It was fitting that the crime fiction masterwork Only Built 4 Cuban Linx had to wait its turn. Method Man and the Ol Dirty Bastard made sense as the first two artists to merit solo albums following the Big Bang of the Wu-Tang Clan’s Enter the 36 Chambers and the execution of the group’s Abbot and point guard. The RZA’s master plan: to sign each Clan member to different solo deals at different labels and make each record a variant, a multiversal portal, a concept record within the grand conceptual framework that composed the Wu-Tang universe. Imagine being a teenage core demo rap consumer in the early ‘90s and hearing Enter the 36 for the first time. There are only masked ninjas and no faces on the album cover. Rap music videos are played sporadically on television at odd hours. You are immediately thrown into this world with no flotation device, crammed with Kung Fu flick snippets and muddy beats, and strange slang spit by nine guys with funny names (several each) who hail from a borough you’ve only driven through.
So, differentiating one Wu rapper from the next posed a challenge. But Dirt and Meth didn’t have that issue. Meth was tall and good-looking, the obvious matinee idol McCartney of the crew, and Dirt was their drunk, dread head, rizz-drenched uncle/mascot. They were huge personalities that jumped out of the speakers and popped with limited facetime in those first music videos and radio interviews. I wouldn’t blame any groundfloor fans who missed the potential of Raekwon the Chef. He looked like an actual teddy bear, and had a few memorable moments on the debut Clan album, sparking “C.R.E.A.M.”, “7th Chamber Part II”, and the original “Can It Be All So Simple”, but is a more earthbound and restrained MC in a pool of ghettomystic superstars with distinct and easier to metabolize schticks.
This perhaps explains why Rae made the unprecedented move of attaching a “co-host” to Only Built 4 Cuban Linx, electing The Ghostface Killah. Corey Woods and Dennis Coles were the same age, separated by only a few months, as well as the 0.7 miles between Rae’s Park Hill Projects and Ghost’s Stapleton Houses. They were a natural pair because while the rest of the Clan focused on Taoism and Black Israelite theories and Nation of Islam numerology and varieties of Tai Chi, Rae and Ghost rapped about their shared experiences as low level, casual, active participants in the ‘80s crack epidemic in New York City, on both the supply and demand sides. But perhaps because of their closeness to their co-workers and the esoteric references the Clan stuffed their albums with, Rae and Ghost’s vision of local crime and the underworld around it was rendered alien and mythic. It makes OB4CL an album full of paradoxes and oxymorons, operating on the street level, the penthouse, and in the quantum realm simultaneously.
Raekwon (aka Corey Woods) and the Rap Group The Wu-Tang Clan perform “C.R.E.A.M.” with SWV at The Source Awards in April 25,1994 in New York City, New York.
Photo by Al Pereira/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images.
“Be original,” Ghostface commands at the conclusion of one of the album’s several indelible skits, this one acidicly titled “Biters (Shark N*****)”. Ghost is rash, immature, ranting — fueled by Ballantine XXX Ale, and possibly dust — at The Notorious B.I.G., ostensibly because the perceived rival featured a baby on 1994’s Ready to Die’s album cover, which Ghost felt stepped on his “Verbal Intercouse” collaborator Nas’ historic debut Illmatic just a few months earlier, when he superimposed his own baby picture over Queensbridge. In retrospect, one senses the real animosity stems from Ghost’s assertion that Biggie had spit Ghost’s own lines, had infringed on his style, or delivered a cinematic, era-defining crack masterpiece — before he got the chance to. As is the case for so many competitive maniacs, this imagined chip on the shoulder may have been what Ghost needed to push him to his creative peak, but his frustration and anger was misplaced because as Ghost was in the process of proving on this very album, there was plenty of genius and innovation in the air in 1995 New York to go around.
On his debut, Christopher Wallace’s drug narrative arc was closer to Hollywood’s recognizable cinematic structure. It’s a blockbuster, mainstream, literal birth-to-death linear biopic of a Reagan-manufactured American monster delivered with a moral undertone of dismay and sorrow, OB4CL is something entirely different. When RZA and Rae have discussed the album they similarly claim they see it as a film, complete with story beats, about a pair of hustlers coming together for one last job to escape the life. And while the album is certainly conceptually thematic, there’s little to nothing on the album linking any one song to any other (U-God’s guest verse on “Knuckleheadz” is him briefly joining the crew, then he dies? And is then replaced by Cappadonna “Ice Water”? Sure). In fact, following a coherent train of thought from one bar to the next is often difficult, which takes nothing from the always fascinating and sticky intricate stacking of words style Rae and Ghost invent in real time, or the sustained mood and tone the album delivers, which makes this a feature, not a bug.
If Only Built 4 Cuban Linx is a movie, it’s several different films from Michael Mann or Brian DePalma randomly spliced together, mixing genre with fine art composition, relating Donald Goines and Mario Puzo plots that look like Peter Greenaway lensed them. So it’s devoid of concepts like remorse, responsibility, and community, and populated near exclusively with detail-rich yet abstract images, along with threats and boasts related via pidgin — indecipherable in 1995 unless you were an actual member of the Wu-Tang Clan or possibly related to one of them — but still sounded fly as fuck. They’re tenuously held together poems full of shit you buy with drug money, women attracted to gangsters, non-English speaking Caribbean Latino plugs, and literal sniffing on the track, of course occasionally mixed in with moving real-life trauma like a sudden, poetic memory of the time Ghost was shot in the neck in Steubenville Ohio.
