60 Songs That Explain the '90s - Wu-Tang Clan—“C.R.E.A.M.”

Episode Date: October 29, 2020

Rob explores the Wu-Tang Clan’s 1993 genre-defining classic “C.R.E.A.M.” and the unique circumstances that were seminal to the group’s identity. This episode was originally produced as a Music and Talk show available exclusively on Spotify. Find the full song on Spotify or wherever you get your music. Host: Rob Harvilla Guest: Lex Pryor Producer: Isaac Lee and Justin Sayles Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

You're listening to a music and talk episode where full songs and talk segments play together only on Spotify. Best of all, you can create your own music and talk show for free with Anchor Spotify's podcasting platform. Get started at anchor.fm-fm-M-S-H-H-O-R-F-M-U-S-I-S-M-U-S-I-C-A-L-L-K. A lot of spelling there, but just do it. In 2019, Showtime. ran a four-episode four-hour documentary on the Wu-Tang Clan called Wutang Clan of Mike's and Men.

It was great. It was long. It was quite long. If you remember Wu-Tang forever, the album, how long that was, this was more than twice as long. My favorite part is early in the second episode. The members of the Wu-Tang clan, the Rizza, the Jiza, Method Man, Rayquan, inspected Deck, Ghost Face Kill, Mastakena, Yugod, and Capadana with old dirty bastard who died in 2004, very much there in spirit, they're sitting in a beautiful old movie theater in their home base of Staten Island, watching old footage of themselves and reminiscing. And in this moment, they're arguing about who first suggested they named themselves

the Wu-Tang Clan, and by extension, who first saw the 1983 Hong Kong martial arts movie where that name comes from. Here is just part of that argument. You saw the scene. I didn't know you seen it. But I told you to watch it.

this shit like this like yo no no what's going on I don't know that man I know that man Hold on

Hold on Hold on Cut cut cut I don't know I don't know Rizah This shit's kind of fishy Instinctively he's supplying the melody

The hook the chorus Keep that in mind The guy who yells cut is the Rizah Who is the leader? who is the producer, who provides the structure and the direction. That clip should give you some idea of the work involved, the art and the labor in organizing all these guys and harmonizing their voices. The Riza is the Jerry Krauss of the Wu-Tang Clan.

He drafted them. He assembled them. Some were his friends. Some were his family. He's the Phil Jackson of the Wu-Tang Clan. He calls the plays. He sets the lineups. He provides oblique, mystical, philosophical direction. And as a rapper himself, he's not the Michael Jordan or the Scotty Pippen. The Horace Grant? Not the Will Perdue, obviously.

You deal with this. You decide which dude on the 93 Bowls would have made this beat. My name is Rob Harvilla. I'm a staff writer at the Ringer. I'm a rock critic. I'm tall and sort of ophish. I'm the Will Purdue of the Ringer, okay? I write about pop music a lot, and I'm talking about it a lot

on this podcast, which is called 60 songs that explain the 90s. Yeah, 60. This is the Wu-Tang Forever of podcasts. Maybe you're here because you're nostalgic. Maybe you're here because you're a younger person trying to understand what all these nostalgic old people are blathering on about. The goal here is to illuminate this particular decade whether you think you don't know enough or you fear that you already know way too much. But either way, I'm guessing you recognize that loop, which of course is from cream, as in Cash rules everything around me. It samples a 1967 soul song called As Long as I've Got You, written and produced by

