The Twelve Days of Wu-Mas 2025 - Day #5

Today's contribution to the 2025 edition of The Twelve Days of Wu-Mas is an exclusive-to-the-free-site brief write-up for a Wu-Tang side project that, somehow, it just occurred to me to write about this month. I must be slipping in my old age. Anyway, I hope you enjoy it!

The Twelve Days of Wu-Mas 2025 - Day #4

In 2021, rapper Killah Priest and mostly producer, sometime rapper True Master joined forces for Divine Intervention, a full-length collaborative project that you'd think they would have done at least twenty years prior, given how long both artists have been a part of the Wu-Tang Clan's story. Priest has obviously been around since the very beginning, helping form what would become Sunz of Man, one of the first spinoffs from the main narrative, before going solo and continuing an off-again, on-again relationship with both the Wu and its various members, all while slowly becoming one of the most prolific affiliates in the group's shared history, while True Master has hung around the same length of time, kicking off his career as a part of the late Guru's Gang Starr Foundation before finding a path with the Clan.

Divine Intervention is comprised of ten guest-free tracks fully produced by, and occasionally featuring, True Master. With that Powerpoint looking-ass album cover setting up proper expectations, Killah Priest spends the duration of the project doing things as he's always done, audience be damned, his quasi-religious hyperbabble sharing equal time with his pointed observations of street life and his gift of storytelling, usually to the detriment of "conventional songwriting practices" and "general rules of what makes a song work". In short, you're either exactly the type of Wu stan who would seek this out, or you'd avoid it at all costs, there is no middle ground, and Priest couldn't give a shit either way, which is at least sort of commendable.

Click here to read my write-up for Divine Intervention, which has now been unlocked and is available to Patreon subscribers at any tier, including free! Enjoy!

-Max

The Twelve Days of Wu-Mas 2025 - Day #3

Grand Rapids, Michigan rapper-slash-entrepreneur Willie "Willie the Kid" Jackson may not be an actual Wu-Tang Clan affiliate, but that certainly hasn't stopped him from periodically popping up here and there with the lore of the group. Even though his older brother is La the Darkman, Willie made his own way into the hip hop space, first through mixtape czars The Aphilliates and then on his own, spitting stylized criminal thought non-sequiturs over hard beats from some of the underground's finest. Nowadays he's known for being an engaging shit-talker with a good ear for instrumentals and a ton of people in his 'Contacts' folder, a lot of whom you two are very familiar with, while the Darkman is primarily known as, well, not as Willie's brother, because a lot of heads fail to recognize that they're related because La never comes up in the conversation, that's how much work Willie has done for his own legacy.

In 2014, Willie paired off with prolific Wu-Tang producer Bronze Nazareth, a fellow Grand Rapids resident, to record The Living Daylights, a full-length collaborative effort that would officially put his name in front of the many Wu stans who might have skipped over him in an effort to get the complete Wu-Tang saga. Even with the pedigree, Bronzey treated this as a Willie the Kid project over anything else, so while the beats reside in Shaolin territory (or at least the soul-soaked interpretation of Shaolin that Nazareth prides himself with), lyrically it's the Kid's show, and the feature list is filled with primarily collaborators that he would have worked alongside anyway, such as Roc Marciano, Boldy James, the late Sean Price, and, unsurprisingly, La the Darkman, Wu-Tang presence is kept to a minimum - although affiliates do manage to pop in from time to time, the connections still feel more natural than had, say, Method Man suddenly made a cameo.

Read up on The Living Daylights, over at the Patreon site, where my write-up has been unlocked and is free to subscribers at any tier level, including "free". (A subscription is required to access this review, however.) Enjoy this weird week between Christmas and New Years where time doesn't matter!

-Max

The Twelve Days of Wu-Mas 2025 - Day #2

 

Cut Throat City is a heist film released in 2020 that takes place in a post-Katrina New Orleans. It was directed by The RZA, but not written by him - that credit goes to Paul Cuschieri in what appears to be his only credit. It features big-name actors such as Terrance Howard, Wesley Snipes, and Ethan Hawke playing alongside Shameik Moore (Miles Morales in the Spiderverse animated films), Demetrius Shipp Jr. (2Pac in All Eyez On Me), and Denzel Whitaker (no relation to the Ghost Dog). A good heist film is entertaining as hell when done properly, each con and double-cross keeping the audience on their collective toes, and setting one in the aftermath of one of the worst natural disasters in United States history only raises the stakes for the participants.

