Through the peak years of hustling and partying and getting fresh, we never lost focus. Most people don’t realize that the Wu-Tang Clan was eight years in the making. We were hungry to be creating, focusing on our art, while other Escobar-emulating motherfuckers were running ten keys.
My friends all felt the same way I did. RZA, Raekwon, Ghost, Meth, we all had one thing in common: we wanted to be stars. We wanted to be fucking rappers, to get our music out, make money and be rich and famous, and we wanted out of the fucking ghetto immediately.
Didn’t know how we were gonna do it. Didn’t know how it was gonna happen, but for some reason, we just always knew it was gonna happen. I just always knew, and Meth knew, and Rae knew. We were all certain, we just knew. That’s why we were able to do what we had to do, ’cause we were all going in the same direction toward the same goal.
Besides, by this time I was nineteen and tired of the game. It didn’t help that dudes were falling like flies in the drug game, either. I was trying to get off the streets entirely. I was still in school, but looking for something more than even what college had to offer as a way off the block. Music turned out to be the vessel that took me and my cohorts away from the ghetto violence we grew up around.
Ever since the Baby Crash Crew, we were always rhyming and making up little songs together. That didn’t change when we started hustling in front of the buildings of Park Hill.
At the time, I wasn’t really rhyming seriously yet, but I was the beatbox guy in the hallway for other dudes to get their own shit off. It was nothing for me to beatbox for people, because that got me my rhythm, which gave me certain things, like beat coordination as well as improved physical coordination, that other motherfuckers didn’t have.
I’d beatbox for Cappadonna and Raekwon while they caught wreck. When RZA came along, we started taking our beats and rhymes more seriously. I already knew him as the DJ from the Stapleton block party. By 1989, he’d moved out of his mother’s place and got his own apartment, which was actually his family’s old apartment that he sublet from his mother (in the city, once you get an apartment, you never let it go). He’d also moved away from DJing and started making his own beats. He was getting serious about the rap game, and so were we.
The nights I got tired of ducking the cops and dealing with junkies and stashing guns around where we were posted up and keeping an eye out for any potential drama that might pop up—those were the nights I’d go to RZA’s place. Even though it was in Stapleton, another project just like ours, when we were at his crib, we didn’t have to worry about all the shit going on back in Park Hill. We could concentrate on what really mattered: our music.
I’d walk into his building and take the elevator up to his floor. You could hear the beats and smell the weed before you even stepped into the hallway. The door was never locked at RZA’s joint. Stapleton apartments were like that. First off, there’s not much to steal, but also, who’s gonna try anything up in RZA’s pad with an endless cycle of hood-ass, slanging-ass, gun-toting individuals coming in and out all day?
Now, I was still hustlin’, so I’d walk in wearing all fly shit, new sneakers. I was strapped back then, so I’d take out my gun and put it on the glass table near where Ghost would usually be sitting. RZA, on the other hand, wasn’t hustlin’ like that, so when I came on looking fresh, he’d be smelling like a goddamn onion. We used to call him “RZA Radish” back then, ’cause he never wore deodorant.
We’d bring our forties and weed and whatever else and just write and rap and listen to beats and build for hours and hours. RZA’s brew back then was Brass Monkey, a premixed cocktail of dark rum, vodka, and orange juice. Ghostface and RZA were living together at the time, so they’d be eating ramen noodles and watching kung fu flicks. For a while, those two were like me and Meth, on some Dynamic Duo shit. RZA and Ghost would just be in that crib all day long, eatin’ Oodles of Noodles, watching kung fu movies, and making beats on a little four-track recorder.
I’d walk in and the beats would be blasting. Dudes would bring the mic cord out onto the terrace and be rhyming. Sounds fancy, but it’s far from it. Like I said, the Stapleton ’jects looked like jail facilities. The terraces looked like the tiers in prison. But we’d have the mike out there, and weed be blowin’, and the Brass Monkey be flowin’, and everybody was just getting high and throwing darts (rapping). It was a getaway from the drama, a way to transcend our surroundings and the day-to-day grind.
RZA’s crib was our first studio, and that four-track was our first real equipment. That was our lab. When you have a whole bunch of possessions you don’t do anything with, you don’t have anything. When you got that one piece of machinery that you really master, though, that enhances your art. A lot of motherfuckers don’t know how or don’t have the discipline to just stay right there, in that chamber, until you’ve mastered it. They move on too soon, and lose that potential mastery and end up losing themselves altogether. That’s the struggle of being an artist. You can’t keep coming out with the same shit, but you can’t lose yourself, either.
With RZA’s four-track, we kept making bangers. At the end of the night we’d leave his place with a tape of what we’d done. We’d go back to Park Hill, listen to our songs, and critique our shit more. We’d compare ourselves to other people and their verses and just sharpen one another’s steel. Then we’d write even more rhymes to improve our lyrics, some of us working harder on it than others. Meth was really working on it harder than other dudes.
One night, while working on one of our first original Wreck Posse cuts, “I Get Down for My Crown,” Meth wrote a verse from which a portion would later be used by Ghost on one of his biggest hits, “Cherchez La Ghost.”
Once Meth laid this verse down, I went into my rhyme books and put down my verse, and Deck came behind us and laid down the last verse. RZA even sampled the flushing toilet and added the sound effect to the joint as well. It was the first song that we laid down and felt good about as a group.
Back then we would dub tapes and pass them off to other brothers in the hood. That’s how you used to do it back in the day, you’d make a bunch of tapes and pass ’em around the project, and it would spread through word of mouth.