Isaac Hayes and David Porter and performed by a Stax Records girl group called the Charmels. And it appears on the Wu-Tang Clan's 1993 debut album, Enter the Wutang 36 Chambers. In 1993, the East Coast's iron grip on hip-hop had weakened somewhat. Maybe that sounds familiar. Dr. Drey's The Chronic had come out in December 90s. his new label, Death Row was huge, G-Funk was huge, the West Coast was huge. 36 Chambers came out the same month as Snoop Doggy Doggy Doggy Style, and that debuted at number one on the Billboard chart,

whereas 36 Chambers didn't quite crack the top 40, though in time it would go multi-platinum. Meaning millions of copies sold, triple platinum is 3 million and on and on. But during the golden era of late 80s and early 90s hip-hop, which happened to coincide with the 90s C-T, boom, there were degrees of multi-platinum. You could conceivably go diamonds, 10 million copies sold. Both the Beastie Boys and MC Hammer did that, if either of those meet your definition of golden era. Later in the decade, Tupac did that, the notorious B.I.G. did that. Eventually, Eminem and Outcast and Nelly

would do that. You didn't necessarily have to come from New York to dominate rap anymore, which is part of the reason why this is the decade where rap truly started to dominate the music industry as a whole. But back then, if New York rap supremacy especially mattered to you, help was on the way. Nas' is Illmatic and Biggie's ready to die were coming in 94. Mob Deeps the infamous was coming in 95. Jay-Z's reasonable doubt was coming in 96. That upswing for the five boroughs arguably started when a tribe called Quest's Midnight Marauders and Enter the Wu-Tang 36 chambers came out on the same day in 93.

November 1993, crucially. Winter is coming. If the Riza is your producer, if the Wu-Tang clan are your hosts, then it is always, and it always will be winter. And crucially, winter in Staten Island. The warmest thing about cream is the hook, which is brought to you, of course, by Method Man. The Wu-Tang clan are one of the biggest rap groups in history, and the Wu-Tang logo, the black and yellow W, is one of the biggest logos. rap history. And as 36 chambers blew up in the 90s rumbled on, that logo was everywhere, scrawled on notebooks, carved into school desks, and emblazoned on like 10 billion t-shirts.

But prior to Cream, I'm guessing the vast majority of the people would seem be wearing those t-shirts. A lot of suburban teenagers, for starters, had no idea what winter in Staten Island was like for a young, poor, black person. This disconnect between artist and fan got to be a problem for the group and maybe for rap music as a whole, the more popular and dominant the genre became. Not everybody got the whole point right away. Let me give you an example. The first major revelation I had personally with 36 Chambers, as an O-Fish late 90s Midwestern college student, was that the skits made for excellent outgoing answering machine messages, in particular the one right after Cream, where Rayquan and Method Man are comparing methods of torture.

fucking dresser just your nuts laying on the fucking dresser and bang them shit with a spike fucking back. Hilarious. Absolutely hilarious. Everyone loved it. My mom especially loved it. Not everybody got the whole point right away. Even though the point of cream was abundantly clear, starting with the opening lines of Raqwan's opening verse.

I grew up on the crime side, the New York Times side. Staying alive was no job. Had second hands. downstone old man, so then we move to Shaolin Land. Shaolin Land, meaning Staten Island. You're a teenager. You live wherever you live. You put on 36 chambers.

You've never heard anything like it. The first thing you hear is a sample from Shaolin and Wu-Tang, a 1983 movie that you most likely haven't seen. And then suddenly nearly a dozen individual voices, rappers, personalities, stars are all fighting for oxygen, for playing time. It's aggressive. It's grimy.

It's blunt. It's winter all the time. It's electrifying and it's fun. Wu-Tang Clan ain't none to fuck with. Protect your neck. Method Man, the song. Method Man, the human. Have fun. But Cream is one of the big moments where these guys tell you where they're from and what it's like where they're from. And what it's like for them to know how clueless you likely are about where they're from. And to me, there's something beautiful but a little sad about the mythology the Wu-Tang Clan immediately created, the way Staten Island becomes Shaolin. Because for a Midwestern oaf with a stupid outgoing answering machine message, Staten Island is so far away,

