Future Echoes: Will You Love me Tomorrow?

In Future Echoes we look at the evolution and influence of those songs that split off in all directions.

The melody is so brisk and direct, so immediate, it’s not at all surprising to find out it was banged out in an afternoon – as it turns out, by an 18-year-old called Carole King (born Carole Klein) while her baby played in a crib near the piano. It is a surprise that it was the child’s father who wrote the lyrics, an impressive feat of empathy and reflection for a 20-year-old bloke in 1960. But that was the division of songwriting labour between King and then husband Gerry Goffin over a decade of producing mini-masterpieces together, and while his lyrics were always an elegant adornment to King’s sprightly melodies, Will You Love Me Tomorrow must be the only time they truly do 50% of the heavy lifting in the song.

It was first a hit for The Shirelles, the first US number one for a black female group and they add the final kick; lead vocalists Shirley Owens provides a performance as restrained, intelligent and clear-eyed as the song. Doo-Wop was an inherently melodramatic genre, and like most pop that dealt with sex pre- Prince and Madonna, found its pleasurable tension in hinting, through tone and performance, at what could not be explicitly said. Not Will You Love Me Tomorrow, which is bracingly, bravely clear in content. And compared to the operatics of, say, Mel Carter, the production is relatively sparse.

The song is from the point of view of a young woman, deciding whether the promises being made tonight by a prospective lover are going to be honoured the next day. Big deal, I know, but sufficiently shocking in post-pill 1960 America to get the song banned by several radio stations. On the face of it, it all sounds a rather quaint, an 18-year-old’s idea of a big commitment. It’s not. When Owens sings ”So tell me now, and I won’t ask again”, that honesty, that agreement that responsibility for whatever turns out to be the truth will be shared, it’s, well, for lack of a better phrase, incredibly grown up. It rings as true for me at 33 as it did at 19, and I don’t trust anyone for whom the conversation in Will You Love Me Tomorrow has never once felt necessary.

The song, as hits often did back then, inspired a couple of “answer songs”, including one from The Satintones, a largely forgotten group who nevertheless earned immortality as the first to record a single for Motown. The vocal arrangement is a delight, a reminder of just how imperishable that melody is (it still sounds so new) but … look, a protagonist as smart as King/Goffin/Owens’ is going to see straight through the empty sentiment and flattery these guys are peddling.

Things have shifted by the time King’s own version comes round – as the Financial Times podcast “Life of the Song” notes, it feels wearier, like the question has been posed a few times now, and few disappointing responses have been logged.  The immaculate Joni Mitchell/James Taylor harmonies are a nice reminder of why everyone’s mum owns a CD of Tapestry.

By the time Smokey Robinson gets his hands on it – in full Afro/tache/quiet storm early 70s mode – the lyrics have become more or less embroidery. What Smokey wants to say with the song, he’ll say with strings and quivering falsetto, thank you very much. I’m a real soft touch for this era, those nimble basslines tiptoeing along under lush strings and angelic horns, but if you’re not, I merely encourage to listen through once and pay special attention at  2 minutes 6 seconds and again at 3 minutes 51.

Devil in a New Dress is the only track on Kanye West’s decadent masterpiece My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy that he didn’t produce – and, gifted talent spotter he is, he ceded control on the right track. Bink!’s flipping of Smokey’s version — plucking out two moments that are improvised around the original melody and looping them into a circle — glistens with the possibility of a city skyline, as the longing in Smokey’s voice is engulfed in synths and guitar. Like the rest of the album, the lyrics play on the conflict between religion and more earthly desires (“we love Jesus, but you done learned a lot from Satan”). Conscious or not, his worry that his companion for the night only wants his money echoes the original song: whatever happens, I just don’t want to be used.

She may well have been the greatest song interpreter of her generation, but perhaps Amy Winehouse wasn’t quite there yet with her version for the Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason soundtrack in 2004, which felt oddly saccharine and perfunctory. After her death it fell to Mark Ronson, as he had done on Back to Black to find the right settings for her performance, which he did with great thumping melodramatic horns for the posthumous Lioness: Hidden Treasures, another indication, as if any were needed, of what a shocking waste it all was.

Finally, we have Jazz saxophonist Kamasi Washington who, like the song, has collaborated with artists across genres. In his billowing, diffuse version, snatches of the melody arrive in his sax like one of those dreams where you think you’ve written one of the greatest songs of all time, only to wake and find someone’s listening to it in another room. The 2018 EP on which this is featured is called The Choice.

