Best Valentine's Day Memories

How'd I celebrate Valentine's Day last week? Went and saw the Wu-Tang Clan with Jeff the Ex-Roommate. This is what I said about it in the school paper:

Maybe the thing that surprised me the most about the Wu-Tang Clan’s sold-out show at the Hammerstein Ballroom last Tuesday (yes, Valentine’s Day) was that, when I entered the theater at 9:40, the band was already on stage. I had not expected New York’s most notorious nine eight man (RIP ODB—but I’ll get more into that later) rap conglomerate of kung-fu mystics to be so punctual. My ticket said the doors of the theater would open at 6:30, and to find the band already on stage three hours later strongly contradicted what I had expected of this band, especially considering that I knew the band’s show in New Haven a week earlier had started at 11:00. According to a fellow concertgoer also standing at the back of the floor, assessing the mass before him as I was, planning how to best penetrate this throng of people whose hands were held high making W’s by clasping their thumbs, they had only performed a couple of songs. The band was still taking to the stage one member at a time, and I had made it there in time to catch Method Man, arguably the group’s biggest star (or at least the only one to have done a Right Guard commercial) appear on stage for the first time, performing (no surprise here) the song “Method Man” from the band’s first album, “Enter the Wu-Tang: 36 Chambers.”

Knowing that good journalism would require me to give some background on the Wu-Tang Clan for readers who might not know anything about the band (not that I’d call myself a Wu-Tang aficionado by any means) has probably been one of the harder parts in presenting my Wu-Tang Clan concert experience, as the Wu-Tang Clan simultaneously defies and embraces typical notions of what rap is or can be and what a rap group is or can be. If Hunter S. Thompson were a rap group, he’d be the Wu-Tang Clan. If Guns ‘n’ Roses were a rap group, they’d be the Wu-Tang Clan. If feudal Japan were a rap group, it’d be the Wu-Tang Clan. If the Five Lions of Voltron were a rap group, they’d be the Wu-Tang Clan. And, most importantly, if the Wu-Tang Clan were a rap group, they’d be the Wu-Tang Clan.

More or less hailing from Staten Island (or “Shaolin,” as it is known in the Wu-Tang Lexicon) the Wu-Tang Clan is a collective of rappers who first graced the car stereos of suburban white teens in the early-mid 90s. In the age where gangsta was king, the Clans’s raps were consistent with the era in that they were mostly about how the band 1) was tough and 2) loved money but defied the trends of the day by also being about how the band 1) were sort of all ninjas (or at least hadn’t realized that they weren’t ninjas). Stylistically, the two things that most distinguished this band from their West Coast counterparts (not that the Wu was ever involved in any East Coast/West Coast beef, the band has always transcended that sort of trifling, and seriously, who’d pick a fight with a band of mystical assassins?) First, while the West Coast scene leaned on soulful g-funk beats, the Wu’s sound trips along over menacing and mysterious soundscapes—music to snap necks by, as opposed to Dr. Dre’s cuts to bust caps to. Second, the Wu-Tang Clan was a super group right out of the gates, then numbering nine members strong (now just eight, RIP ODB, as I said before, I’ll get more into that later) and it’s one thing to have Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg trading verses on a track, another for each song to require nine verses if each Wu-member is to have his moment.

For anyone but the truly devoted, naming all the members of the Wu-Tang Clan is no easy task, like naming the Seven Dwarves, if each of the Seven Dwarves also went by a handful of additional aliases. Just off the top of my head I usually can only name six or seven members of the band—The RZA (a.k.a. Bobby Digital), the GZA (a.k.a. the Genius), Method Man (a.k.a. Johnny Blaze, Mr. Mef, the MZA, Big John Stud, Iron Lung, etc.), Old Dirty Bastard (a.k.a. the ODB, Osirus, Big Baby Jesus, Dirt McGirt, also RIP, but you know I’ll get to that later), Ghostface Killa (a.k.a. Tony Starks, Pretty Tony), Inspectah Deck, Raekwon,—that’s as far I can get before I break down wondering if U-God is really a member of the Clan, or just a buddy of theirs, and if the group could contain someone that’s called “Master Chef,” or if I’m just making that up. Naming the members of the group is hard enough for the mildly-initiated, never mind matching voices to each name on their records, let alone matching the voice (quite a bit different when being yelled live) to the face when the band is on stage.

