More VV: Your Favorite 8D Moments

The Village Voice keeps up it's fairly heavy coverage of 8 Diagrams with a feature about writer Tom Breihan's favorite 10 moments on 8D. It is an interesting format for discussion as Breihan points out in his intro: the format provides "a good excuse to write about [8 Diagrams] without bringing up Rae and Ghost's increasingly dumb jihad against it." His taste is his taste--no need to call anyone wrong here, especially someone who clearly enjoys the album--but it is funny to note some of the things he doesn't like--such as the Heart Sutra rendition at the end of Life Changes or more notably either of George Clinton's performances. Replace Clinton with ODB saying the same shit in the same way & these bits would be universally applauded. But the list is mostly spot on, from the very first item--I can't help but sing that part at the top of my lungs whenever I play Stick Me for My Riches.

1. "Stick Me for My Riches," 0:54-1:00. So the catchiest, most accessible song on Wu-Tang's big comeback record is a six-minute hood-is-dying epic with a guest vocal from the 65-year-old former lead singer of the Manhattans and no actual rapping for the first minute and a half. It's an inspired choice. Gerald Alston has the kind of grainy, raspy grown-man David Ruffin voice that's just completely extinct from R&B these days, and he just kills it over that haunted RZA beat; the whole thing reminds me of the Horace Andy tracks from Massive Attack's Blue Lines. This is the part where the key changes and the horns come in and Alston just starts frothing: "Now with success, I've become a target / They wanna set me up / I guess more money equals more problems," and I can't listen to it while I'm walking down the street without punching the air and screaming along, which makes me look like a crazy homeless man.

2. "The Heart Gently Weeps," 1:36-2:51. Ghostface's verse here is a totally richly textured and beautifully observed narrative, and I like it better than any of the story-songs on Big Doe Rehab. In his 8 Diagrams post, Brandon Soderberg has a great line about how Ghost's verse here is "next to the hood." The guy who tries to kill Ghost in Pathmark is mad because Ghost "murdered his uncle Tim / I sold him a bag of dope, his wife came and copped again." So Ghost is there in the moment, but he also recognizes that he basically killed this kid's family just by selling them drugs, which lends a whole new level of moral complication to the story. It's a dark moment, but then Ghost busts out this ridiculous cartoon falsetto ("You better kill me! / You know you booty!"), and it's just fucking hysterical and overblown. Ghost's story about fighting the kid in the grocery store has all the telling little details that only Ghost seems to be able to conjure these days: "In the aisle busting them paper towels and wiping my Wallies down," "shots was whizzing, hitting Clorex bottles." Ghost delivers the whole thing in this great urgent breathless voice, and he even gives it a satisfying ending. Nobody tells stories like Ghost, and when the music industry completely dies, I'll be buying his novels.

3. "Wolves," 0:21-0:57. When that godawful George Clinton hook dissolves, and RZA's mariachi whistles and humming Ennio Morricone choral moans come in, U-God jumps on the track and just murders it. U-God has always been a really stealthy rapper, the type where you might not realize how good he is on certain songs until years later. But on a track as weird and esoteric as this one, he brings it down to earth with this great authoritative baritone verse, not really talking about anything in particular but sounding absolutely badass and concrete: "I do the honor, the Shaolin bomber / Sharkskin armor, I bring the drama." U-God's always been a role player in the group, but here he's just insanely spry and on-beat. Out of everyone else in the group, U-God probably has the most to prove on 8 Diagrams, and he steps up and goes in hard every time anyone lets him near a mic.

4. "Life Changes," 2:02--2:13. "Life Changes," the ODB tribute, hasn't grown on me the way so many of the other songs on this album have; it's too long and chaotic to really come off as a moving tribute to the one guy who didn't make it. But GZA has a couple of utterly heartbreaking lines where he talks about recording the song in the same studio before he died: "I cried like a baby on the way to hate place of death / Hate not being there the minutes before he left / Now I'm in the booth, ten feet from where he lay dead / I think about him on this song and what he might've said." GZA sounds haunted and broken, like he's not sure if he [should] really say what he's thinking and like he might cry if he keeps talking.

5. "Campfire," 0:58-1:21. After the kung-fu sample, the album really begins with a decaying zombie-movie synth-tone with ghostly druidic backing vocals gurgling underneath and a ticking clock and a few floating ambient sound-effects. And then this titanic snare kicks in, bringing with it a mournful violin sample and Method Man, who sounds totally confident and reinvigorated, back on top of his game once again. The Meth verse that follows might include that near-unforgivable "sexy back" line, but without that it's a shockingly fierce performance from a guy who seemed lost to that untenable middle ground between rap and Hollywood. This opening works so well because it's so sneaky and minor-key, RZA signaling that we're back in bent expressionistic goth-rap territory, that this album isn't going to be Wu-Tang's effort to catch up with rap; it's going to be the album that forces rap to catch back up with Wu-Tang.

