This only makes sense, considering that that album remains the group’s finest moment, the origin point from which all their subsequent achievements descend. The world created by this music is complete unto itself, and the drab dimensions of reality simply can’t compete with these lyrical flights of fancy.Īlmost half of the videos featured here are culled from the group’s debut album, 1993’s Return to the 36 Chambers. Watching these videos, seeing the Clan lip-sync the words to their tracks, it seems to be as much of a distraction as anything else. There’s a density to the Wu-Tang Clan’s music that simply can’t be compared to anything else. The appeal at the center of the Wu-Tang cosmos is not that of a lifestyle or an attitude but an imposing mythology built around the disparate, sometimes contradictory styles and preoccupations of nine distinctive MCs. But this only makes sense: listening to the Wu-Tang Clan requires active listening in a fashion that seems disconcertingly at odds with the very idea of music videos. As compared to the video work of similarly influential artists such as the Beastie Boys, Jay-Z and Eminem, the Wu-Tang Clan’s videography seems positively emaciated. The videos on display in Legend of the Wu-Tang are of strictly secondary importance in any consideration of the group’s output. The Wu’s particular virtues are such that the music video format has never made for a comfortable fit. The members of the Wu-Tang collective were all still capable of producing good music (some moreso than others, it must be admitted), but the need to do so as a group was becoming less and less pressing as time wore on. The latter album was notable, aside from a few choice cuts, for its overall lack of focus 2001’s Iron Flag was a little better, but by then it was obvious to all that the bloom was off the rose. After 1997’s massively baroque Wu-Tang Forever, the group remained separate until 2000’s The W. The Wu had already been drifting apart for many years prior to this death: with nine members and various associates all involved in relatively successful solo careers, the group had been torn by conflicting priorities for years.
The writing was on the wall as early as 2004, with the premature but by no means surprising death of the Old Dirty Bastard following a period of imprisonment. After a decade and change of turbulence and dirty grandeur, the strange, unpredictable entity known as the Wu-Tang Clan is finally coming to an end.
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