If you’d told me a year ago that one of my favourite records from the first half of 2015 would feature an estranged member of the Wu-Tang Clan teaming up with a retro cinematic funk orchestra, I’d have been…. well, skeptical doesn’t quite cover it. But June is coming up fast, and guess what...

Reading this blog over the years, you might have got the impression that I’m not very big on hip-hop, and indeed, when it comes to the past decade or so, you’d be more or less correct. As a typical guitar-brained white man, I have no valid cultural connection to the more vital/underground aspects of the genre, and it would be foolish of me to pretend otherwise. Meanwhile, the more supposedly palatable, Pitchfork-approved examples of the form that have been intermittently spoon-fed to me in the internet era have almost all struck me as tedious, bloated, confused and generally quite dislikeable for any number of wholly subjective reasons. Thus, very little contemporary hip-hop has managed to hit one beyond my defenses since the days of… god, I dunno – Outkast? [This background should be borne in mind if anything I say below is, in fact, ill-informed bullshit of some kind or other.]

You may argue that such an attitude to music listening is lazy, defeatist, beneath contempt, and, again, you may well be correct. But I would counter-argue with the claim that much of my alienation from contemporary hip-hop stems from the fact that the stuff that hit me upon my initial exposure to the genre was so fucking good that I’ve yet to hear anything subsequent that comes anywhere near it. Which is to say that, in addition to canon of ‘80s NY rap and early ‘90s P.E./Ice T stuff that it’s obligatory for every honky born after 1975 to pay homage to (and rightly so), I remain a MASSIVE fan of the pre-’97 Wu Tang Clan.

Guess it must have been around the turn of the century that some considerate souls pointed me in the direction of the Wu, and all these years later, I still find myself pulling out those key albums every couple of months when the mood takes me, and even as I listen for conceivably the 250th time or something, I’m never less than totally floored by the pure, out of control inspiration to be found within.

Some music fades with repeated exposure, but other stuff just blows the cobwebs out of your ears, any time, any place, forever - and needless to say, we’re in the latter category here. The sheer potential that was on display as these guys moved from the lo-fi assault of ‘36 Chambers’ to the dark mastery of ‘Liquid Swords’ like an ever-learning, ever-growing ninja army remains breathtaking, and that’s what causes the subsequent betrayal of that potential to sting even harder, souring me on the thought of even bothering to investigate whatever mediocre, self-absorbed resource wastage RZA & co are half-heartedly trying to sell us on this year.

If I had been a bit more tolerant, paid a bit more attention, I might have heeded the call of those who maintained through the ‘00s that Ghostface Killah at least was still doing his best to live up to that original potential… but with the mediocrity of post-Y2K collective Wu endeavors and the sheer, repellant awfulness of the several live appearances I attended around the time fresh in my mind, I tuned him out along with the others; and they don’t play Ghostface Killah on the radio round where I live, so that was that.

Until now that is. A couple of months ago, I was pretty flabbergasted when I switched on the radio prior to doing some washing up, and heard what appeared to be some 100% certified prime Wu shit blazing out, riding over backing that sounded like nothing so much as some vintage Italian movie music. Holy wow. Confused, I assumed it must be some kind of mash up or remix or something featuring some old verses I’d never heard before, but no – turns out this is Ghostface in the here and now, cutting loose over tracks provided by a rock-band-plus-orchestra unit called BadBadNotGood – a gang of slick cats who basically sound like they’re warming up waiting for Isaac Hayes to come in and start giving the orders (which is plenty good enough for me, needless to say).

I don’t know whether it is this unconventional backing that’s inspired Ghost to get off his arse and tighten things up (“got my swagger back an’ all that!”, he announces exultantly at one point), or whether, against all the odds, he has just remained really fucking good all these years, but basically, during the best moments on ‘Sour Soul’ (of which there are many), he sounds like he’s fallen straight out of a time warp, tone and flow nearly indistinguishable from the glory days of ‘Ironman’ and ‘..Cuban Linx’ - the same menacing webs of reflective, dual-layered imagery piling up left, right and centre as the ‘cinematic’ backdrop allows him to expand the scope of his gangsta vocab into surrealistic vignettes of twisted crime story excess, still spat out with the pure, break-neck viciousness of a dude half his age, leaving the kind of “respectability” that neutered so many of his comrades still kept way out on the distant horizon, despite the ‘class’ musicianship and tasteful b&w cover shot.

If I remember correctly, one of the reasons I overlooked Ghost’s much-lauded run of albums in the ‘00s (‘Bulletproof Wallets’, ‘Fishscale’, etc) was that I had somehow formed the misguided impression that he was one of the less lyrically ambitious members of the Clan. “So what’s he rapping about these days?”, I remember enquiring (online) of those albums’ cheerleaders. Oh, the usual I suppose, came the reply – pimping, dealing, making Gs. I, like an IDIOT, responded with distaste and turned away, hankering after RZA and GZA’s pot-addled ruminations on chess and going into space and shit, when clearly someone actually should have sat me down on a hard chair in front of the stereo and politely pointed out that, in spite of the rest of the Clan’s high-falutin’ notions and Meth and ODB’s sundry eccentricities, it’s Ghost who always comes top of the heap on those early records I love, laying into the tracks like an attack dog, bringing a wilder, more imaginative lexicon than any of ‘em, despite his more, uh, ‘limited’ range of subject matter.

