What's Goin' On

AS a sort of a one-stop shop, The Wu-Tang Clan have everything you could possibly need or want from a contemporary music collective. When the 11-strong group (I refuse to use the word posse and no white person should ever try to) aren't producing the sort of music that has The Prodigy, The Chemical Brothers and Tricky sending them salivating faxes, they're off bringing out their own solo efforts - GZA's solo album Liquid Swords was one of our albums of the year in 1995 - or else they're running their highly successful clothing company, Wu-Wear (the only clothes to be seen down Temple Bar way, apparently) or else they're busy expounding their own idio-syncratic socio-political world-view which includes big blocks of Louis Farrakhan's Nation of Islam ideology coupled with the curious kind of Eastern philosophy that goes hand in hand with martial arts, along with the mystical (and more than a bit mad) belief system known as "numerology".

Come and meet them, they're certainly a lot more fun than The Chemical Brothers: there's RZA, Ol' Dirty Bastard, Method Man, Ghostface Killah, GZA, Inspectah Deck, Masta Killah, Raekwon, Truemaster, U-God and Cappadonna. As a sort of anti-Jackson family, they represent - through all their different concerns and side-lines - the current state of American urban thought and action, and when they produce the sort of music album that goes platinum in most countries in the world and still retain their distinctive "underground" modas operandi, we're looking at one of this decade's most important musical groupings. And I'm prepared to substantiate that by saying that they take the better parts of Marvin Gaye, Grandmaster Flash, Public Enemy and De La Soul to come up with the sort of genius-enriched sound that makes The Prodigy sound like a hangbag house outfit.

The first release from the Staten Island, New York collective was Enter The Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) which was released in 1993. It succeeded in not only pushing the West Coast gangstas (Snoop Doggy Dogg et al) off the urban musical map but also in somehow pushing the rap genre into areas it had never visited before. Talking it like they walk it, the most important band member (arguably) is RZA, who grew up in the notorious projects of Staten Island. Having foresworn a life of dealing in drugs and becoming addicted to his wares (the very silly PCP drug in his case), he and his colleagues-to-be took their cartoon book names from various kung-fu B-movies (Return Of The Bastard Swordsman being a particular favourite for moniker-hunting - but you probably know that yourself).

RZA, who has produced both Enter The Wu-Tang and the new one, Wu-Tang Forever is now producing Bjork's new album and will have his own solo effort out before the end of the year. On the subject of solo efforts from the Wu-Tang Clan, under the highly recommended banner we find Ghostface Killah's Iron Man from last year (the spoken word track near the end, number 17 I think, being quite astonishing) and Ol' Dirty Bastard's Return To The 36 Chambers from 1995.

Wu-Tang Forever, which is released this week, is a two-hour, 30-track, double-CD monstrous musical sprawl which looks certain to drag rap back from the cheesy R`n'B charts and re-position it hack where it originally started.

LYRICALLY, it doesn't stray too far from the debut. The major concerns remain the Islamic religion, martial arts, numerology and all manner of epochal tales - also present and correct is the rather pathetic misogyny which is neither big nor clever and certainly not, as they would claim, "an authentic expression of ghetto life".

Quite eloquent and, at times, spookily poignant, the rapping on this record is magnificent over all 30 tracks. From the super-hero ramblings of For Heavens Sake to the commercially conscious Scary Hours/Cash Still Rules they go through the A-Z of urban black life, Wu style. Aptly enough, in these dog day exam afternoons, the entire episode ends with the advice "Why you going to summer school? Pick up the Wu-Tang double album. It's got all the education you need for a year". Put it on the syllabus, Minister.