who?
eleven eleven | two forty six post meridiem
C.R.E.A.M.(Y)
Lately my listening has swung back and forth between my 2-step compilations and the original round of Wu-Tang Clan albums that came out prior to Wu-Tang Forever. The former is notorious for its girlyness, while the latter is, umm, not. With their starkness, homocidal seriousness, claustrophobia and initiate aesthetics, the Wu are stereotypically closer to hyper-masculine genres like dub or jungle, but I've noticed myself responding to them in a way that tries to deny this, not wilfully, but simply because I don't know how else to respond. I end up absorbing the beats, textures and voices in a smoothed-out swirl, without different levels, like a Todd Edwards cut-up; aestheticizing and making delicate something which is certainly not intended to be that way.
I was in high school when G-Funk and the Wu-Tang both came out. I didn't like the former; it was too familiar; I thought it cheapened the very real threat in gangsta by making it casual, too Sunday-afternoon frat boy pool party (I love it now, of course, especially Doggystyle). Wu-Tang fascinated me for precisely the opposite reason: it was some of the most unfamiliar and threatening music I'd ever heard. Even for someone who'd grown up on NWA and Ice-T, it was totally alien in its violence, in the unrelentingly hostile street scenes it evoked, in its trippy and tripping techniques. It didn't surprise me at all to find out that they were Five Percenters; nearly every aspect of their worldview lines up with an emphasis on initiation (whether there is a consistent intitiative rite they swear by I never bothered to learn) and exclusion. It was music that resisted me more than anything I'd come across, and this became the source of my - not infatuation - but definitely strong interest.
After high school I moved to Seattle, where I sporadically attended UW part-time, worked in a video store at night, and spent most of my days by myself, in the library, carefully annotating the elaborate structures and references in Lolita and Ulysses. When I came out of my shell, nine months or so later, I realized there wasn't much for 19 year olds to do: liquor laws were draconian, and the Teen Dance Ordinance made it all but impossible to keep legal under age venues open. A small but close-knit subculture grew up in response to this, and their solution wasn't too far from what happened (I later learned through reading books like Energy Flash) in England eight years earlier: semi-legal warehouse parties, E'ed-up house parties, weekend treks into the Eastern Washington desert. I made friends and contacts and was absorbed into this, and it was a revelation: no more standing stock-still while watching crappy bands make their amplifiers squeal, no more hostility, no more indier-than-thou posturing like I'd experienced growing up in Olympia during the horrifically awful (urgh, I can barely bring my fingers to type the word) "Gr*ng*" years. People would decorate their walls with lace and dried red roses, and parties would end with circles of delicately-limbed adolescents holding hands, their nerves all combed together in a perfect wreath. When my friends and I weren't spinning house records, we were listening to these Wu-Tang discs, and there didn't seem to be any inconsistency in this. The very elements that made them so alienating also allowed us to appropriate them in our own way, to hear in them what we wanted without any intrusive clarity on the Clan's part to contradict us.
The beat was of primary importance, of course. Coming down from 6 hours of thumping 4/4 to conventional song structures was too much; the beat was still there, but it was syncopated, stuttered, and offered a reprieve without abandoning the head-nodding or feet-moving principle, in a similar way to 2-step. House and Hip Hop have always been opposed, the former castigated by the latter for its rootlessness, hedonism, androgyny, and escapist impulses (just read any random Chuck D interview to see what I'm talking about). But, in a wonderful irony, these were the qualities the Clan had for us: rootless in the sense that we couldn't even begin to identify with their cinemascope realism; escapist in that their elaborate vocal techniques became - for us, the uninitiated - an appreciation of technique in itself, a tantalizing tongue-tripping formalism; hedonistic in that RZA's fractured soundscapes became a ruined version of the deep house synthetic sounds we otherwise loved, a way to step out of the here-and-now glare into an overgrown garden complete with cracked pillars and a hermitage.
When I listen to these albums now - partly out of a natural response to their impenetrability, partly from memories and associations - I can't separate their moods from those remembered incensed interiors, with their deep reds and elegant fringes, strokable fabrics and warm bodies. It's as if the hermeticism of the Clan's music has a textural, but not metaphorical, analogue in my private imaginings. This is a form of alienation that I find more and more congenial and exciting: the freedom to reimagine diverse elements in my own way, without questions of identity, or concerns with "relevancy", or a priestly hierarchy getting in the way; mechanical reproduction, commodified and dispersed, becoming a work of private mental art divorced from those who would try to claim it, condemn it, or redeem it in some socially-minded way. A return to my own 36 chambers, of roses and lace.