A Week With Wu-Tang Clan's "8 Diagrams": Day 2
25 March 2008
tell your friends...
Words by Todd Olmstead // Illustration by Sean Duggan
Every separate Wu-Tang artifact – be it Clan albums or solo joints – has it’s own distinctive flavor. Listen to 36 Chambers, Only Built for Cuban Linx, Forever, and Supreme Clientele and you’ll feel the gradual evolution of the RZA from minimal sampling wizard to a true master of the technology. 8 Diagrams is, for all intents and purposes (especially considering that he had no role in the recent Ghostface projects), the culmination of all his knowledge. The closest thing to a “Heaterz”-style blaster is the epic, six-minute street-soul song “Stick Me For My Riches.” More on that later. But the new stuff is far more of a headphone record, which feels strange. This leads to a feeling of disconnect between the MC and the beat, at times as if they’re pulling at each other. When Raekwon begins “Take It Back,” he’s rapping over a syncopated synth line that’s barely audible unless you’ve got the right headphones. And when Meth hits the chorus of “First we told y’all niggas then we showed y’all niggas, huh?” and U-God echoes “We gon’ take it back with this,” some might wonder whether or not they actually are going to take it back with this. And that would be yet another fatal flaw in one’s thinking, to be exposed later during “Weak Spot”: if you think you’ve found a weak spot in the Wu-Tang armor, then think again. It’s this dichotomy of ideas that makes 8 Diagrams brilliant for what it is. The Wu-Tang emcees are the yin to RZA’s yang. Equally separate parts comprising harmony. This might be lost on whack emcees, the Soulja Boys of the universe who haven’t been around the block long enough to recognize what’s up.
“Get Them Out Ya Way Pa” works in the same way, with Ghostface and Raekwon blasting a smash mouth hook for the chorus: “If he front then we stomp him out (Get ‘em out ya way pa!)” that in the past would have been reinforced by an equally hostile beat. Instead, we get what Ghostface derisively refers to as “hip-hop hippie shit,” but I can’t help but wonder if this is some bizarre experiment concocted by the RZA as if to say, “Can the world’s most ruthless emcees still hang over these fucking wind chimes?” And guess what, Ghost, the joke’s on you – like it or not, you’ve proved that you can. Ghost has reinvented himself in the last several years as the solo star of the Clan, with multiple successful releases in The Pretty Toney Album, Fishscale, More Fish, and now The Big Doe Rehab, which conflicted with the release of 8 Diagrams. In fact, it’s almost as if between Iron Flag in 2001 and the new record, Ghostface willed himself into stardom and in the process single-handedly kept the Wu in the public consciousness. After all, the other Wu-Tang solo stars (Method Man, GZA, Raekwon) either fell off or faltered, and the lone other torch-bearer (Masta Killa) failed to make much of an impact with two underrated solo albums. Presumably, Tony Starks was too busy with Big Doe to join in on all the Wu shit, but it’s also not unthinkable that he might have considered himself larger than the common good. Not exactly a good line of thinking, but a possible explanation. At least it helps explain the lack of his presence in this review from here on out.
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