You can tell a lot about musicians by their riders. There’s Kanye West, who insists that all vases in his dressing room must be cylindrical. Mariah Carey, famed for once requesting 100 doves and 20 white kittens. The Rolling Stones, who now require written instructions on how to use the electronics in their hotel rooms. And for the Wu-Tang Clan, it’s bottles of Moët & Chandon stacked alongside wholesome snacks. After touring for two-and-a-half decades, it seems that these one-time party boys are caught between enjoying the Champagne lifestyle of their heyday and the realities of touring in their late forties and early fifties. The mammoth crudite platters, tofu nibble sticks, nuts and a loaf of Hovis Nimble (a depressing, tasteless, low-fat take on bread) are all being enjoyed with gusto. But I also spy some of the Clan shovelling crisps and chocolate buttons, straight from the packet, into their mouths in between carrot batons.
It’s July, on what must have been the only rainy day during the already-legendary summer of 2018, and the Wu-Tang Clan have assembled in London for Lovebox Festival. They’ve just played their only UK show of this, their 25th anniversary year, and I’m backstage in their dressing room, which is actually just a Portakabin. In fairness, no one seems unhappy with the suburban-park setup. In fact, there’s a buzzy post-show high in the air. RZA, the Clan’s de facto chief, who does the vast majority of the talking, is drinking Champagne straight from the bottle.
When I initially turn up, some of the Clan seem surprised. Perhaps they were expecting a bespectacled gentleman in a suit and tie, but instead they get two women in their mid-twenties (I was with a colleague, there to film bits for social). The Clan are personable, polite, cooperative and genuinely seem like really nice guys, but there’s a definite sense that a couple of them have not yet received the post-Me Too memo, jesting references to the “Womb Tang Clan” and picking up women abound. The compliments flow freely. We aren't quite sure what to make of it – there is no publicist in the room to shoot them warning looks – and the vibe makes the experience of interviewing this huge group of living legends all the more surreal. This, we imagine, must have been what it was like in the days when journalists could become groupies and professional exchanges could could turn into the real-life version of a hip hop music video. To be clear, it wasn’t inappropriate or scary, and all this is not to say that they made us feel uncomfortable. It’s more that this small detail – their lack of hyper-sensitivity to the new conditions of our age – chimes with the way Wu-Tang are now widely considered a relic of a different era.
The Clan are one of a few acts at the very axis of hip hop and how it has evolved. It’s been a quarter-century since Enter The Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) was released, and while they were at their peak in the Nineties, their influence still reverberates throughout culture in a seismic, although sometimes subtle, way. There were more than a few diehard fans in the audience at the Lovebox show. People old enough to remember enjoying the debut record in 1993 threw up their hands in the iconic “W” hand gesture alongside enthusiastic 18-year-olds who rapped along to every word of “Protect Ya Neck”. GZA tells me he’s just signed a hoodie – “It was old and dirty as hell; I know it was one of the originals. I could see other signatures on it. He’s probably getting one every two years” – which, emblazoned with the Clan’s unforgettable logo, is still one of the most coveted pieces of merch of all time. And I’m not just talking vintage. Wu Wear might have been the first clothing line created by rappers, but thanks to what RZA calls “big investment” from Live Nation (and, I suspect, the vigorously renewed current obsession with all things merch) it’s taken on a whole new lease of life. Just last week, Bella Hadid was snapped in Wu Wear tracksuit bottoms.
Wu-Tang’s legacy reaches way beyond surface level. Perhaps the most extraordinary thing about the Clan is the way they fundamentally changed how hip hop was structured on a business level, how they paved the way for groups such as No Limit, Roc-A-Fella and Cash Money with the invention of a “Wu deal”. They were the first collective to negotiate a record deal as a group while simultaneously releasing solo albums, a coup attributed to RZA’s sprawling-but-intricate five-year plan. “Look, Coca-Cola don’t only have Coca-Cola, they have numerous other drinks brands, but they are all consolidated within one company,” RZA explains to me. “What I tried to do was liken our brand of hip hop to the structure of major corporations.” The torrent of independent albums that followed Enter The Wu-Tang – all with consistent threads, guest appearances from other Clan members and an overarching sense that they were all products of the same, idiosyncratic world – turned the group into a pop-culture omnipresence. There have since been more than 50 Wu-Tang spin-off albums and, as RZA had planned, “all of them saw their profits grow”.
