From the archives: Hip Hop Hump Days #2: Wu-Tang Clan – Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) (1993)

Originally published on It Is Happening Again on March 26, 2014

There wasn’t much excitement in the former mining town where I grew up. We always joked that when the ‘90s came around, its residents would be right on the ball. We made this joke in 1995.

So, it caused something of a stir when the townsfolk awoke one morning to find strange, ‘foreign-sounding’ names sprayed in large black letters across shop fronts, shutters, brick walls and, well, anywhere with a surface really.

‘Wu-Tang Clan.’

Who were they? What did they want? One person I spoke to suggested that a Triad-style Chinese gang had moved into town and its members had set about marking their territory across the frontages of Woolworths and Clinton Cards to show everyone that they meant business.

The names of their leaders were also there for all to see: Method Man. Chef Raekwon. Ghostface Killah. Ol’ Dirty Bastard?!

The graffiti has long since gone, of course, but looking back, it’s difficult to tell what the good townspeople would have found more frightening: a Triad takeover or what those spray-painted words REALLY signified.

Enter the Wu-Tang.

When the Staten Island collective first burst on to the scene more than two decades ago, it was clear that they were not like other rappers. Their music was too brutal to be lumped in with the warmer G-Funk sound emanating from the opposite West Coast. Equally, it didn’t take itself too seriously, unlike a lot of the hardcore gangsta rap at the time.

It’s no understatement to say that ‘Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers)’ was a total game-changer. They were less a gang and more a movement, masterminded by de facto leader and producer RZA. They established an identity which went way beyond their music: it’s a safe bet that more people have heard the name Wu-Tang Clan than have actually heard their music – not to mention those unaware that Wu-Tang is anything more than a clothing label (yep, the Wu empire conquered that market too). But I digress…

"Shaolin shadowboxing, and the Wu-Tang sword style. If what you say is true, the Shaolin and the Wu-Tang could be dangerous. Do you think your Wu-Tang sword can defeat me?"

"En garde. I'll let you try my Wu-Tang style."

This opening dialogue, lifted from obscure late 70s/early 80s Hong Kong films, sets the tone for the album. The kung fu mythology theme is one which runs throughout the record – indeed, ‘Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers)’ is divided into two sections: Shaolin Sword and Wu-Tang Sword. The battle theme is also evident in the Clan members’ lyrical style – each track sees selected members (rarely do they all appear together) square up to each other on the mic, flexing their lyrical muscles to see who can outdo the other with the most out-there free-association lyrics which veer between downright brutal and frankly hilarious, often blurring the two (the torture scene skit at the start of ‘M.E.T.H.O.D. Man’ is a case in point). Who wins these battles? Who cares? The results are never anything less than dazzling, regardless.

Musically, it’s difficult to find comparisons – even Wu-Tang Clan themselves failed to match their own stunning debut (although solo efforts from GZA and Raekwon came pretty damn close). In other words, this record is like nothing else that came before it. There is very little in the way of hooks or choruses and where other hip hop acts of the day would simply lift old songs wholesale and use them as the basis for their new tracks, RZA would instead take snippets of forgotten soul and funk and turn those brief snatches of music into instruments in their own right. The cheap equipment used during the recording process lends the album a raw, dusty sound, while the samples themselves (the sparse Chinese yangqin on ‘Da Mystery of Chessboxin’’ or the ghostly piano on ‘C.R.E.A.M.’, for example) give the whole record an eerie, unsettling tone, as if you’re eavesdropping into the Clan’s conversation and any minute now you’re going to sneeze or nudge whatever you’re hiding behind and give the game away. Wu-Tang Clan Ain't Nuthing Ta F' Wit. 

If your opinion of Wu-Tang Clan is based solely on ‘Gravel Pit’ (an uncharacteristically radio-friendly offering by their standards), then you’ve got some serious catching up to do, my friend. ‘Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers)’ is your starting point.

Listen and learn.

From the archives: Hip Hop Hump Days #1: Jurassic 5 – Jurassic 5 (1998)

Originally published on It Is Happening Again on March 18, 2014

Glastonbury, 25 June 2010. It’s hot. Too hot. We’re queuing up to meet Chali 2na. He’s just come off stage, having performed with Breakestra, and is chatting to fans, signing autographs and posing for photos.

Jurassic 5, the hip hop collective which made him famous, split up three years earlier, citing the classic “musical differences” and, since then, Chali has busied himself with a plethora of collaborations, including with the aforementioned Breakestra.