Next thing you know, everybody in our fucking neighborhood had the shit. Then that person would take it to another project, and someone there would take the shit and listen to it and they’d dub it and take it to another project. Next thing you know, everyone in the ’jects was jamming “I Get Down for My Crown.”
That song right there was an epiphany. We noticed when we did our first couple of songs together, they came out kinda hot. Meth, Deck, and me did a couple of other songs during the early days of fucking around with RZA, like “Let Me Put My Two Cents In.” We were EPMD babies and Public Enemy babies, Big Daddy Kane babies and Rakim babies. We just incorporated all that into our early little sounds. We would record ’em on tapes and listen to them and critique ourselves.
Once we got on those beats, when I first heard my voice over the music on tape, it seemed like the dream was even closer to being real, like it was something tangible that we could touch. ’Cause we weren’t just rhyming and beatboxing in the project hallways anymore, we were actually laying down vocals now. And even though we were still wildin’ in the streets, that dream of music saved us from getting too far gone.
Once we got a taste of hood success, RZA kept recording more joints. Deck put down a solo joint called “This Ain’t Your Average Flow.” That joint was crazy good, and it became a hood anthem.
When we started going to RZA’s on the regular, we started seeing who the MCs really were. Here comes Rae getting on a song. Then Genius is up there. And here’s Ol’ Dirty, who RZA said was his cousin. ODB and GZA were both RZA’s family, and they’d come through our hood fairly often. In fact, GZA lived in Park Hill for a little while with his family before they dipped to Brooklyn. They’d come see RZA in Stapleton, then they’d all come up to the Hill to smoke and drink and rhyme. Every so often we’d take a break from hustling to join them. RZA’s place was a sanctuary.
It was there that a whole team of dudes, some I knew well, some I’d only met once or twice, came together to form something that would never be duplicated in rap history. A crew with similar upbringings and perspectives, but radically different ways of conveying their individual viewpoints. That was the genesis of the Wu-Tang Clan.
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Around this time, some of us were already attracting attention from New York record labels. Warner Bros. signed Genius under their Cold Chillin’ label and released Words from the Genius in 1991. RZA also did a joint, as Prince Rakeem, with Warners under their Tommy Boy imprint and released the Ooh I Love You Rakeem EP in ’91.
I thought we were really on when RZA and GZA got their individual record deals. When that happened, we thought it was about to just happen for all of us. The industry had other ideas, though. RZA and GZA ended up flopping because their labels were trying to make them something they weren’t. Both of them had bangers on their albums, but the CC execs went with “Come Do Me” for Genius. At Tommy Boy, they settled on the “Ooh I Love You Rakeem” single. It was obvious the labels were trying to re-create the success of artists like Big Daddy Kane and Eric B. & Rakim.
That’s got to be the worst feeling in the world—being an artist with no real creative control over your art. Labels at that time were trying to get that crossover popping. They wanted something that took the grit out and made their music a little more accessible to the mainstream. A record about having mad girls or inviting hoes to fuck was the label’s idea of what could make them money. They passed up on two of the illest lyricists that ever rapped because they were trying to fit them into a box that was all wrong for them.
When their deals went south, RZA and GZA both came back to the hood. We’d all been sharpening our swords all along, ready for any opportunity. We were beyond ready when RZA came and got his wolves. He knew we were where it was at. We kept rhyming over RZA’s beats and building our skills. It started coming together really well. The core members started formulating and conspiring on songs together. It started from humble beginnings; the recording started off real small. Then, gradually, dudes started putting in work, putting in work, putting in work. RZA and GZA took what we were doing and enhanced it.
Unfortunately, some guys who should have gotten in at the ground level of the Wu-Tang got taken out of the game before they could even get started. Cappadonna was one who, if things hadn’t gone the way they did, might have played an even bigger part in the formation of the Wu.
His rhyme style was amazing, really ahead of its time. I remember this talent show/rap battle that was going down at the Wave. Cappa destroyed everybody to win that battle; even RZA and GZA were no match. He just ate everybody. He melted the mic that day, rapping over “Impeach the President.” GZA, RZA, and Dirty didn’t stand a chance. It was Cap’s hood, plus he was rhyming about shit that people from that hood could relate to. All his references were Park Hill related. I was right there with him. The crowd was unanimous in its choice.
Then Cappadonna got locked up. He was in front of the building one day, and this dude called Boo-Yay ran past him with the cops chasing him and dropped a package at Cappa’s feet. The cops ran down on Cap and pinned the drugs on him. It really wasn’t his stuff—the cops locked him up for somebody else’s shit. That’s why he said in one of his rhymes, “They locked me up. / They said it was mine, but it was Boo-Yay’s stuff.” Cappa wound up doing three years for a crime he didn’t commit.
That shit fucked me up. Me and Cappadonna used to hang out pretty much every day. He was the rapper to my beatbox, my rhyme partner. Knowing he was innocent didn’t help instill any faith in the justice system. The hood was like that a lot, though. There was so much wrong shit going on all the time, the chances of being caught in the wrong place at the wrong time were pretty good.
When Cappa went to jail, I had to move on with my life. I started going down to Stapleton more with Method Man to see RZA. Years later, when Cappa came home from prison, he got caught up in some other shit charges and got sent back. Altogether, I think the system took eight years of his life. Because of that, he missed getting on 36 Chambers entirely.
I became an adult while he was locked up. That’s just how that is. You come home after being away for a few years, dudes are different. I’m driving a car. I got big gold chains on. He didn’t even know we were going down to RZA’s house and recording. People didn’t know we were doing any of that shit at the time.
But they were about to find out.