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Sitting back and relaxing in Wu-Tang’s world was not an option: They wanted you wild-eyed and disoriented, fight-or-flight hormones coursing through your system. Sit back, relax, and take this ride, Dre commanded. Dre polished every corner of his records until they gleamed like a brand-new Bentley. He was something completely new to rap: a sonic mastermind who wasn’t fussy about fidelity. RZA was not, strictly speaking, the leader of this fractious group, but the vision for their total takeover was his, and, most crucially, so was the group’s sound. In this strategy, they were again turning to kung fu movies by taking a page from the Drunken Master, who throws his opponents off by seeming foolish and erratic. The Wu might have signed to multiple major labels, but they were “rugged,” “rough,” “raw.” They wanted to look unpolished, unpredictable, unprepared, when in fact they had planned their strategy far in advance - “If y’all give me five years of your life, I promise in five years I’m gonna take us to the top,” RZA told them. Photo by Danny Hastings, Courtesy of Sony Music “PLO-style,” the man calling himself Ghostface yelled at the outset of the album. It would feel like a hostile takeover, a regime change. This leap, from underground to mainstream, was amorphous at the time, and the Wu-Tang helped shape what it would look, sound, and feel like. The Wu’s first release for Loud, “Enter the Wu-Tang” , was an enormous success and pushed the band up from hip-hop’s underground scene and into the mainstream. In 1993, the group was busy pushing copies of their underground hit single “Protect Ya Neck” out of vans when RZA negotiated a historic contract with Loud Records, one that allowed each individual member to sign with rival labels for their solo records. For their name, they took inspiration from the Chinese swordsmen of Wudang Mountain, who sought to anticipate their enemies’ movements before they made them. They spoke their own language, re-christened their home boroughs (Staten Island became “Shaolin”), and lived by their own mythology, borrowed heavily from kung fu films and Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. It was a grimy and mesmerizing one, purposefully dark and dense with inscrutable symbols. Out of this surreal and jarring clash, the Wu-Tang built their world. & the M.G.’s “ Children, Don’t Get Weary” and Gladys Knight & The Pips’ “ I Feel A Song (In My Heart)” promoted peace, positivity, tenderness, and love from their stereo speakers, as violence, discord, and hopelessness spread like tenement fires outside their windows.
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They grew up in crack-era New York City, a time and place of widespread suffering and even wider public indifference, with the soul records of the 1960s and ‘70s ringing in their ears. With their 1993 debut album, “ Enter the Wu-Tang,” the Wu-Tang Clan stormed onto the hip-hop scene with an aggressive message and a soulful sound.