6. "Weak Spot," 1:48-1:58. In the middle of Raekwon's verse, this disgusting fuzzed-out distorto-bass suddenly appears, sounding like something RZA pulled from a mid-90s Unsane record. It just thuds away for a couple of bars, and then it disappears. We never hear it again. 8 Diagrams is full of perverse and effective musical left-turns like this; I don't ever quite feel settled when I'm listening to it.

7. "Gun Will Go," 2:28-3:02. Another left-turn: as GZA's verse begins, the song's great little eerie circular guitar-figure gives way to an old rattling Marley Marl-esque breakbeat, buried under layers of tape hiss, like the ghost of 80s rap floating through.

8. "Rushing Elephants," 1:47-1:49. RZA: "Strangle cold bottles of Beck's, like a vexed German." A vexed German? Means nothing, sounds awesome. I should also mention that "Weak Spot" has maybe the most on-beat RZA verse ever. Weird how the guy who makes all the beats is also the most likely to ignore them when he's rapping.

9. "Take It Back," 2:45-2:48. Ghost: "We like rebel niggas powdered-up wildin' in the streets of Liberia." Why Liberia? Because it rhymes with "area" and "ain't tryna hear ya," and because it sounds like the hardest place on earth. Ghost is as good at coming up with incurably badass one-liners as he is at screaming frantic crime narratives.

10. "Stick Me for My Riches," 2:29-2:31. I feel bad not mentioning Meth's verse here, since it's probably his best in years. But the opening of Deck's verse is just so hard and iconic, and it's the one line from the album that probably gets stuck in my head more than any of the others: "In my city gritty blocks / Little love, plenty cops." Deck delivers most of his verse in those clipped shortened lines, and the level of alliteration and internal rhyme is just off the charts.

I wonder how Windmill doesn't get a single mention, given it is perhaps the best track on the LP. Also, I'm not sure about Breihan's take on Life Changes, as each performance is fairly interesting even if the song fails to really gel on the whole, perhaps due to RZA's strange verse--regardless, I'm a big fan of the song. GZA obviously is outstanding on the track, but so are Deck, U-God, & Raekwon, Meth's dope leadoff notwithstanding. Of course, there's Ghostface's absence to remember, but that is an old issue & what's done is done. Breihan also falls a little too much into music-writer mode when discussing Ghost on The Heart Gently Weeps, but perhaps this is just a case of how describing why someone is great obviously doesn't compare to the greatness itself. Everyone writes about Ghost these days, but when Ghost is hitting on all cylinders he really needs no commentary; he's complex, but speaks for himself. Then of course Breihan mistakes Masta Killa for GZA in his Gun Will Go entry (#7) but he's definitely not the first to do that, & I'm probably coming off a little too nitpicky, but discussion is discussion [Another small error: Stick Me for My Riches was primarily produced by Mathematics, with only co-production from the RZA].

Breihan obviously enjoys the album, as do I, if you do too drop your favorite moments in the comments section.

Village Voice: More, More, More + Kotori

The Village Voice keeps bringing the heat in terms of the recent assortment of Ghost/RZA/Wu shit that's sprung up in the leadup to 8 Diagrams & Big Doe Rehab. This time Rob Harvilla reports from a recent chat with the Ghost. I think readers & fans understand what Ghostface is trying to get at here--certainly those turned off by the sound of the new album--but Harvilla is right to point out the potential hypocrisy of Ironman's stances. It's not that I consider RZA infallible or even really innocent of never being shady--but then we get into talking about Divine & a bunch of business things nobody really knows about. Regardless, Harvilla's article takes the standard line of commencing with the just-arrived Big Doe Rehab before leading into the reason everyone really wants to talk to Ghost all of a sudden: his status with the Wu-Tang Clan. Earlier in the article Ghost discusses how he identified with Jay-Z's Kingdom Come album, how Jay attempted a more mature record, only to be lambasted by the populace. Ghost said, "The people want you to stay a certain way for the rest of your life...People don't want change, man. But you're becoming a grown man. You can't be 45 years old talking about how many bricks, how many kilos you turned over, how many you sold, at 45. People have to start talkin' grown-man shit. I respected Jay-Z on that shit, you know what I mean?" The excerpt below picks up with a recap of the history of the rift between Ghost & RZA:

First came a public spat over scheduling—briefly, both records were set to come out the same day until Ghost balked and Wu mastermind RZA politely (and publicly, and somewhat grumpily) agreed to push Diagrams back a week. But in addition to loudly complaining of financial mismanagement, Ghostface is also joining Raekwon (on record, at least, his closest Wu ally) in attacking Diagrams itself.