Such are the possibilities of King’s melody – no version (except, perhaps, the original) tops any other. It all rests on the way the performer, on the word “completely”, has to draw the melody to the back of the throat, like the deep breath before a decision you can never take back.

Bookmarks, August 29

Bookmarks is an fortnightly series of recommendations, recent addictions and subjects for further study.

I happened upon Les Retro Stars French version of the Kinks classic A well respected man while searching for Petula Clark‘s Un Jeune Homme Bien. Their version appears to come from a cheap late nineties nostalgia compilation, and it’s perfect.

Michael Kiwanuka‘s approach is very much “more is more” — recall the roiling 8 minute grooves of Love and Hate, still my record of 2016. Here he piles Congas, easy-listening “la la la” backing vocals, growling fuzz guitars and clapping Ronson drums; his mournful but energetic voice perched above it all.

Common‘s theme has been love ( love as solidarity and as compassion as much as romance) for as long as he’s been worth listening to. And in Show Me that You Love , it’s love as fatherhood. Special mention to Jill Scott for organising the rambling, sprawling beat into four discreet, lovely melodies from chord to chord.

Boy they sure did love their groovy spaceman messiahs back in the early 70s, huh? Space Captain is saved from curio status by it’s gorgeous arrangement, horns and backing vocals (S/O to 20 Feet from Stardom) and, as ever, Joe Cocker‘s mad conviction (“this lovely planet caught my eye”).

I thought my first ever blog post was going to turn out to be a defence of Chance the Rapper‘s The Big Day — sadly I concluded the haters were right, it was spotty, too long and chock full of unearned sentimentality. Do You Remember is one of the tracks that initially convinced me (chuck this, Handsome with Megan Thee Stallion and Five year plan with Randy Newman on your Chance “best of” playlist, and you’ve probably got the album covered) — perhaps because it’s early enough that it’s sweetness, prettiness and warmth hadn’t curdled into treacle yet.

Oh yes, I’m bursting into the party 25 years late to announce that D’Angelo is fucking incredible — he gets two songs, bookends from one end of his career to the other, by way of apology.

My Little Brother review may have given the impression I didn’t love modern hip hop. I should clarify; the genre is in rude health, and it has more to do with Sampa the Great, (whose sweet sweet Freedom is here) Ill Camille, Megan Thee Stallion, Noname and Rapsody than any group of blokes I could name. Women have, obviously been great at rap since there’s been rap to be great at — from Roxanne Shante to Bahamadia to Jean Grey to Nicki to shit, should I just put a playlist together…? Apologies for the Rapsody repeat from a few weeks ago; it’s just a) Ibtihaj the most joy a single song is giving me at the moment and b) the easiest song to sever from the surroundings of her magnificent new album Eve.

I thought Liam Gallagher had given me everything I needed from him by roughly 2000 — but it’s not just that video of him chatting to school kids that proved me wrong; One of Us, his new single, finds new uses for that raspy whine of his.

I should announce I know Ah Trees a little, and would recommend their driving, moody groove regardless.

The Vanguards are a lost soul group who’ve finally gotten an anothology out (It Glowed Like the Sun) while I dive into that, catch up on their dusty melodrama masterpiece Somebody Please.

Future Echoes: The Last Time

In Future Echoes we look at the evolution and influence of those songs that split off in all directions.

The Verve‘s Bitter Sweet Symphony has as strong a claim as anything by Blur, Oasis or Pulp to being Britpop’s defining statement. From the booming thump of the drums through exultant strings, to its “man on the street” wisdom, somewhere between drudgery and possibility. Since 2008 it has taken it’s rightful place as the them music for ITV’s coverage of England international football. To the extent that Britpop had any particular goals, practical or artistic, Bitter Sweet Symphony achieved them all.

Allen Klein was a central casting villain of 1960s rock and roll. A ruthless businessman, a terrifying negotiator and (now, brace yourself) eventually imprisoned tax cheat, he had spent the early part of the decade managing Sam Cooke, and a handful of British Invasion B-listers. Eventually he landed the two greatest prizes in music at the time: The Beatles — lost after the death of Brian Epstein — and, most important for our purposes, The Rolling Stones. In both cases he would leave in cloud of acrimony and litigation that would last for years.

