LEARNING 2 LISTEN PODCAST
Big shouts to the Learning To Listen podcast. Quinn, Charlie & Naomi host a weekly interview with different artists, and I was happy to be included. The central question they like to ask artists is “What album made you want to make music?”
That’s a big one, and there were lots of factors that played into that beyond other people’s music. I had to think about it for a while. The first rap album I ever had was Will Smith when I was in like grade 5 probably, in around 1998 I bet, but that one didn’t really get me into the full on Hip Hop mode that I’d eventually lock into when Eminem and Dre sunk their hooks into me (and everyone else) a few years later. Difference, as near as I can tell, between me and a lot of the other people who loved/love Em and Dre was that I continued to dig deeper by reading liner notes. West coast stuff was catchy, and it’s still cool, whatever, but for me it was just the entry point. Honestly at this point it feels almost cringy because I’ve seen one or two too many 2pac posters. Em’s a talented guy who has made many contributions to the culture. That said, access to the internet is a beautiful thing when you use it in pursuit of knowledge, and I used it to find and listen to all sorts of music I wouldn’t have otherwise heard.
It didn’t take me long to find that there was a whole other side of Hip Hop, a divide that went beyond the East vs West thing. It' was a whole different sound. New York stuff didn’t have the catchy funk bass lines that the west was taking from George Clinton, and I’d guess that kept a lot of my peers from enjoying it as much sonicly. It sounded sparser, and much less polished than Chronic 2001. Dre had taken the shiny suit pop star sound quality Diddy was pedaling and made it extra hard edged and appealing to people who wanted to feel/act tough while they/we listened to it, without sacrificing any of the catchiness of a pop jingle. That’s second Chronic is a great album and all. Classic. One of the best. But it wasn’t the one that helped me love Hip Hop as a culture.
That distinction belongs to New York classics that I was downloading 10 years after their release. On a 56k dial up modem.
For some reason, I can still really truly remember the day I downloaded C.R.E.A.M.. Not the date or anything, but the setting. I was in my basement playing what was probably the first, or maybe 2nd Tony Hawk game. That track is such a classic people who don’t know it know the chorus. On surface level it’s a glorification of having money, but if you listen to it a bit closer it’s pretty obviously also a critique of sorts of capitalism in general. “Life as a shorty shouldn’t be so rough”. It only is so rough because cash rules everything around me. That’s what I got out of that anyways.
I’ve seen it said before that white people who are safely far enough from gang life and drug dealing use Hip Hop as a safari ride where we can be entertained by danger from a distance. Taking joy from other people’s suffering is fucked up. That’s definitely something that happens, and probably there have been unexamined at the time parts of that throughout my life. Even now, when I’ve analyzed and tried to combat my acceptance of music that is detrimental to a lot of people’s well being and public image, I still get suckered in by vibes and bass sometimes and find myself enjoying something glorifying all sorts of shit I don’t support. Hip Hop’s weird that way. It’s being misused to push messages it was never built for, selected by interests it was largely created to counter. Its supposed to help uplift the community, as far as I understand through my studying of the history.
Hip Hop can also be something that opens eyes to realities that otherwise wouldn’t be seen or known, and sometimes, that can be really fascinating and have a huge draw for good reasons too. It’s up to the listener what assumptions they make based on the information they receive. Is the trap a spot where people sell drugs, or does that very word convey the message that it’s not somewhere you want to find yourself or force others to be, by way of inaction when it comes to racist governmental policies? It was songs like Cream that convinced me early that movements like drug legalization were worth supporting, because the current prohibition is ruining people’s lives and being enforced unfairly. It’s why my stage name looks like I took it from a furry blanket in a weed shop. I wanted to proudly represent that I smoked because I saw prohibition as inherently absurd and wanted to be active in rejecting it. If the listener is willing to listen to the words beyond the surface level aesthetic, they can hear people’s perspectives and gain some for themself. If the writer is saying anything that matters that is.