Was his five-year plan really that, well, planned? “It was meticulous,” RZA says, poker-faced, likening his role in the group to that of a bus driver. “You’ve got to have a complete, concise idea of the destination. Everybody might not always know the destination, but the driver must know. I was totally conscious.” Of all the Clan’s achievements, he tells me that it’s still that first five years, the first cycle of albums, he’s most proud of: “It was those years that really put us in the library of hip hop, the cannon.” I ask the others what they see as their most significant achievements, and while they all clearly agree with RZA (while he speaks about those early days, whoops and cheers erupt around the room), they also talk more generally about the ways in which Clan has become a source of inspiration. GZA reflects on how they went from “economically depressed guys from the neighbourhood” to “godfather figures pushing the genre of hip hop forward”. Raekwon speaks on how they’ve “given people like us the ability to believe in themselves”: “Now you see a lot of kids so focused, they know what they’ve got to do. They know how to come in with their crew and create a certain situation for all their careers. Everybody will tell you that’s a Wu-Tang roll.” He’s not wrong. Look at A$AP Mob, Odd Future (the Los Angeles crew that counts Tyler The Creator and Frank Ocean as members) and Joey Bada$$’s Pro Era.
They might have created the blueprint, but after 25 years, how do the Clan quantify success in their own lives? Everyone pitches in and it becomes impossible to tell who is saying what. One shouts, “Longevity, baby”; another, “Record sales.” Someone else shouts that “it’s being thankful for every breath” before RZA once again commands the conversation. He takes the role of mouthpiece seriously, and it’s one all the others, who mostly mill round the sides of the room just listening, have always been happy for him to assume. “Look at us,” he says. “This is our success, knowing that this collective group of men was able to touch so many people. That’s a blessing.”
Drawing on discordant, sometimes quasi-mystical sources, from martial-arts lore and comic books to Nation Of Islam doctrine and science fiction, in the Nineties, the world of Wu changed perceptions of what counted as cool in American culture. “A lot of people who were nerds thought that they had to hide comic books or hide their video games,” RZA says, gesticulating with one hand, holding the bottle of Moët tight with the other. “We allowed that cross-pollination of gender, age, culture. And then you think of the Asian brothers.” He references the famous actor Daniel Wu, who he says told him that “until Wu-Tang came out he was bullied in school. But when Wu-Tang came out, his name was cool.” Martial-arts culture might not have been mainstream back in 1993, but this Wu-Tang reference point still proliferates in hip hop today. Just look at Kendrick Lamar, AKA Kung-Fu Kenny, whose Damn tour visuals were based entirely on martial arts. “Then you look at the racism we grew up with on Staten Island, which was a very racist borough,” RZA continues, barely pausing for breath. “And next thing you know we had multicultured people working with us, for us and within our world. Our legacy touches on music, culture, politics in its own way, reality, race.”
I’m interested to hear their take on the evolution of hip hop itself. Do they, as OGs of the genre, see their style of Nineties hip hop as superior to the mumble-rap and SoundCloud stars of today? “You can’t expect things to stay one way,” says Method Man. “Genres like that may have spread from hip hop initially, but they’ve grown into their own thing now… It’s become a universal language.” The others echo his sentiment. U-God tells me that “hip hop was designed to grow. You’ve got to look at it in the same way you would the movies.” GZA says that we should respect that every generation is going to be different.
These days, some of the Clan have become known for things other than their music. RZA is a successful actor, with TV credits including cult favourite Californication, starring David Duchovny, and the current series Fresh Off The Boat. Method Man, who has built a rap career as one half of a duo outside of Wu-Tang, is also a Hollywood actor. GZA, on the other hand, lectures on the cosmos and the relevance of science education at schools and colleges. Why then, do they continue to perform together? Why not say it was good while it lasted and hang up your Wu-Tang hats altogether? “It’s a love of the sport. Of the culture,” says Ghostface Killah. “We make money regardless of whether we see each other or not,” adds RZA. “When I go and do a movie, we are up at 6am, in bed by 10. That’s work, this isn’t. This is a joy.”
It’s obvious the men all like spending time together. When reminiscing on the Nineties Wu Mansion days, when they all shared a house with a studio and their own rooms, they start to jump over one another again, finishing each other's sentences and laughing nostalgically about the time founding member Ol’ Dirty Bastard, who died in 2004, crashed two cars in one night on the driveway.
It’s getting towards the end of our time. The stormy summer rain has, for now, stopped falling. At this point, the room is unbearably stuffy – unsurprising given that there are eleven people packed inside this tiny metal box – and the Wu-Tang Clan are getting antsy. They want to get back to their hotel, make the most of their time in London. From where I'm stood, 25 years on the Wu-Tang life seems pretty sweet. “I get to spend the weekend with guys I’ve known most of my life," RZA puts it. "I get to fly across the world first class to eat good food, meet pretty women, all I can drink, if I want to smoke I can. And they are paying me. This is a vacation you can’t beat.”
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