Now, I hope, I’m old enough to realise that great art relies not so much on what you try to say as how well you succeed in saying it, and that to dismiss Ghostface Killah for talking about little beyond pimping, dealing and Mafioso boasting is short-sighted in the extreme – a text-book example of the somewhat depressing phenomenon that can see musicians and song-writers hauled up before their peers simply for daring to approach unpalatable subject matter in anything other than an overtly judgmental and one dimensional fashion, making lyricists reluctant to exercise the kind of freedoms that writers and filmmakers have taken for granted since time immemorial.

(Whatever misdemeanors the Wu membership may have been party to back in the day is a matter for them and their lawyers, but I think it’s safe to say that by this stage in the game, their output, and Ghostface Killah’s pumped up crime epics in particular, has gone wa-ay out into the realms of mythic story-telling, no more subject to accusations of irresponsibly warping youthful morals than Nick Cave is of encouraging his audience to strangle preachers’ daughters and dump their bodies down wells.*)

It may be a bit of a push to try to claim that Ghost approaches, I dunno, William Burroughs or Abel Ferrara in using deplorable attitudes and bad behavior as a jumping off point for excursions into the artistic unknown, but he’s certainly more on the same page with those guys than he is with the vast majority of his contemporaries in music, and beneath the surface braggadocio of his verses lies a whole world of the weird.

As in the classic Wu material, his talent for smacking you in the chops with off-piste cultural references faster than your mind can process them makes for a head-spinning joy on ‘Sour Soul’, adding a nightmarish undertow of clandestine paranoia to his crime-brag narratives, whether claiming his kilo-shifting kingpin “sent Ichabod Crane on his horse ride”, or warning would-be victims of CIA harassment that “pure alkaline and flouride’ll fuck you up / I seen spaceships flyin’ out of the back of a truck”. Meanwhile, we just try to catch our breath before the next allusion to some act of stomach-churning violence or abuse, fed back second hand like a grim, urban legend harbinger of the societal collapse-based apocalypse than all the Wu’s darker material seems to be pulling towards… assuming it hasn’t already been reached and surpassed, whether in inner-city USA or just the back alley graveyards of Ghost’s imagination.

‘Gunshowers’ and the magnificent title track gleam like silver on the surface, but Ghost’s monster growl drags them down swiftly as possible into blue-tinted, censor-baiting horror movie territory, twisting snatches of stock gangsta machismo and misogyny into such nightmarish shapes, only a moron could mistake them for any kind of ‘glorification’.

‘Six Degrees’ sounds so much like a live band recreation of a classic RZA loop (paranoid kung-fu twang & drum machine bounce) it’s slightly ridiculous, but elsewhere BadBadNotGood’s tracks wisely follow their own dramatic path, working in parallel with Ghostface but never over-shadowed by him, as brushed jazz-funk drums, pulsing upright bass and washes of reverbed guitar help drag the aesthetics of our man’s unseemly fixations back in a slightly more, uh.. classical?.. direction.

On the beserkly comedic ‘Tone’s Rap’ – dark horse contender for the best cut here – he’s lumbering around like one of the cartoon pimps who harangued the aforementioned Mr. Hayes in ‘Truck Turner’, or perhaps the more pathetic specimens who pop up in Chester Himes novels, trying to keep their diamond-collared Dobermans off their fur coats in one room tenement apartments. Putting on his best Rudy Ray Moore shriek for an opening cry of “Yo bitch, fuck, I got lint on ma robes!”, he gets laugh out of my every time, but even as the track proceeds much in the manner of a lolloping, flared pants pisstake, the agonsied, soulful drag of Ghost’s delivery and the lonely, bug-eyed desperation lying in wait behind his closing declaration that “pimping ain’t easy, but it sure is FUN” speaks more eloquently of the futility and irrelevance of this way of life than any amount of socially-conscious “just say no” indie-hop could… (and the fact it hits alongside a just-perfect brass crescendo from the backing band is icing on the cake).

Another thing that helps make ‘Sour Soul’ such a great listen is – get this - it’s really short. Ten tracks, most of them under three minutes, wrapped up in a lean 27 minutes. Is that even an album by hip-hop standards? For all I know, some of Ghostface’s contemporaries are still making albums where they spend longer than that clearing their throat. Barely a second here is given over to bullshit and padding - no skits, no mumbling, no filler cuts or contrived call & response routines. Just the band kicking ass and Ghost on the attack, a few swift guest verses (all pretty good, but MF Doom gets man of the match), and we’re out. All fibre, no fat. Awesome.