The Wu was saying those things. There was deeper lyrical value being offered in Wutang’s music than in a lot of the competitions. Once I found Cream, it was go time. I was buying stacks of cds every week I could. Eventually I was doing dumb shit, risking my freedoms in order to pay to continue buying more and more albums. The beauty of finding Wutang a decade after they were new to the world (Alberta is super slow. I’m sure there were people here onto Wu in 93, but they weren’t people I knew), is that I could binge listen to the entire catalog. I think I still have 50+ CDs with that W symbol on them sitting in one of my many boxes of discs that I insist on keeping for some reason.
The captivating part to me was not only how much music these 9 guys made, but the quality they maintained throughout it (for the first 5 years especially). At least 6 or 7 of these guys were and are elite level super lyricists. Even the ones who maybe weren’t were unique either in tone or flow patterns. RZA managed to make these beats that just hypnotize you and gave the different emcees so much space to show off their skills. That was the part that I liked most. The various personalities displaying the different ways you could rap over the same simple beat. That’s still the part I love most about Hip Hop.
I annoy my engineers sometimes because I just don’t give as many fucks about what the mix on a song sounds like as maybe I should. I’m listening to my voice and the bars and the cadence, not so much the rest of the mix. I like it raw.
Wu offered such a variety of elements on every song, and they were all dropping gems that you would only catch on the third listen. Even then you probably wouldn’t totally understand it for years. They made music for Rap Genius (I dislike that site, but that’s beside the point) years before it was around to be the cheat code for decoding wordplay and metaphors. I had to go read books and interviews. Buy magazines. Learn the history of the culture.. that sort of thing. There are still bars I only gain understanding of when I read something in some unrelated book and realize what they were referring to. That this many emcees with this much talent all came together and shared the same ideas to push knowledge to the youth through hard line gangster rap, (which wasn’t just a pretend image).. I don’t really have the words to describe that to this day. It’s so unlikely and.. weird really. It continues to astound me that they’re all still making music almost 30 years later, and still under the Wu umbrella as a brotherhood. RIP ODB. Wu Tang is for the children. It’s also forever.
They did all the lesson passing without sounding like they were doing it, so it’s easy to miss and only hear the gangster stuff, or for a lot of listeners who aren’t maybe as obsessed with lyrics, it’s easy to not even around get to analyzing the lyrics at all because the sound is too raw compared to the more radio friendly pop blended Hip Hop they’re used to hearing. When I say radio friendly, I don’t mean it’s clean of swearing. I mean it’s made to sound appealing to anyone and everyone at surface level as it passes by in a car or plays as you shop for groceries. There are frequencies and melodies that are scientifically proven to make hits.
Near as I can tell, NY in the early 90s was much less about trying to make “hits”, and more about flexing lyrical skill and passing knowledge. Wu strikes me as the epitome of that. The W might be on shirts in Walmart, but these guys have, for the most part, and with a few exceptions as people’s solo careers went on, shown almost no inclination towards trying to make hits by any accepted formula. Sure they got Mary to sing a hook for Meth’s solo, but that song’s a legend at this point. It’s not it’s fault that it started a domino effect of “hardcore rapper and r&b diva” follow ups from around the industry.
I know plenty of great writers have talked for pages and books about the impact Wu has had, and they’ll do it better than I can or did on this podcast. This is just me telling the story of how I was personally influenced to look deeper into Hip Hop lyrics in general when I uncovered 36 Chambers. I had to type all this because I didn’t manage to get most of these thoughts out on this podcast. I haven’t actually re listened but I’m pretty sure most of what I said boils down to “I really like Wu”. The most notable hot take I remember making was that if you put Ghostface’s solo catalog up against Jay-Z’s, I’ll take GFK’s. I don’t know if Id stick to that if I sat and really went through that playlist album by album, but at the time I felt confident, and if I had to make a snap call on who’s music I’d rather have erased from history, I know my choice. Jay’s a goat too, but I know he’s mentioned Tony as an inspiration before. There doesn’t need to be a winner, ridiculous scenarios aside. Art can all be great in different respects.
Point is, I don’t think it was only me who’s taken a lot from the Wu school of Hip Hop. You can see the influence all over the place if you know what you’re looking for. Sorta like meanings in well written lyrics.
Thanks to L2L for having me on, hope to talk again.
Stay up!