The Verve sampled heavily from The Andrew Oldham Orchestra‘s fabulous version of The Stones‘ The Last Time, surely the greatest example* of that distinctly 1960s trend of taking the pop hits of the day and re-doing them with orchestras.

The original The Last Time was, of course, The Rolling Stones‘ rollicking blues rock classic, during the transition from R&B cover band into that hazy, androgynous, feline blues, R&B with its hips rolling and a little pout on its lips.

The Verve had gotten permission from Decca, The Andrew Oldham Orchestra‘s record label, to use part of the recording, but not Klein, who still owned the rights to the Stones pre-1970 material. And despite the great liberties the Orchestra had taken with the source material, it was still credited as a solely Jagger-Richards composition. Once the song was out and selling like crazy, Klein pounced, successfully suing The Verve for all the song’s royalties. The Stones themselves always kept their distance from the action — while doing nothing much to oppose or reverse it — until last month, when they signed the rights back over to the Verve’s Richard Ashcroft.

There is of course a lingering irony here. Beyond the basic chordal architecture of the song, you may note The Stones’ single doesn’t sound a huge amount like the orchestra version. A song it does sound a great deal like is This May be the Last Time, by the imperishable The Staple Singers, an eerie blues gospel howler. It was recorded a few years earlier, but, as a Keith Richards put it, the melody “goes back into the mists of time.”

I should be clear — I don’t intend this as any kind of gotcha. They’re all amazing songs, and their similarity to one another, conscious or otherwise, makes them more beautiful, not less. Musical allusions, sometimes bordering on theft, are as old as music, and are the only way forms and genres develop. From Bach and Beethoven, to Childish Gambino, sea to shining sea. We can’t stop it and a damn good thing too.

Still, there’s a sour taste to this story that’s hard to wash away. Rock and Roll, for all its genuine emancipatory potential, innovation and vitality was built on the (largely uncredited) ideas of black men, often themselves built on the ideas of black women**. Britpop was a genre built by young working class people in the depressed dog-ends of Thatcherite Britain, leaping on a promise that a handful of those bands had left for them a few decades earlier. It ended its brief period as a dominant genre with one of those bands stealing that promise back.

*If anyone has any “60s rock songs reimagined by Orchestra” recommendations, please let me know, I’m quietly obsessed with them.

** Happily, credit in both cases is slowly arrving where it has long been due.

Little Brother: May the Lord Watch

Hip Hop is now old enough as a genre to have several generations of “back in my day” conservatives among its fans — people who believe that, by astounding coincidence, the genre produced its great work during the period which they first started listening, and all mutations since represent an unnecessary distortion of something that was working. The real tragedy is I’m now old enough to be one of them. In my case, it’s the hyper-soulful sound ushered in by Kanye West and Just Blaze on Jay Z’s The Blueprint in 2001 and lasting as the dominant sound until Drake’s early work around 2012. That is where I learnt to love what Hip Hop (and Hip Hop alone) could do.

Which is why I’m so delighted Little Brother have a new album out. Between 2002 and 2010, the group — so named because of their debt to Golden Era legends like A Tribe called Quest and De La Soul — produced a handful of minor masterpieces without ever getting as big as the critical acclaim they received suggested. Their music was from the same pitched up soul palette as Kanye’s early solo work, and their lyrics from the same “not a gangster, not a nerd” everyday concerns. But their emotional palette and ambition was far more stable and grounded than his. So they never produced anything as grand or transcendent as My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, nor anything as witheringly obnoxious or wasteful as Bound 2.

After the early hype didn’t translate into sales, the trio became a duo when 9th Wonder left to produce tracks for more or less every significant rapper in the last 15 years. In 2010, after four albums, remaining members Phonte and Rapper Big Pooh announced an indefinite hiatus. This lasted until a week ago, with May the Lord Watch. I cannot stress enough how much I mean this as a compliment: it’s exactly what you’d expect it to be.

They arrived sounding like veterans, exploring race, relationships, fatherhood, live as it’s lived, so it’s no slight to say their themes haven’t changed much. They never sounded particularly young, so you’d expect the wry, laid back observations of how boring they find clubs now, and annoyance at how much fun young rappers look like they’re having.