"RZA is fumbling the ball," Ghost says. "You know what I mean? Fumblin' the ball. He wanna do what he do, when we trying to tell him, like, 'Yo, man, do this or do that.' His music wasn't sounding like how it was when we first came in. And it's hurting us. People want that old Wu-Tang shit, but you tryin' to make new shit—tryin' to play live instruments, instead of just goin' to the crates and just do what you do best. You still a master at what you do, but right now you ain't lookin' like that master, 'cause you tryin' to do other stuff. We were just upset with the way things was comin' out."

To be fair, Diagrams is a dense, abstract, deliberately nauseating, deeply disturbing piece of work—you'd think extensively biting "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" would make a song more accessible, not dramatically less—unlikely to halt the Wu's slide in the public consciousness, losing ground to fresher entities (Southern rap, primarily), a calamity that Ghostface's recent success has valiantly battled against. But it's unfair that the main thing we know about this record, a week before its official release, is that two of its biggest rappers seem to hate it. And even if after five listens you find it repulsive, that's still five hours or so of deep, bewildered fascination. Diagrams deserves better than I fear it's going to get.

And furthermore, isn't RZA just trying to do what Jay-Z tried to do, what Ghostface says you must do: evolve? Grow and develop and experiment, even at the risk of pissing off your fans? "We just need to go back to what we been doin'," Ghostface insists. "If we not gonna go back to what the people—if you tryin' to get somethin' new, then do it right . . . Not just a beat with a bunch of rhymes goin' different types of ways, and the beat's not even all that, but you want everyone to sing on it."

Diagrams could undoubtedly benefit from some warmth, some familiarity, some semblance of sanity. But a drop or two of its wide-eyed, half-crazed eccentricity wouldn't have killed The Big Doe Rehab, either. As the tiff gets uglier and more public, interviewers lately have inundated Ghostface with Wu questions, to his understandable frustration: "I don't care if you ask me about it, but let's not just sit there and go for 40 minutes on it," he says. But a reconciliation is crucial here: It could reinvigorate what remains one of East Coast rap's most beloved franchises, and boost to new heights Ghostface, its star attraction, highly evolved relative to his competition but battling a whiff of staleness within his own outstanding catalog. But is it possible to make peace? "I'm not sure," Ghost says. "I can't tell you that, because it's serious with Wu-Tang Clan right now. It's serious. So I don't know." What would have to happen for everyone to reconcile? "I can't even tell you. I can't even tell you. I can't even tell you."

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INS, U-God, Ghostface Killah

A much needed change of pace is now available in video form from KotoriMag.com. We've seen pieces of this long video interview before (specifically where RZA, sitting in a red booth, discusses The Heart Gently Weeps) but this more substantial cut is definitely worth your time. Unfortunately, only three members end up in front of the camera, but the good news is that two of these, U-God & Inspectah Deck, are fresh faces to the 8 Diagrams hype game. After 12 rounds of Ghost said this, RZA said that, hearing an extended, wholly positive description of the album along with some new faces is quite refreshing.

Someone Finally Gets How Good The Beats Are

That someone is Tom Breihan writing for the Village Voice, in an article called "8 Diagrams: RZA's Drug-rap Masterwork." After beginning with an apt point in regards to the vocal sample that precedes Campfire, Breihan soon arrives at

The fact that 8 Diagrams even exists is some kind of miracle, and it's even more amazing when you consider that not one song on the entire album has the faintest chance of becoming a crossover hit. 8 Diagrams is a deeply weird album, a total immersion in weed-fried mythology and willfully obscure tangled-up black psychedelia. It's clearly the album that RZA wanted to make, and recent developments show that he may have burned up all his goodwill with the rest of the group in the process.

The one thing here that I might disagree with is his sense that nothing on the album could blow up--either version of Wolves, given the right treatment, could be huge, ditto Stick Me For My Riches, perhaps even Starter. Another questionable Breihan take is his statement against the RZA as a rapper, saying that while he enjoys him on Sunshine, "I've never much liked RZA as a rapper because he always sounded totally content to ignore his own beats." This is an oft repeated opinion--at least distaste for RZA on the mic, if not for that precise reason--that continually makes no sense to me. Bobby Digital is one thing, but RZA's mid-nineties performances on tracks such as 4th Chamber, Assassination Day, After the Smoke Is Clear, Windpipe, '96 Recreation, Mr Sandman, Diesel & Wu-Gambinos are as forcefully interesting as anything in Wu history. But then Breihan does correctly note Method Man's incredible performance on the album, & then continues to praise the record as a whole:

The things that Raekwon doesn't like about 8 Diagrams are the things that make it something like a masterpiece. At least during the recording of the album, all the Wu guys seemed to realize how great they sound over RZA's bent orchestral beats, and they stepped it up accordingly. And even if RZA never manages to get these guys back under his spell, the end result may be worth it. It's going to take a long, long time to untangle 8 Diagrams, but even a few days after it leaked, it's pretty evident that we won't be hearing another rap record this bent and fascinating anytime soon.