OB4CL is entirely single minded and relentless in this focus and style as no album had really been before — to the extent that the cassette tape was colored a translucent purple like the glassine bags of drugs Rae saw all over Park Hill — and as a result, the album became infamous for glorifying hustling, but that isn’t quite right. Wu-Tang is the first fully postmodern group to emerge in an entirely postmodern art form, and OB4CL might be its most deep-fried, culture-brained pastiche. It’s as if the Clan flew through a cosmic radiation field in another galaxy while Ghost and Rae were clutching a Scarface VHS, Nordstroms and Sharper Image catalogs, an Iceberg Slim novel, a plate of lobster fra diavolo, and a pound of coke, and the product was these DNA fused mutant rappers, blinkered and obsessed and incapable of speaking in any language but second hand, that stumbled out of the spacecraft back in Shaolin.
They also had the good fortune to be the recipients of the best single clutch of beats the RZA ever produced, which can partially be attributed to Raekwon’s ear, work ethic, and skill. There’s a legend that any RZA production multiple Clan members wanted had to be battled for, and this bears out at least in the case of “Incarcerated Scarfaces”. RZA wanted to keep his projects to 13 tracks, which Rae already had in the can, but he was around when RZA was making that beat for GZA (Rae was always around, because Rae matched RZA’s nature as an obsessed studio rat). Rae heard it, wanted it, immediately started writing to it, then forcibly took it for himself, which is why Rae was not just a benefactor of RZA’s best work, in the right place at the right time in history, but earned each beat then made them his own. Has any rapper ever sounded as good, as consistently over RZA’s production? Rae effortlessly spit multisyllabic internal rhymes with off-kilter pacing. The master stylist floats all over OB4CL expertly without ever straying off pocket.
“Incarcerated Scarfaces” is one of several beats that explain what makes the production on OB4CL distinct from basically every other Wu project of that era. The album has a sonic personality/spine embedded in its refrain, the theme from John Woo’s (original) 1989 crime opus, The Killer, which is defined by composer Lowell Lo’s use of the vibraphone (RZA met John Woo soon after the album’s release and found a fan. Woo was honored The Killer was sampled and allegedly never asked for a dime in royalties). On beats like “Scarfaces,” RZA and Rae lean on sounds that fall outside the purview of the cracking bamboo and monk shouts and analogue instruments that made up many of the Clan’s early beats. Like the space laser effects dropped in at random, and the whirring 8-bit broken Gameboy humming on “Glaciers of Ice,” the ascending pinball synth loop of “Incarcerated Scarface” — over God’s perfect open hi-hat fill courtesy of The Detroit Emeralds — is the sort of electronic sound that glistens like neon reflected off the 1980s rain soaked blacktop in Thief.
“That’s the thing about these albums that we made earlier. We used to keep a lot of the fuckups. That’s what made it raw. Everything ain’t always gotta be too perfect.” Ghostface said of the production on the album. The resulting work is gritty and handmade on beats that sound like a piano falling down a project stairwell (“Knuckleheadz,” “Spot Rusherz,” “Wu-Gambinos”). You can hear distinct punch-ins on “Wisdom Body” and the stitch where the loop cuts on “Criminology.” You imagine Blue Raspberry’s off-key warble on “Rainy Dayz” was produced, written and recorded in a clapboard booth soundproofed with egg cartons, and it basically was. The mix is messed up on “North Star (Jewels),” though who can say if the vocals aren’t turned down, forcing you to strain to hear by design.
The entirety of the album was made near Clove Lake in Staten Island, where RZA had a studio in his basement and no engineer, working around the clock and fueled only by turkey burgers, blunts and ambition. Before this album would launch the Wu to the stratosphere of fame and riches that would realize the aspirational things Raekwon and Ghostface Killah referenced in their rhymes, the Clan was the biggest movement in rap, but rap was still regional, still niche, and the checks were still coming in slow, so this was one of the last times in their history the process would be so direct and intimate. “Ice Cream” was as close to a conventional single OB4CL has to offer. It’s a grim and bleak-sounding song about sampling a rainbow consortium of women you could dance or smash to as theoretically intended, but there is little in the music calling out for the listener to do either, characterizing the auteurist lack of compromise that makes playing the album start to finish so rewarding.
As specific and bizarrely rendered as it sounds, ultimately, in spite of its luxe trappings, Only Built 4 Cuban Linx mirrors a universal, particularly lush and chintzy experience selling drugs in the ‘80s and ‘90s that many shared in New York. It’s the paradox of being suddenly cash rich but asset poor. The album lives in the mind of the young dealer bagging up in Park Hill with one eye on the scale and one eye on Scarface, playing on an endless loop in a decrepit, unfurnished studio apartment. He’s street level in Staten Island now — living a high drama existence, risking his freedom and his life on a daily basis without social safety net — but perhaps someday soon, with ruthlessness, discipline and commitment, he’ll work his way up the global narco-food chain to the tier of wealth, of women, and of power he’s only read about or seen in a theater.
It’s the perspective of a new money hustler who hungers for more, but lacks the life experience or access that would explain in the grand scheme of things, a 27-inch Zenith isn’t a particularly large or nice television, and the journey from Baltimore to Fort Greene isn’t all that far.
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