They always had formidable melodic chops, so the preponderance of glinting Philly-Soul beats — as well as Phonte’s lovely, proto Drake singing voice — is no surprise. But the beats have never been more delightful, playful and robust than Sittin Alone or Everything. They lock into a coherent mid tempo groove from track one, and sustain it over the appropriately brief 40 minutes.

They were always funny, but I don’t remember previous skits — featuring, as ever, the LB cast of characters like white rapper Joe Scudda and decaying producer Roy Lee — ever making me laugh like Life after Blackface or Inside the Producers Studio. And they were always clever, but the wordplay here is dazzling at times: my personal favorite being Phonte telling a rival he “streamed ya little album, shit was inconsistent, ehhhhhh, spotty fire”.

It’s an album clearly designed to be loved by those that already loved Little Brother, and on that front it succeeds. It’s not just what you’d expect, it’s what you’d hope for. The “more of the same, only better” approach yields only one surprise; just how lively, and vital — just how necessary — those original elements still sound all these years later.

But of course, I would say that.

4.5/5

TGIF, AM I RIGHT

I’m sure you got it — Theme in Each song in yesterday’s playlist was a big iconic sample, usually used in a song that became far more famous than the original. For fun and completeness reasons: here’s the corresponding songs, arranged in the same order.

Little shout outs due in particular to Montell Jordan, the first soul song I’m aware to steal a tune back from Hip Hop, taking the horn line from Slick Rick‘s Children’s Story for This Is How We Do It, and Amy Winehouse whose melodic reinterpretation of Ain’t No Mountain High Enough for Tears Dry On Their Own is so imaginative and subtle that a lot of people plain didn’t notice it.

Thursday. What a concept.

Thursday is themed playlist day at Dancing to Architecture. Today’s is a fun one, and a two parter. You will no doubt pick the theme after two or three songs — if that — but I won’t spoil the fun by telling you before you’ve listened.

Regardless of whether this combination of songs makes sense on its own, this should hopefully still be a fun playlist to dip in and out of — and tomorrow another playlist will explain everything.

Post Colonial Studies, part 1: Angola

Angola

In the second half of the 20th century, as African nations attempted to rediscover themselves after colonisation, the view on art and culture espoused by Ghana’s first president Kwame Nkrumah became particularly influential — the idea that, beyond gaining the ability to self-govern, Africans had to “decolonise the mind”. Colonisation, after all, is not just a theft of land, or a subjugation of people, it more often than not is an erase the memory that things were ever any different, to make people forget they were ever anything but subjects. Necessarily, this involves severing people from their linguistic, artistic and musical histories. The Portoguese, for one, knew this. In colonies like Angola, traditional styles of music and rhythms were banned. 

This resulted in the style we hear from the first Angolan group for find international recognition, Duo Ouro Negro, or Black Gold, who had a series of hits in Europe across the early to mid 1960s. Fare like Maria Rita is cinematic and distinct but doesn’t reflect the traditional sound as much as what came later. 

It was in the atmosphere of the decaying reign of Portoguese dictator Antonio Salazer that José Adelino Barceló de Carvalho  — born in the province of Bengo in 1942 — came of age. He grew into a gifted athlete, representing “Portugal” in track and field. He was also a closet revolutionary — using the protection of his status as professional athlete, Josè Adelino joined Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) and began clandestine performances as a protest singer, taking the name Bonga Kuenda, meaning ‘he who is looking, who is always ahead and moving’. Under Salazar, such crimes were punished with death or torture. Resistance had to be as much cultural as it was political or military. Bonga would later say ”since we had no weapons to fight with, we resisted on a cultural level…” 

He used his freedom of movement to smuggle information to exiled revolutionaries in Europe. When the Salazar regime finally realised what was happening, he fled into exile in Rotterdam.  There, in 1972, he recorded a haunting, harrowing album entitled “Angola 72”, with Cape Verdean musicians. The standout song is Mona Ki Ngi Xica, (The child I’m leaving behind) a heart- stopping lamento in its own right, sung in Kimbundu. That’s before you get to Bonga’s voice. Just listen to that voice. That howl, at once lively and present, and older than time. Wracked with pain, and yet radiating with power. Angola 72 was regularly smuggled into Angola and Portugal, and became a soundtrack for revolutionaries fighting for independence. 

