Wu-Tang Clan's Individuality in Community

Individuality and community go hand in hand, interweaving and interlocking and making each other stronger, just like Cuban Linx.

It’s difficult for spin-offs, side projects, and solo efforts to succeed in any art form. Once an audience has latched onto the things they love about a piece of art, recontextualizing them or messing with the formula becomes dangerous business. This is why so many musicians from Ringo Starr to Zayn Malik fail to live up to their band’s successes. It’s why Joey wasn’t a smash hit follow-up to Friends. It’s why Minions is not as funny as Despicable Me. It’s understandable why film studios, musical artists, and other art creators would pursue these efforts—they don’t depend on excellence in craft to bring in the money. People watched Joey (for a little while) because they loved the titular character’s comic relief in his original role, and Minions made $1.159 billion at the box office for the same reason. However, neither work stands the test of time and will be forgotten long before their predecessors.

However, every so often, artists are able to break a masterful piece of work into its individual parts without sacrificing any value. In 1995, Wu-Tang Clan accomplished this not once or twice, but three times.

Two years earlier the Staten Island collective delivered a grimy right hook to match the smooth punches G-funk and gangsta rappers on the west coast were dealing. Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) is unmatched by any record in gritty street storytelling, murky beat-making, and well, samurai film sampling. It’s an impressive feat of choreography, featuring 10 unique rap voices that gel perfectly together over Wu-Tang mastermind, the RZA’s, hard-hitting boom-bap.

Following this monumental album would be an incredible task for the entire Clan to take on, let alone its individual members. But rather than attempt to remake Enter the Wu-Tang, RZA had the vision to launch his friends’ rap careers individually, launching a musical universe akin to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. In 1994, Method Man became the first by releasing Tical which debuted at number 4 on the Billboard chart and remains a favorite among hip-hop heads.

Things would blow wide open for Wu-Tang a year later, however, with the release of GZA’s Liquid Swords, Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s Return to the 36 Chambers, and Raekwon’s Only Built 4 Cuban Linx…, and the Wu-Tang stars’ individual expertise would be on full display.

On Liquid Swords, GZA is firmly in the pocket with his deliberate “flow like the blood on a murder scene,” as he tells us on the title track. It’s a perfect description for two reasons. One, GZA is never in a hurry. He drifts down the beat with patience and intentionality. Two, GZA uses his flow to paint bleak pictures of our “Cold World,” where “Babies crying, brothers dying, and brothers getting knocked / Shit is deep on the block, and you got me locked down.” It’s a dark, somber record, tonally distinct from his fellow Wu-Tang rappers, and yet fits perfectly in their universe.

And then there’s the absolute opposite side of the spectrum, where Ol’ Dirty Bastard takes GZA’s same level of passion for careful attention and fuels it into reckless abandon on Return to the 36 Chambers. Listening to ODB is like watching a drunk elephant swagger through a sea of people and somehow managing to dodge them all on his way through. It’s like watching Leeeeroooooy Jeeeenkins obliterate all the battle plans, except he comes out victorious. There is not an ounce of reverence or care anywhere on this record (save the RZA’s production skills), and yet I dare you not to have the time of your life blasting “Shimmy Shimmy Ya” as loud as you can.

Finally, Raekwon lands somewhere in the middle. Joined by his co-star Ghostface Killah on Only Built 4 Cuban Linx…, Raekwon holds the careful wordplay of GZA and the now-or-never ambition of ODB in perfect tension. “I'm hanging this shit up man if this shit don't work right here, God,” we hear him say in the opening skit, “Striving For Perfection.” What follows is a passionate dust-to-riches exploration of the entrepreneur’s American dream in which Raekwon, Ghostface, and their guest stars lean on each other, attack the beat with fervor, and prove there is indeed strength in numbers when the community is tight.

There is a lot more to say about all these artists and their respective Quarter Note albums. But the thing I’ve come away with this time through these albums is how important it is to celebrate individuality in community. It’s easy to want to homogenize a group, to tighten the flow into a perfect three-part (or ten-part?) harmony where individual voices are lost in service of the whole. But Wu-Tang Clan reminds us that celebrating each person’s idiosyncrasies, talents, and voices is essential to the health of the community. We need the careful, deliberate thinkers, the ambitious entrepreneurs, and even the reckless, impulsive executors to make this community thing work.

I tend to see other people’s individual idiosyncrasies and character traits and wonder why I don’t hold them myself. This isn’t healthy at all. It doesn’t allow me to celebrate my own idiosyncrasies, nor does it help me love others. I’m thankful for the reminder that we’re not supposed to be a homogenized people. Individuality and community go hand in hand, interweaving and interlocking and making each other stronger, just like Cuban Linx. And when the individual voices of the community are made stronger and supported by their companions, that spin-off or solo project will always be worthwhile.