it might as well actually be a mountain in China. Think about how many white boys on ballcourts you've seen wearing Wu-Tang Clan t-shirts, maybe with no socks doing spin moves until. smashed macdoubles fly out of their pockets. Rayquan was one of the group's early breakout stars. He put out his first solo album, only built for Cuban Links in 1995. The same year as ODB's return to the 36 chambers

and Jizz's Liquid Swords, which is, conodically, Joe Biden's favorite Wutang Clan album. Help was on the way. That avalanche product was another part of the Riza's Jerry Krauss' master plan. The Wutang Clan as a whole were signed to loud records, but per the group's deal, any member could sign as a solo artist to any label. He knew what he was doing, and better yet,

he knew that most people in the music industry didn't know what they were doing, or at least didn't know what to do with him. Riz's real name is Robert Diggs. And yes, briefly, in the early 90s, he was known as Prince Rakeem, a young rapper signed to Tommy Boy Records with a very minor hit called Ooh, I Love,

you, Rakeem. I don't play that for you now to denigrate him, but to denigrate whichever label guy was the Phil Jackson of that particular situation. How there is a puts it in that Showtime documentary is, I didn't know that the label could be wrong. Tommy Boy thought he was the fresh prince. It's a bit of a Jay-Z and the Hawaiian Sophie video deal, if that means anything to you, which if not, maybe we'll get to that some other time, Jay-Z with a parachute. It's amazing. The point is that it's clear Prince Rakim's label didn't understand him or where he was from. And so, Reborn is the Riza. He had to do it, do pretty much everything himself. Because apparently, even if you lived in Manhattan in the early 90s, if you were a typical clueless major label, Stoge, an A&R man, a mountain climber who played an electric guitar, and Staten Island, which was physically only 20, 25 miles away, might as well have been a mountain in China.

Inspector Deck knew that too Inspecated deck does the other guys still struggling Survival got me bugging To stay awake to the ways of the world Because shit is deep Inspector Deck does the second verse on Cream In that Showtime documentary

It's clear that the other guys really liked that line I'm alive on arrival It's possible that if only rappers in the Wu Tang clan were voting He might be the Michael Jordan of the Wu Tang Clan They talk a little bit about how his verses Especially were a hard act to follow He was so precise, so surgical, but so vulnerable.

A tragedy within the perpetual tragedy, Cream describes, is that inspected Deck didn't get his own immediate breakout solo album, because one of the other fun things about living in Staten Island was that Riza's basement studio kept flooding. And one such flood wiped out the original version of Deck's uncontrolled substance, which should have come out with that first big wave of solo albums in 94 or 95, but instead it got retooled and fussed over and delayed all the way to 1999, by which time the Wu-Tang Clan as a whole were in a very different place.

The phase that comes after you've taken over the world is way different than the phase when you're creating your own. That's depressed. That's depressed twice in two seconds. that. Whoever you are, wherever you live, you can put on cream and revel in the glory of it, the triumph of that loop alone. But there's genuine pain in it too and all over 36 chambers, on tears, or on can it be all so simple, which talks about the good old days or rather suggests that as a poor kid in Shaolin, maybe there's no such thing, because the less cash you have, the more it rules everything around you. Per there is a cream was recorded four or five times.

One of its working titles was Lifestyles of the Mega Rich, back when nobody involved in the song's creation qualified. These are all incredible songs, and anthemic even, but by design they're also chilly to the point of frigid. They pull you in by detailing so vividly and precisely how it feels to be shut out in the cold. The bigger the Wu-Tang Clan got, the bigger the stage, the more diverse, the crowd,

the harder it got to get any of that across. The full group's second album, 1997's Wutang Forever was very long and debuted at number one on the Billboard album chart. And soon the guys were on tour with rage against the machine, a much bigger stage but a dramatically different sound for, often, a dramatically different audience, meaning way more suburban white kids. In the Showtime documentary, that tour is framed as a big deal, but also somewhat of a disaster,

or at least a major source of internal discomfort. The gulf between artists and audience was only widening. Method Man put it this way. I don't want to go. Because for me, the black audience was the core, and I've seen different guys go over to the white audience and never get to come back and shit, so I was a little scared.