Bonga is probably the most celebrated of the revolutionary era of Angolan popular music, but there was a thriving rock scene, as Angolan music spat and sizzled like a frying pan during the rocky years leading up to the carnation revolution in 1974; there is the flame-brilliance of Sofia Rosa, whose exquisite Maria Dia Pambala is included here. He would have a string of hits in the early 70s before being murdered 1975 during the post revolutionary civil war, most likely by the Anti-communist Unita forces, on account of his sympathies for the rival, communist MPLA. 

Tino diá Kimuezo, another singer associated with the MPLA was luckier, and as best as I can figure out is still alive and performing today; he wrote beautiful, bittersweet merengues, a couple of which were captured on the wonderful Soul of Angola compilation; another, not on Spotify, can be found here.

Elsewhere the music was less laid back, with rock bands like the legendary Oz Kiezos, Os Bongos and others clattering together traditional rhythms with Psychedelic influences to make glorious, tense thrills; a fistful of which are showcased here, largely collected from a couple of (as always) brilliant compilations from the peerless Analog Africa label. If this blog achieves nothing but successfully proselytise a couple of people into listening to Analog Africa, I’ll be happy.

To jump to the modern day, I couldn’t leave Angola without mentioning Titica. She is one of the world’s best Kuduro artists. Kuduro is a kind of Angolan dance-hip hop hybrid, taking influence from techno, souks and samba. She is also, as it happens, transgender, which hasn’t stopped her from being massive for nearly a decade in a country that still technically criminalises homosexual activity.  “I really like her. Some say that she’s a girl, some say that she’s a boy, I don’t really know, we just like her music” said one young lad in a BBC profile from a few years ago. It may be a coincidence, but the cause of LGBTQI rights in Angola has seen some big strides in the years since Titica became big. In 2015 it became illegal to discriminate against someone in the workplace because of their sexuality, a LGBTQI activist group was legally recognised for the first time this year, and currently being debated by the Angolan parliament are laws to descrimanlise “homosexual behaviour”. Never let anyone tell you art can’t change the world. Included here are  a couple of bangers, my favourite of which is Capim Guine, put together in collaboration with the great Brazillian Roots/Electronica Group BaianaSystem.

Finally, we return to Bonga, and his most recent LP, 2015 Recados de Fora. Still as vital and lively and beautiful at 72 as he was at 29, and certainly a little happier. He has released over 30 albums, singing in Portuguese and traditional Angolan languages, a mixture of semba, kizomba and latin beats. Like a lot of the music we’ll look at in Post Colonial Studies, the beauty is bittersweet, a syncretic cocktail only possible because of a very specific, often horrifying, set of historical circumstances.

With particular thanks to Angola45 and Nothin’ Sez Somethin whose great research filled in some tricky gaps. 

Bookmarks, August 15

Bookmarks is an ongoing* series of recommendations, recent addictions and subjects for further study. No theme as such, except that it will be largely new music (or at least new to me) — but I’ll invariably cheat occasionally and throw in an older favorite that’s come back into my mind for one reason or another.

Bookmarks, August 15

Maybe it’s the weather — or something like that — but the aesthetic that has me most at the moment is breezy, female-led neo-soul; see the soft glow of KIRBY’s Kool Aid, AWA Fuckin Love Songs (feat. Ebenezer) and Hamzaa’s Sunday Morning. Wise and sweet and true, all.

To observe of an artist that they sound as though the majored in music (which David Longstreth of Dirty Projectors did) sounds like a backhanded compliment at best, conjuring bloated showiness at one extreme and sterile inaccessible experiments at the other — What is the time is nothing of the sort, the group using striking rhythms, and weird instruments in aid of making something beautiful, soulful and above all, catchy. See also.

Miriam Makeba will get a post all to herself one of these days, but if you’re not acquainted with her, enjoy this 60s Jo’burg dance craze cash in as a joyous intro, with the extra joy of being sung in the Xhosa language spoken by the majority of Eastern Cape inhabitants, Xs, Cs and Qs pronounced as a percussive clicks, the tongue tapping at the back of the palate and the teeth.

I liked BROCKHAMPTON’s playful, colourful Hip Hop just fine till now, though not as much as I wanted to. I’m not sure what it is about IF YOU PRAY RIGHT but the hue has skewed cooler, and proceedings are tighter, more arresting, and I love it.