It’s our turn. We were at the back of the queue, but he treats us like we’re the first people he’s seen all day. Handshake. Autograph. Photograph. Then the journalist in me kicks in and I start asking him questions.

Has he performed at Glastonbury before? He has.

Was that with Jurassic 5? Affirmative.

Will Jurassic 5 perform together again? Uh…

He looks awkward. This cannot possibly be the first time he has been asked that question today. WE WERE AT THE BACK OF THE QUEUE.

“You’re all working on your own projects at the moment, right?” I chip in.

He looks relieved.

“Uh… yeah, yeah.”

“Well, hopefully we’ll see you guys back together again soon,” I quip, optimistically.

He gives me a smile which betrays a hint of pity and puts his hand up for one of those handshake/high-five hybrid things, saying: “Aw, respect man.”

---

I first encountered Jurassic 5 while at university in 1998. One of my housemates had their self-titled debut and I was immediately struck by the way it managed to sound so old skool and yet… so new, so fresh.

From the off, it was clear that this was the real deal. J5 weren’t concerned with guns, bitches and bling (which, as the great philosopher Scroobius Pip once reminded us, were NEVER part of the four elements and NEVER WILL BE). Theirs was not a world of macho posturing or pointless playground beefs based on territorial disputes and perceived disrespect. They had no need to pretend: every claim of lyrical prowess was instantly backed up. The evidence was right there in your hands, on your turntable, embedded in your consciousness.

So what about the album itself? Firstly, ‘Jurassic 5’ isn’t technically an album, per se, but more of an extended version of their earlier self-titled EP. Of the 13 tracks, just six are what you might call ‘songs’ (I hate to use that term in relation to hip hop but you know what I mean, right?) while the rest are either brief skits (‘Sausage Gut’, ‘Set Up’) sample-heavy instrumentals (‘Lesson 6: The Lecture’) and ‘reprises’ (in other words, shortened instrumentals) of earlier tracks. However, far from sounding fragmented or disjointed, everything comes together to create a mini-masterpiece which has stood the test of time.

Musically, this is hip hop stripped back to basics. Four MCs, two DJs. That’s it. What more do you want? Jarring kids’ TV samples shoe-horned into your track to get commercial radio play? Nah. P Diddy producing your record on the condition that he’s allowed to dance like a twat in your video? Not on their watch. Your own line of over-priced, garishly coloured headphones which look like something you would buy from the Early Learning Centre? GET OUT AND DON’T COME BACK.

Taking its cue from the conscious hip hop of De La Soul and A Tribe Called Quest, this is an album where substance takes precedence over style. What sets J5 apart from their peers is their smooth lyrical flow and four MCs rapping together as one, almost harmonising in places. These aren’t people who ‘think’ they can have a go at rapping – these are people with a talent that others should aspire to. The standard has been set.

It’s coming up to 16 years since ‘Jurassic 5’ was released. To this day, it remains one of the albums I play the most. The day I get bored of it is the day I stop breathing.

---

O2 Academy, Birmingham, 11 June 2013. It’s hot. Too hot. We’re queuing up to meet Chali 2na. He’s just come off stage, having performed with a reformed Jurassic 5, and is chatting to fans, signing autographs and posing for photos.

It’s our turn. We were at the back of the queue, but he treats us like we’re the first people he’s seen all day. Handshake. Autograph. Photograph.

I resist the urge to say “I told you so”.

From the archives: Consciously uncoupling myself from Coldplay

As traumatic experiences go, this has got to rank up there with mislaying your house keys or losing your mum in the supermarket. There’s a high likelihood that I could be scarred for life.  I still wake up screaming in the middle of the night.

There’s no easy way to say this, so I’m not going to insult your intelligence by dressing it up: I found a Coldplay single in my record collection. Yep. There it was, nestled between Cold Water Flat and Collapsed Lung (Google ‘em both), just waiting to be found at an opportune moment.

I took some consolation from two facts: firstly, it came free with an issue of NME back in 2008, so I didn’t pay for it as such and, secondly, I’ve never actually listened to it. I must have removed it from the cover of said magazine all those years ago, filed it away (alphabetically, of course) and forgotten about it.

Unearthing it after six apparently Coldplay-free years brought up a lot of feelings – guilt, anger, shame, disappointment. How had I let my guard down so spectacularly? How could I look people in the eye again? How could I even step out of the house in the morning?