He sounds a little less jolly there. They dropped off that tour early, and from that point forward, the group as a whole fractured, not totally, but visibly and maybe permanently. The Wu-Tang Clan together and apart are still a present-tenths operation. They survived Odi-Ban. B's death in 2004, and they've survived all matter of calamity since then, including their 2015 album, Once Upon a Time in Shaolin, which exists as a single copy, which disgraced

ultra-capitalist, Farma Bro, and convicted felon Martin Schrelli bought. But no one will ever forget where these guys came from or what it means to come from there. Among as many other activities, the Rizzo writes books now, and should you require oblique, mystical, philosophical direction, check out his 2009 book, The Dow of Wu. In that one, he wrote about how crucial it was when the Wu-Tang Clan formed that Staten Island was an island. He writes, when you watch a movie like Godzilla, you see them go out to one of these tiny remote islands and find Mothra. It was the same way with us. A nine-man hip-hop crew based on

mathematics, capital M, chess, comics, and kung fu flicks wasn't springing up in the middle of the Manhattan art scene. Only on a remote island can something like King Kong grow to his full capacity. He also advises everyone to, quote, find an island in this life, end quote, which is almost now a beer slogan, I think. And also to turn off the electromagnetic waves being forced up on you, which is not yet a beer slogan. In April 2020, in the early days of widespread COVID quarantine,

the Rizzo did one of the earliest versus beat battles, matched up against DJ Premier, and incredibly, he did not play Cream, which is a tragedy all on its own. That's some cold shit, because I'd like to think the beat alone would have made DJ premier shiver. My guest today is Ringer's staff writer Lex Pryor, who covers the intersections of race, pop culture, and sports. Thanks so much for being here, man. I appreciate it. Yeah, man. Thank you for having me on. It's good to actually, like, see you in person instead of just rambling to you all in the phone. Absolutely. Lex, I have an upsetting question for you. It's going to upset me. Enter the Wu-Tang 36 Chambers came out in 1993. Lex, how old were you in 1993?

I was negative four, so yeah, I was not born. Yeah, that's fantastic. That's great. Thank you for being here. I think that's it. Come back anytime. Thanks so much. Okay, how old were you when you first heard the Wu-Tang Clan? and did you stumble across it like organically or did someone play the Wu-Tang clan for you or like at you? Yeah, I had to be like at least probably like eight. It was not as if I just found it on my own. I was brainwashed from a very young age by my father. So he was like providing me with all this stuff.

He gave me like a horrible like iPod Nano and like put Wu-Tang on it, put Tribe Call Quest on it, put De LaSoul on it, put De La Sol on. it. I had to beg for Kanye. Like, I remember that was the big sticking point. I was like, please let me have Kanye on this. And I had to like literally annoy him for days before he actually put it on. But I had Wu-Tang on it and like Wu-Tang was kind of the dirtiest thing that was on the iPod. So I think like at a young age, I was kind of drawn towards it where I was like, what are these songs with like an explicit sign next to it? And like, how have I not discovered these? But first time you ever played it, definitely. like in the car. I'm sure he was playing it while I was a kid. Was he specifically like I am brainwashing you like this is the good shit like I'm educating you here. Was he trying to be like subliminal about it to some degree? Yeah, no, no. He was like,

it was an autocracy. Like it was very clear like this is what we're listening to. It's very strange. You know, my friends always make fun of me because like from like probably six to like 12, I just did not listen to popular radio. So, like, I knew that Little Wayne was going around. I knew, like, T.I., you know. But I also was just like, no, you guys aren't, like, listening to Public Enemy. Like, that's what's on, like, in my dad's car. You guys are all listening to that, right?