Alex the Astronaut’s I Like To Dance, a history of an initially thrilling relationship’s descent into abuse is shattering in its simple detail its deeply felt love and most of all, that a 24-year-old sings so convincingly on on this subject in the first place

I know nothing of the show Euphoria, from which the song emerges, But All For Us by Labrinth and Zendaya, is shimmering, thrilling, pure pop as good as I’ve heard all year.

To say Hot Girl Summer isn’t quite as funny and bawdy as Megan Thee Stallion‘s fabulous debut Fever, nor is it quite as thrilling as hearing Nicki Minaj put Jay Z or Eminem in their place is just to observe that almost nothing would be: it’s a fucking delight.

Unashamedly, I want this blog to become a favourite for crate diggers — the rare break beat stomp of The Soul Riders Soul Food is for them. More to come soon.

Elsewhere, some old blues gospel with Blind Connie Williams Take my hand Precious Lord, Kendrick Lamar teams up with bummed out stoner SiR to prove there’s no conditions he can’t adapt to and improve and enjoy the tension of the world’s greatest ever funk band The Meters resisting the urge to tear one of the most beautiful songs of all time (Wichita Lineman) to shreds.

Finally, shout to my dear friend Limpin’ Dave, who introduced me to the rock solid riffs and humanism of The Hold Steady and is now filling me with jealousy by traveling to see them on their home turf. They’re likely to play Denver Haircut, as believable and lived in as ever.

*the regularity really depends on demand — but I’m thinking twice a month at this stage.

“Alive on arrival”: The music of the Wu Tang Clan

One of the biggest compliments I can pay Of Mics and Men is that it managed to make me view the music of the Wu Tang Clan differently. One of it’s biggest weaknesses is that this relies on you already having an in depth knowledge of the group’s work. The following is the sound track as I would have done it, and an attempt at a manageable intro the sprawling work of the group. I’ve avoided the solo work for thematic and length reasons, but we’ll get there in time, I suspect.

Havoc, of Mobb Deep, one of the many influential groups who, Velvet Underground style, only exist as they do because of the Wu Tang Clan, notes that they were the first Hip Hop group to truly express their pain, not cover it up with hard man posturing. If you listen to Tearz from their groundbreaking debut, or I can’t go to sleep from 2000’s The W, violence is expressed not with smirking detachment, but howling, breathless desperation.

Along similar lines, I had thought the vivid, “breath in the air” chill of The Heart Gently Weeps was just that: flinty story telling. The series reveals at least one detail; the murderous ‘Officer Brown’ who killed a friend of the band (Ernest “Kase” Sayon ) and went unpunished is literally true. The song also showcases the beauty of those voices, in this case the “seen it all’ cool of Raekwon, Ghostface Killah the wide eyed hair trigger, the raspy charisma of Method Man.

Meth was the first to get a breakout single –the swaggering funk of Method Man, a showcase for the group’s Casanova.

Indeed, lest I’m making it seem that the Wu are a worthy, joyless slog, I have to mention the fun, the pure joyous thrill of the group: The thunderclap stomp of Campfire, the feline slink of Gravel Pit, the silvery black and white crime cinema of Back in the Game.

This sense of fun, of mischief, emanates from Ol’ Dirty Bastard, in some ways the group’s soul — see his verse on Da Mystery of Chessboxin’: somehow unhinged and completely controlled, flitting from spit-flecked growl to theatrical crooning and, in a moment of true genius, rhyming “cherry bomb” with the sound of clearing his throat. Some of the saddest scenes of the film are watching ODB slowly drift away; after his stint in prison, he’s somehow soggy, his wild but clear eyes gone clouded and sleepy, the jokes replaced with mirthless , distracted smile.

All this madness and life — and more — was contained within the bricolage put together by RZA, the Wu’s cerebral, solitary leader. The sonic palatte he created was at once random and precise, abstract and totally organic; in a word, unrepeatable. Sunlight is a perfect encapsulation of his wonky sensibility. A one man hymn of sorts, it has the woozy philosophising, striking abstraction, and the jokes.

Finally, ibtihaj by Rapsody*, one of the best of the current crop of rappers working in the territory originally conquered by the Wu. Released a week ago as I write, she teams up with the baroque harmonies of D’angelo and the GZA in a re-wokring of the latter’s solo masterpiece Liquid Swords. GZA is considered the great pure lyricist of the Wu, and Liquid Swords is as influential an album put out by any Wu member. ibtihaj is a warm and beautiful indicator of just what beauty that influence gave and continues to gives us

*With thanks to my colleague Kishor for calling my attention to it.