The Wu-Tang Clan’s career has had it’s ups and downs, but primarily just some Ups followed by a series of Downs, the band’s first two releases (“Enter the Wu-Tang: 36 Chambers” and “Wu-Tang Forever”) were fairly strong, but their next two studio albums (“The W” and “Iron Flag”) both fell a short and most members of the band have spent most of their time since the band’s first release concentrating on solo records and side projects (also a mixed bag, to say the least), not that any of this has diminished the group’s presence or cache in the minds of its fans. Prior to beginning their current tour the band hadn’t performed as a complete unit for years, and the announcement that the complete band would be playing in one of the city’s largest non-arena venues brought out their hardcore fans and the curious en mass. As Ghostface boasted from the stage halfway through the show, “New York, your favorite super heroes are on stage tonight” and no statement could have been more correct that evening.

Watching the Clan perform live was like going to someone else’s church, or celebrating a holiday at someone else’s house—familiar in many senses, but foreign in ways you hadn’t expected. I’m no stranger to stages crowded with performers, but the Wu-Tang Clan crowds a stage like no other band with its eight primary players, their DJ, an entire posse of hangers-on lingering just behind the DJ, two middle school aged boys who’d occasionally emerge with microphones and rap along with the group without any introduction or explanation, and a gentleman in a baseball cap and worn out jacket who looked like he was probably some member of the group’s grandfather (or the grandfather to several, as I think a few of the Wu-Tang Clan are cousins) on stage throughout the show. The band’s attitude fluctuated between serious and menacing (particularly when the brooding RZA took control of the performance) and jovial and energetic, with Method Man repeatedly trying to walk on the crowd. And on this Valentine’s Day the band occasionally took the tone of a spurned lover, frequently asking the crowd why New York didn’t love them anymore and why the city’s major rap stations didn’t even announce the show (this was all news to me and a little hard to believe as I’d never been in a crowd so strongly committed to loving what was on stage before it). The show came to a near complete halt when Ghostface Killa entered something of a monologue over his disbelief that New Yorkers would rather listen to songs like “this” (and when he said “this” the DJ dropped the beat to D4L’s infectious but ridiculous hit, “Laffy Taffy,” which Ghostface derided with a mocking little imitation of the dance that goes to the song) instead of the Wu-Tang Clan. Moments like this left the audience shrugging its shoulders like the kid in class that didn’t shoot the spit wad and wondering when the band would get back to their music.

But I don’t mean to dwell on the negative or unusual. When the band did perform at full strength, and this took up most of the group’s healthy 90+ minute set, it was something like Muhammad Ali fighting in his prime, and, during especially devastating moments (like when “The 4th Chamber” from GZA’s solo masterpiece, “Liquid Swords,” exploded from the theather’s sound system), much more like Mike Tyson scoring a knock-out in the opening seconds of a fight. When the band performed “hits” like C.R.E.A.M., they surrendered most of their vocal duties to the audience, the majority of whom could shout the words (and it’s something to hear a few thousand yell “I grew up on the crime side / the New York Times side / where staying alive was no jive” in unison) for them.

While no typical rap concert is without a lengthy homage to Biggie Smalls and Tupac Shakur, the Wu-Tang Clan sidestep this tradition as they have their own fallen member, Russell Jones, a.k.a. Ol’ Dirty Bastard, who succumbed to a little bit of everything a year and a half ago (as opposed to the bullets that claimed the poster boys of the East/West feud nearly a decade ago) to honor. While ODB’s absence was felt throughout the show in the form of verses missing from each songs, the band paid official tribute to him halfway through the show when they brought Jones’ mother onto the stage and asked that all the lights in the theater be turned off and then had the audience hold up their lighters and cell phones. The audience was happy to oblige, briefly transforming the Hammerstein Ballroom into a well-illuminated, multi-layered birthday cake before the band shook off the momentary trappings of reverence and stumbled into ODB’s break out solo hit “Shimmy, Shimmy Y’all.”

Another way that the Wu-Tang Clan spurns one’s typical expectations for popular rap is with their trademark ghetto intellectualism. Between songs the band would comment on current events, national, international, and local, the RZA drawing the biggest cheers of the night when he quipped (and I paraphrase, of course) “You know you livin’ in a messed-up world when the Vice-President shoot somebody.” And, when it came time for the show to end, the band explained that the show was over because “You know New York is a union town, and that means New York is a mafia town, a Gambino town” (I think that the idea that they meant to get across was that the Wu-Tang Clan wasn’t about to pay for overtime union services at the Hammerstein Ballroom—and as you may have learned from the Wu-Tang Financial Consulting sketch on Chapelle’s Show, the Wu-Tang Clan is a fiscally responsible bunch). And although the band declared their concert to be done, the band was slow to leave the stage, each member having a few additional Valentine’s thoughts to share with the audience, or a street date for their next solo record to plug.