The most surprising thing about “A Better Tomorrow,” the latest album from New York’s Wu-Tang Clan, is not that it is generally strong but that the fractious nine-person group ended up making any kind of recording together at all. For its previous studio album, “8 Diagrams” (2007), Wu-Tang Clan ended up touring without its founder, the RZA, who had produced most of the album. RZA, meanwhile, conducted a solo tour of his own, at the same time. By doing more visible work, including writing soundtracks for Quentin Tarantino, RZA had alienated his own group. As he told me, referring to Raekwon, a core member of the clan, “He said I was a hip-hop hippie with a guitar.” Hippie tag aside, this isn’t unfair. RZA said that he wrote many of the tracks for “A Better Tomorrow” on guitar, first, later voicing the compositions with samples or other instruments. But the Wu still mostly sounds like the Wu, and a newcomer who has never encountered the most famous band from Staten Island would do fine to start here.
The Wu-Tang Clan’s long career mirrors the comic books and kung-fu flicks that its members grew up loving: colorful and intense, and longer on respect than on widespread mainstream acceptance. Like cheap Canal Street mixtapes and kung-fu DVDs, Wu-Tang has never had enormous commercial success, even at the height of the CD era. In twenty years and five albums, the group has sold only a little more than six million records, according to Nielsen SoundScan.
Wu-Tang was formed in and around Staten Island’s public Stapleton and Park Hill Houses, in the late eighties, pulling in additional rappers who lived in Brooklyn. By 1992, a member named GZA had released an album, under the name the Genius, on Cold Chillin’ Records, and his cousin, the eventual bandleader RZA, had released a goofy single on Tommy Boy, as Prince Rakeem. But, in the early nineties, RZA plotted a new direction that drew on martial-arts epigrams (“Wu-Tang was the best sword style. And with us, our tongue is our sword,” he explains in “The Wu-Tang Manual”), chess strategy, and practices derived from the teachings of the Five Percent Nation, a group formed in 1963 by Clarence (13X) Smith, a student minister at the Nation of Islam’s Temple Number Seven, in Harlem.
The band’s début, “Enter the Wu-Tang: 36 Chambers,” in 1993, fell into a category of hip-hop that has since been called “boom bap”: slow, aggressive drum samples matched with lyrical dexterity. But nothing was quite like Wu-Tang records. RZA’s production was dirtier and weirder than that of his peers, and he was teamed with an uncannily talented array of m.c.s with divergent styles. No other band has had such a combination of that dodgy cultural concept known as street cred—all its members are from rough neighborhoods, and most are veterans of jail stints—and unapologetically twisty, emotional, poetic writing. Wu-Tang Clan albums feel overloaded in every sense. Other groups, like Public Enemy, had complex, advanced aesthetics, but Wu-Tang Clan was the only one that could switch from discussing Eastern philosophy to telling stories about police harassment to debating the merits of different coats.
Around the same time as Wu-Tang’s début, smoother sounds from the West Coast and the South took over the charts, and haven’t let go. But the Wu-Tang influence is now being heard in a new generation, with m.c.s like Action Bronson and Joey Bada$$, who are heavy on aggression and intricate wordplay, and uninterested in simple, chanted hooks.
There’s no pretending that this is the same collection of rappers who entered the public consciousness with a thundering chain of threats and compressed drums, on the single “Protect Ya Neck.” “A Better Tomorrow” ventures into slightly obvious inspirational talk (“Never let go of your mind, it is a terrible thing to waste, to lose, but it’s very hard to find,” GZA raps, on “Never Let Go”); what sounds like an unironic sample of “Feelings,” on “Felt”; and, on “Miracle,” an invocation of familiar modern rock that has an unmiraculous effect. For most of the album, though, the band is typically prolix, haughty, and immersed in its own world of slang. There are live drums and other traces of RZA’s work as an m.c. and a producer outside hip-hop, with acts such as the Black Keys and James Blake, but nothing that will make you question whom you’re hearing. Indeed, the drum samples in the song “Pioneer the Frontier” were also used in “Enter the Wu-Tang: 36 Chambers.”
There are snippets from kung-fu movies scattered throughout the album, a device that was RZA’s initial watermark as a producer. And although the group has been more flux than stasis in its career, every m.c. is as strong as he was twenty years ago. On “Mistaken Identity,” over a live band playing vaguely sinister funk, Method Man starts off a rattling sixteen-bar verse with an open acknowledgment of who’s on the playing field now: “Whoever push me like Pusha T, I push back. I push your cap, before ninety-three, I pushed crack. I’m hood, black, you know me well, what’s good, scrap? I’m smoking rappers, you are a L—what’s good, Smack?” Pusha T is the well-known rapper who has worked with Kanye West, while Smack White is an underground battle rapper.
“Crushed Egos” begins with a sample of a man saying, “You practiced twenty years? You must be extremely good, then.” And he is: Raekwon enters with a verse that sticks to his tradition of folding together phonemes and slang that sound better for lining up askew. He raps, “Restaurants with skeleton keys is big business. Well groomed and elegant, posture’s real dapper. Status is gigantic, coats is alpaca.” The verse reminds us that the solo albums of many of Wu-Tang’s members are stronger than some of the group efforts. Raekwon’s “Only Built 4 Cuban Linx . . .” (1995) is possibly the most complex of all the Wu albums. GZA’s “Liquid Swords” (1995) is the most coherent and fluid. Ghostface Killah’s “Supreme Clientele” (2000) is the most fun and unhinged.
And then there’s the work of the m.c. whom Raekwon shouts out as Ason Unique, one of the names used by Ol’ Dirty Bastard, the band’s only casualty—he died in 2004. The rapper struggled with many antagonists, including the police, drugs, and himself. A new book called “The Dirty Version,” written by his constant companion, Buddha Monk, describes the continual state of tumult the rapper lived in, doling out money to friends and lovers and relatives, going AWOL for recording sessions, and generally not accepting that he was possibly the best-known Wu-Tang member. There have been few unexpected appearances as lovely as Dirty’s verse on Mariah Carey’s “Fantasy,” which created a bridge between unchecked lunacy and showroom optimism that nobody has been able to cross since.
There is none of Dirty’s mania or gurgling on “A Better Tomorrow,” which is a bit defanged. That makes it a perfect primer; there are dozens of albums featuring this producer and these rappers, perhaps the richest catalogue of any single group in rap. The collective is responsible for more than forty albums, probably half of which are worth owning. That’s a pretty good average for a deeply disorganized bunch of people. If “A Better Tomorrow” does anything for you, go straight to yesterday. ♦