Wu Tang Clan: Of Mics and Men

Of Mics and Men, Sacha Jenkins’ four part documentary on the Wu Tang Clan — screened over two night at the Melbourne international Film Festival — is by turns as thrilling, moving and disjointed as the group it chronicles. The focus is primarily on the ‘Clan’ element of the Wu. The series is never more alive, more interested in its subject than when viewing them as an ancillary family, nine distinct personalities, who cannot function separately for long, and never stray far from one another’s orbit. As such, it’s at it’s strongest focusing on the periods before and after the group’s vertiginous super-stardom in the second half of the 1990s, the periods of youthful hunger and near-content middle age.

We are introduced to Staten Island, where the men who would become the RZA, the GZA, Raekwon, Ghostface Killah, Ol’ Dirty Bastard, Inspectah Deck, Masta Killa, Method Man, U-God, and Cappadona grew up and met. The apartment buildings arranged “like a prison”, wedged in around children playing on smudges of concrete edged by unruly grass. The New York skyline, filtered blue and cloudy, far away across the water.

We hear of the sudden violence, erupting between warring minorities, Italians vs Jamaicans vs Africans, all vs the police, and all vs our young protagonists. We hear of absent fathers, struggling families.

We see thrilling, sweat-drenched concerts, these nine men jostling on tiny stages, a crowded mirror for the audiences who sidle up to the performance like punters at a bar. The hustles their management would pull here and there to get their record played. The explosion into worldwide fame, the egos and demands inflating with bank balances. The inevitable fracturing of relationships.

Throughout, the surviving members, scattered through the first few rows of a Staten island cinema, watch proceedings and add their commentary. They joke and reminisce and bicker, and it’s really quite lovely.

And just like any family reunion, there are topics they don’t broach; in this case, it is the bizarre art project/scam Once Upon a Time in Shaolin. Pieced together over several years by a RZA acolyte Cilvaringz, it features stray verses from Wu members who didn’t know exactly what they were contributing to. What it turned out to be provided a bizarre late chapter in the band’s career; a single copy of the album was produced and auctioned off for a reported $2 million in 2014.

In a further surreal twist, the buyer turned out to be sneering pharma-crook Martin Shkreli, who promptly gained notoriety for upping the price of AIDS treatment Daraprim from $13.50 to $750 per pill. Worry not: Shkreli is now in jail and the album is, according to Ghostface, “total trash”. All we need observe of Cilvarings (real name Tarik Azzougarh, a Dutch Moroccan who became friends with RZA during the groups late 90s peak) is that in 1998 he talks like a parody of a white rapper with a Brooklyn twang, and in 2014 he talks like an art gallery curator with a Englishy lilt.

If there’s a drawback to Jenkins’ approach, it’s that the focus rarely stays on the music long enough to give any sense of its grimy, beautiful strangeness . To a certain kind of fan, spending four hours with the Wu and hearing little discussion of — let alone insight into — say, that haunted, low-cloud feeling of Enter the 36 Chambers or Liquid Swords feels like an oversight. And the focus on familial interpersonals avoids any deconstruction of the creative tensions between those nine distinct, beautiful voices, and the magic that came from it*. The brief focus on the process of making C.R.E.A.M, possibly their defining song, feels like a tease. On reflection, this is a good choice. The sprawling universe of Wu music — not just the group, but each member’s solo work — invites slavish devotion; better they don’t focus on it much at all than focus on the “wrong” songs.

The unruly approach to chronology, too, can be alienating until the last episode. Towards the end, we see a handful of Wu members crowd at the bottom of a stairwell, U-God beatboxes into the corner as makeshift amplification, Cappadona freestyles, everyone’s high and giggly, and time starts to fold in on itself. We see a flurry of images and moments from the group’s history; the rich, bickering prima donnas, the young hungry men, heaving concerts, absent fathers and dead friends. Life is but a breath, particularly through the distorting lens of unimaginable notoriety. At this point the approach falls into place. The series recognises that it can only hint at the sprawl of all these lives.

As the band leaves the cinema and the credits roll, we get a sense that this is why the music is as thrilling, as stuffed with life as it is. 

*Next up, a little companion piece on the themes of the film, through the music of the Wu Tang Clan.