Thankfully, the solution came to me quicker than you can say ‘conscious uncoupling’.

What follows is a handy step-by-step guide to purging unwanted pests of the Chris Martin variety:

1. Remove the offending record from your collection. Gaze upon it briefly to ensure it is indeed a Coldplay record and not something worth keeping. I checked Discogs to ensure that it wasn’t valuable and therefore worth selling. Thankfully, it was only worth £1.79 (less than I paid for the magazine, I think) so I could proceed with my original plan.

2. Take a bowl – ideally one that the record is too big to fit inside. You may gaze upon the bowl too if you wish but a bowl’s a bowl, so don’t waste valuable purgin’ time.

3. Place the Coldplay record on top of the bowl in the sink and boil the kettle. Once boiled, pour the contents of the kettle onto the record.

4. Bearing in mind boiling water and human fingers don’t really mix, use your fingers (or another suitable appendage/implement) to push what should now be a very soft record into the bowl, so that it bunches up (alternatively, you could push another similar-sized bowl down on top of it to make, um, another bowl, but I didn’t think of this until afterwards).

5. Hey presto! You’ve made a nifty piece of modern art, which already serves more purpose in this fetid existence than anything Chris Martin has ever emitted from his self-righteous face hole.

6. Take comfort in the fact that there is now one less playable Coldplay record in the world. That’s one less person suffering. You’ve done something amazing today. This also works with anything by Bastille, by the way.

It’s taken a lot of courage to share this, but I don’t want others going through similar experiences to think they are suffering alone. I’m in your corner. 

Originally published on It Is Happening Again on June 5, 2014.

From the archives: People like Coldplay and voted for the Nazis. You can’t trust people.

It’s a cold December evening, somewhere between Christmas and New Year, and we’ve returned to the pub we frequented as teenagers, only now we’re actual grown-ups in our 30s.

We’re playing darts. Nothing too serious, but we’re all agreed that getting the arrows to stick in the right numbers still counts for something. Talk turns to music and, specifically, our bafflement at the continuing success of Emeli Sande, despite the fact that her recorded output is about as exciting as regrouting a shower.

“Music for people who don’t like music,” says one of my friends to nods and general murmurs of approval.

“Coffee table music,” I add, to yet more approval, “like Dido.”

I’m feeling over-confident now. This is it. I’m going to hit the ball right out of the park with my next comment. This will define the evening. Here I go.

“And Coldplay!”

Pause. Silence. The rest of the group turn to face me with a collective look that says one thing: I’ve gone too far this time.

“Ah, Coldplay are okay,” says one, and then with the tone of someone trying to deter a school bully from beating up a smaller kid: “Leave them alone.”

Another chips in: “Coldplay have done at least five or six amazing songs.”

I can’t believe my ears. I’ve misheard them. I MUST HAVE MISHEARD THEM.

“But, but… Coldplay?!” – that’s all I can muster. I’m not going to win this one. But it gets me thinking: why, exactly, do I detest Chris Martin and the three other blokes who aren’t Chris Martin so much?

Is it because their songs always sound half-finished, promising something they never deliver? Is it because I’d gain more musical fulfilment from watching an old grey coat for an hour? Is it because of Yellow, where Chris describes things being ‘all yellow’ in the manner of an eight-year-old reading a prayer in school assembly, or that mind-numbingly boring accompanying video where he – get this – walks along a freezing beach for a few minutes (if ever a video accurately represented a song)? Is it the band’s name, which sounds like the sort of word you’d come up with to cheat at Scrabble? Is it the fact that no one would have given a shit about Coldplay had they emerged at the height of Britpop and that their early success was probably really only down to good timing? What about the way Chris used to write slogans on his hands and wrap tape around his fingers like some sort of apologetic messiah? Or do they just make music for people who don’t like… oh, hang on.

I don’t think I can pinpoint a single reason. It’s probably all of those and probably none of them too. If there’s one thing I can be sure of, however, it’s that I definitely hated Coldplay before it was fashionable to do so, regardless of whether or not I had a valid reason.

Maybe one day I’ll work out exactly why I don’t like them, or perhaps I’ll eventually lose my mind and admit that, yeah, they’re okay. Shoot me.

Until then, my friends and I are going to have to agree to disagree. 

Originally published on It Is Happening Again on January 6, 2014.