So why has nobody ever heard of Cut Throat City? That's a question with multiple answers. One could blame a lack of promotion, issues with distribution, general apathy from the intended audience when it came to RZA and his little moviemaking hobby, take your pick. I lean toward using streaming services as an excuse, especially since this was released during the COVID era - even if your local theater was open, how high would the quality of the film have to appear to be in its promotional materials to convince you to risk your life, as opposed to just waiting a week or so and then catching it on Netflix or something?

The point is, this is a film you've likely never heard of, and its accompanying "soundtrack" (it's comprised of just six songs) failed to do its lone marketing job. But these type of things don't usually slip past hardcore Wu stans such as myself, so my Patreon write-up for the Cut Throat City soundtrack has been unlocked and is now available for subscribers at all levels, including the free tier.

Enjoy, folks!

-Max

The Twelve Days of Wu-Mas 2025 - Day #1

Hello, and welcome to the annual Twelve Days of Wu-Mas program, in which we spend almost the entire next two weeks celebrating the Wu-Tang Clan in various different ways, a lot of which involve writing or different podcast-slash-mix shows exposing the two readers to the music of the group and their extended families. Longtime readers will know what to expect (to a degree), while newbies will catch up pretty quickly, so I won't waste your time with semantics (aside from reminding you that the Patreon will continue to host bonus content from this year's series, so keep an eye on that site as well). Let's kick off the season, and I hope everyone reading has a happy and healthy holiday season. Just those of you reading, though, Everyone else can fuck right off.

RandoMax Radio Presents: Wu-Wednesday #53

You likely have more pressing holiday concerns eating away at you today, or if you don’t happen to celebrate, you might just be busy with work or something, so I’ll keep this brief. The Wu-Wednesdays side project will be wrapping up next week, after which point I’ll obviously still enjoy listening to the Wu-Tang Clan, but I won’t be setting aside extra time to track down samples and record episodes, often multiple times before I’m happy with them. (No bullshit, some of the early episode drafts were fucking dumpster fires.) Before we get to the grand-ish finale, however, we have this week to contend with, so I’ve assembled a collection of instrumentals to help the two of you focus as you wrap presents or cook or commute or whatever the fuck it is you do every December 24th. I hope you enjoy the hell out of it.



There is a full year’s worth of previous episodes in this Wu-Wednesdays side project, but only a handful can be featured on the Mixcloud site. The rest, or at least the songs featured wherein, live on at the RandoMax Radio Spotify channel, with tracks (whatever’s available, anyway – some tracks are easier to find than others) being added to the playlist as they get taken down elsewhere. I’ve also put together an alternative over at YouTube Music in case you’d rather not use Spotify, which has more of the tracks available anyway, so that’s clearly the better option, folks. Give either one a look when you get a chance and tell anybody you know who may enjoy something like this – every little bit of support you can offer is appreciated more than you’ll know.

Enjoy!

-Max

RandoMax Radio Presents: Wu-Wednesday #52

The holiday season is upon us once again – it seems that living in hell on earth doesn’t stop the planet from rotating on its axis, who knew? – which tends to mean one thing with regard to this very blog. Longtime readers will know what I’m talking about, but for the rest of you two, all I can say is that you should pay closer attention around the time Santa begins his journey. Until then, we still have the last few Wu-Wednesdays of the year to work through, with this week’s episode detouring into a world where the Wu-Tang Clan and their ilk chose to swipe instrumentals from other rappers instead of relying on RZA and the other Elements for their hits. It’s fun, it’s light, and at least some of this is kind of surprising, so have at it, folks!



There are fifty-one previous episodes of the Wu-Wednesdays side project, but only the most recent eight will be on the Mixcloud site. The rest, or at least the songs featured wherein, live on at the RandoMax Radio Spotify channel, with tracks (whatever’s available, anyway – some are easier to find than others) being added to the playlist as they get taken down elsewhere. I’ve also put together an alternative over at YouTube Music in case you’d rather not use Spotify, which has more of the tracks available anyway, so that’s clearly the better option, folks. Give either one a look when you get a chance and tell anybody you know who may enjoy something like this – every little bit of support you can offer is appreciated more than you’ll know.

Enjoy!

-Max