what will make or break another project.
“I think dudes just want to make sure that our business is perfect and we can go on and still do what we love to do,” he said.
A Better Tomorrow wound up selling around 25k copies in its first week of release last December, and the video for the album’s title track hit the net around the same time that people across the country were protesting against the police over the death of Eric Garner. Which happened to occur on Staten Island, right in the Wu-Tang Clan’s backyard.
And yet there was almost no visible support for the video or the album from any of the more popular members of the Clan. A few scant interviews, some social media posts, but by and large it seemed like everyone was doing as little as they possibly could to draw attention to it. Raekwon said the guys had mixed feelings about it.
Which is fine, I suppose, because the album itself received middling reviews and most fans seemed to be on the side of wanting a redux. I gave the album a positive review in Billboard when it was released, have listened to it since then in fits and starts, and still think it’s a decent project that was unfairly written off.
But what critics and insiders think matters very little in the grand scheme of things, and if fans aren’t putting their money where their mouth is, it gets harder and harder to justify making a full on Wu-Tang album. It’s a costly endeavor, and one that attracts a stressful degree of scrutiny to everyone involved anyway. It’s exhausting.
Plus, more than twenty years into their careers, there’s a gap the size of the Grand Canyon between where guys like Raekwon and RZA are from a creative standpoint. Rae, for his part, has always insisted that a Wu-Tang group should be a harder, more in-your-face type of effort. With RZA as producer, they have gotten bits of that on Wu-Tang albums, but sometimes it’s felt like there’s been something missing. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly what it is, but it’s noticeable.
As an aside, the argument over the sonic direction of Wu-Tang records has always seemed to be an odd one, because many of the group’s classic songs are melodic, sort of laid-back affairs — “Can It Be All So Simple” and “C.R.E.A.M.,” for example — but there’s no doubt about it, they have not been able to counterbalance the hard vs. soft approach in album format since at least the 90s. If anyone has been able to pull that off, it’s been Ghostface, but the peak of his popularity as a soloist, for a better or worse, is at least ten years behind him.
When I talked to Raekwon, I suggested that maybe the best way to move forward was to have someone else in the group oversee things, kind of in the same way he’d done the Wu-Massacre album — the one with just Ghostface and Method Man — that came in 2010.
The idea is a no-brainer — have the rest of the members pick beats they like, then have RZA come in and just be a rapper. Heck, maybe even get a bigger producer, like Rick Rubin — just spitballing here — to oversee things.
Because the problem these guys have now, as older men, is that their chemistry together is not what it once was, and they all have slightly-different tastes. They need to just get on the same page, and RZA is, at least at this point, not the guy to do that.
There will always be a unifying Wu-Tang strain that runs through them, but you can see by listening to Raekwon’s new record, which is far more polished, melodic and straightforward, that not everyone in the Clan wants to be making the same exact record they were making back in 1993.
I think everyone — the fans, critics, even the members themselves — have a strong desire to see the group make another record. But the way it’s been done in the past is not going to work moving forward, and it’s a complicated thing pulling it off. RZA is making movies, Method Man wants to be a serious actor now. God only knows what everyone else is doing.
And maybe given the sales figures, the pool of people who cares about this stuff — a lot of folks in their late thirties and forties, I imagine — is actually far smaller than we think. Ultimately fans are fans, but rap is a fickle business, and when it’s not your time, it’s not your time. The 90s were long ago, and there are solo albums to be released, lives to lived and second careers to be had.
So, yeah, Wu-Tang is forever — but is anyone still listening?
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