The W

After the excess of <i>Wu-Tang Forever</i> and the incredible flood of solo albums that followed (most notably Ghostface’s <i>Supreme Clientele</i>, Method Man and Redman’s <i>Blackout!</i> and RZA’s soundtrack for the Jim Jarmusch movie <i>Ghost Dog</i>), it was easy to overlook <i>The W</i>—or at least feel so oversaturated by Wu-Tang that you put it off for a while. But consider the album in the context of its moment and it’s a remarkable achievement. This was the era of Nelly and Diddy, of R&B hybrids like Usher and Aaliyah. Rap wasn’t subculture anymore—it was the dominant sound in American pop. And here you had nine unsmiling guys from Staten Island making Platinum records out of stuff like “Careful (Click Click)” and the agonising “I Can’t Go to Sleep”. If <i>The W</i> wasn’t the most uncommercial-sounding commercial rap album of 2000, nothing was. Nothing the group did can really compare to <i>Enter the Wu-Tang</i>. But as pure sound, RZA’s production had never felt sharper or more fully evolved—you could play this as instrumentals and it’d still work. Future-feeling, past-plundering, catchy as cartoons and obscure as the inside of a tomb, this is music—<i>music</i>—that helped expand what we listen for when we hear hip-hop. Yeah, some of the verses sound a little phoned-in, but the best tracks (let’s throw in “Hollow Bones” and “Protect Ya Neck (The Jump Off)”) are as vital as they ever sounded, not to mention their last culture-changing statement before settling into their status as a kind of fragmented legacy act. An album earlier, GZA had famously challenged rappers to “make it brief, son/Half short and twice strong”. After the movie-length <i>Wu-Tang Forever</i>, the brevity and directness of <i>The W</i> was it.