So, like, it wasn't an option. My father's, like, very of an era in hip-hop where he's just huge on, like, 90s, like, boom bap and very regional about it. and very testosterone filled about it and very, like, this is the only hip hop that's real hip hop. And everything else you're listening to is not that. Regional meaning New York. Yes, yes, yes. We are residents of upstate New York, aka the North Pole.

Yeah. With Wu Tang specifically, like, what was his pitch to you? Like, how did he explain them or try to sell you on them? I don't know if he ever really explicitly tried to sell them to me. think he was just like listen to this like isn't this that shit like don't you love this shit and like um i was like oh okay like it's just wu tang is so crazy because it's kind of like um it's almost like like the Avengers of rap where you're listening to like nine different voices and everybody sounds so different from each other you know like ghost face sounds so different from Raquan

who sounds so different from ODB you know they all like have just these totally unique styles and like as a young kid i think that really like kind of drew me in where it's like oh, okay, you can almost like pick your favorites. And it's just like, it's a totally unparalleled rap experience. Who was your favorite? I think initially, ODB was probably my favorite just because like that's my dad's favorite. And that's like, I feel like almost everybody from that era, like, that's who they're drawn to or we're drawn to. I don't know if that has something to do with like us romanticizing the dead or like literally just the unique kind of like vocal pattern that he has on.

all his his raps, but initially it was him, and then it kind of, as I've gotten older, definitely gotten more into GoSpace. I feel like Ghostbase is like the only one out of all of them who can make an album without Riza. And like, just his solo catalog is

like so versatile. Plus I just, I love his ad libs. Right. With Wu-Tang, did you gravitate toward any particular album or song? Like, do you have a personal relationship with Cream itself? Yes, yes. I mean, I definitely, have a personal relationship with that

whole first album just because like that's kind of as I got older and was, you know, forced to do more chores and stuff. My dad would have a habit of going up to me and telling me that we have things to do today, which meant I had things to do today. And like,

that's kind of stuff that I would just like I would play Wu-Tang. Like, I would play cream, I'd play 136 chambers. I'd play only built for Cuban links. And like, just, I don't know what it was. I don't know if it was like, oh, I feel like this is cold music. Like, I need to play this right now to survive. Because I don't think, like, I'm telling you how cold Albany is, but like, I don't

think you understand how cold Albany is. I believe it. I would, like, wear, like, um, hand warmers in my shoes, like, literally while I was out there. So, like, yeah, it's just like, I definitely have a ton of memories from, like, just shoveling, like, unending amounts of snow on days that I was supposed to have off, but somehow ended up shoveling because, you know, again, we had things to do. You had things to do. Did you get paid for this? Did you get cash?

No. No, I've never, I don't think my dad has ever paid me for, um, choice, except like watching my, my baby brothers. But no, it was like, you get food. Like, you get colds. I guess that works. That sounds tragic to me, but that makes sense, I suppose. Was there any new or at least newer music that you've gotten your dad into? Like, Does it work going in the other direction? Yeah, no. I mean, I always try. I try to convince him, like, listen to Kendrick around, like, to pimp a butterfly.

I was like, oh, you're going to love it. And he came back and he was like, I don't know. But he's a big fan of Rhapsody, who I suggest to him. He's not, like, a total, like, troglodyte. Like, he is, like, he listens to Jay-Z. And, like, he knows who people are. It's just, like, he's just very much of an era. I don't know.

He'll be mad at me when he listens to this, and he'll hear that I just outed him as, like, you know, stuck in the 90s man. One day you two will be of a certain era, Lex. I can promise you that. I know. It's coming for me. Yeah.

It is. Thank you so much for being here, dude. I really appreciate it. Yeah, man. Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it. This is Rob Harvilla with 60 songs that explain the 90s. Thanks again to Lex Pryor to our producers, Isaac Lee,

Justin Sales, Alani Ronaldo, and to you for listening. And now, here in full, is the Wutan Clan's cream. We'll see you next time.