It’s hip-hop for the boutique vinyl era really I suppose; why sweat it over your latest CD-filling ego summit knowing it's headed straight for dollar bins and Soulseek, when there’re kids (or more likely, geezers old enough to know better) out there ready to drop $30+ on a single LP w/ a nice cover? By weight, this shit’s probably pulling in more dough that one of Ghost’s mystical coke deals, but when the quality’s this flawless, it’s win-win.

Even better, turns out this us actually the *third* briskly paced record Ghostface has made with live instrumental backing in the past few years, whilst I was busy looking the other way. Once again, I hang my head in shame. And when I’m done doing that, I’ll be off to load up on everything he’s done since ‘Supreme Clientele’, and declare 2015 the Summer of Ghostface (in my headphones, if nowhere else). Chalk that one up as ‘unexpected’.



* Full disclosure: I think I stole this joke / observation from someone writing in the NME about fifteen years ago, but it’s too good not to use again.

Labels: album reviews, BadBadNotGood, Ghostface Killah, Wu Tang Clan

“At first the number of white people interested in this music was not enough to have much effect on the sales of popular music. This portion of the audience probably consisted at first of college and a few high school students who cultivated an ‘R & B cult’ as most of their equivalents earlier (and even then) cultivated a jazz cult.

By a happy coincidence we happen to have some observations of remarkable insight made by the sociologist David Riesman on the popular music audience of this period, which illustrate the character of the specialist audience. In an article, ‘Listening to Popular Music’, Riesman noted that two groups could be identified: the majority audience, which accepted the range of choices offered by the music industry and made its selections from this range without considering anything outside it; and the minority audience, which he described with details which are relevant here.

‘The minority group is small. It comprises the more active listeners, who are less interested in melody or tone than in arrangement or technical virtuosity. It has developed elaborate, even overelaborate, standards of music listening; hence its music listening is combined with much animated discussion of technical points and perhaps occasional references to trade journals such as ‘Metronome’ and ‘Downbeat’. The group tends to dislike name bands, most vocalists (except Negro blues singers) and radio commercials.

The rebelliousness of this minority group might be indicated in some of the following attitudes toward popular music: an insistence on rigorous standards of judgement and taste in a relativist culture,; a preference for the uncommercialized, unadvertised small bands rather than name bands; the development of a private language and then a flight from it when the private language (the same is true of other aspects of private style) is taken over by the majority group; a profound resentment of the commercialization of radio and musicians. Dissident attitudes toward competition and cooperation in our culture might be represented in feelings about improvisation and small ‘combos’; an appreciation for idiosyncrasy of performance goes together with a dislike of ‘star’ performers and an insistence that the improvisation be a group-generated phenomenon.

There are still other ways in which the minority may use popular music to polarize itself from the majority group, and thereby from American popular culture generally: a sympathetic attitude or even preference for Negro musicians; an equalitarian attitude toward the roles, in both love and work, of the two sexes; a more international outlook, with or without awareness, for example, of French interest in American jazz; an identification with disadvantaged groups, not only Negroes, from which jazz springs, with or without a romantic cult of proletarianism; a dislike of romantic pseudo-sexuality in music, even without any articulate awareness of being exploited; similarly a reaction against the stylized body image and limitations of physical self-expression which ‘sweet’ music and its lyrics are felt as conveying; a feeling that music is too important to serve as a backdrop for dancing, small talk, studying, and the like; a diffuse resentment of the image of the teenager presented by the mass media.’

[…]

Riesman’s observation that no matter what the majority chooses, there will be a minority choosing something different explains how popular music continues to change, no matter how good – or bad – the dominant types of music are at any particular period. And because the minority audience defines itself as being radical within the music audience, its taste is likely to favor, consciously or unconsciously, music with some element of social comment or criticism in it.

During the early fifties, young people like those described by Riesman turned in increasing numbers to rhythm and blues music, and to radio stations that broadcast it. If the first listeners were those with relatively sophisticated standards for judging music, those that came later included many whose taste was more instinctive, who liked the dance beat or the thrilling effect of a hard-blown saxophone, people who may have found the rough voices of the singers a bit quaint and appealing as novelties.

It was this second group of listeners who provided the inspiration and audience for Alan Freed, who , with Bill Haley, played a crucial role in popularizing rhythm and blues under the name ‘rock n’ roll’.”

- Charlie Gillett, ‘The Sound of the City: The Rise of Rock ‘n Roll’ (Dell, 1972), pp. 19 – 21


Serving Suggestions:

John Lee Hooker – This Is Hip
Frankie Lee Sims – She Likes To Boogie Real Low
TV Slim – Flat Foot Sam
Guitar Junior – Roll Roll Roll
Icky Renrut – The Rooster
Bunker Hill – The Girl Can't Dance

Labels: auto-critique, books, Charlie Gillett, R & B Cults