Day #2 of this year's Twelve Days of Wu-Mas aims to cast some light onto a project of mine from 2019, one that was fairly well-received in 2019 but has since been lost in the dark hallways of the Interweb. Until today, anyway. And I realize that previous sentence implies that the project was buried by sinister forces and not simply that there's been a ton of content added onto the information superhighway since its original publication date, but people believe what they want to believe. I'm proud of the project, even though all I can see and hear are mixtakes and the corrections I would make today, but you have to let your kids out into the real world at some point.
Anyway, today let's revisit my fake concept album, Wu-Massacre 2, which stars three members of the Wu-Tang Clan that deserve much more shine: Inspectah Deck, Masta Killa, and the GZA/Genius. Perhaps this will be the nudge the universe requires to make this fantasy into a reality.
RandoMax Radio Presents: Wu-Massacre 2 (a fake album starring GZA, Inspectah Deck, and Masta Killa)
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| ...at which point Max decides to start being all creative and shit |
So I got bored one day and decided to mess around with an idea that had been bouncing around in my head ever since Wu-Massacre dropped. If you remember the write-up, or if you follow any of the bullshit I write on Twitter that isn't just promotion for my various creative outlets, I mentioned that, while the Raekwon, Ghostface Killah, and Method Man teaming was dead in the water, there was potential to revive the series if the focus shifted to three lesser-known members of the Wu-Tang Clan: GZA, Inspectah Deck, and Masta Killa. (Of course, "lesser known" just means "those three weren't signed to a major label at the time or publication", and they still aren't.)
Since it's become obvious that Wu-Massacre 2 isn't ever going to come to fruition, I chose to make it myself.
Kind of.
Obviously I don't have access to any unreleased recordings from GZA, Deck, or Masta Killa, nor do I know them personally: if I did, this would be a very different blog. So I compiled my version of Wu-Massacre 2 (which is, once again, A Fake Album) using previously-released material, although some of the tracks I used are more rare than others. I could have simply put together a playlist of every time these three had ever worked together, but where's the challenge in that? So instead, I gave myself some restrictions in order to force the creativity out:
- I could only use songs that featured at least two of the three artists in question. A track with all three would be given priority for inclusion, but wasn't guaranteed.
- I couldn't use any songs credited to the Wu-Tang Clan, because while those three may have been involved, that's a cheat.
- I had to work around Mixcloud's licensing rules, which meant that I could only use four songs credited to any specific artist, only three of which could come from the same album. As such, a lot of these songs are credited to Deck, Masta Killa, or the Genius anyway, so this wasn't as difficult as you'd think.
- I could only have twelve tracks on my "album". The original Wu-Massacre only had twelve tracks (ten songs, two skits), and I wanted to match that energy while keeping it brief.
- (This goes with the first rule) Each track has to feature at least two of the three artists. Wu-Massacre couldn't even be bothered with that: of its ten actual songs, nine feature Ghost (one of which is a solo song, for some fucking reason, and another a test run for his later Wu-Block project with Sheek Louch), eight feature Meth, and a whopping four out of ten songs feature Raekwon. How consumer complaints against Def Jam Records weren't filed with the Better Business Bureau I'll never understand. Regardless, I avoided this problem by featuring GZA and Deck an equal number of times, with Masta Killa coming in one verse shy, as his general output has been limited when measured against those two.
With these rules in place, I edited a list of every song these guys shared into what I feel is a cohesive tracklist for an album that isn't real. Some of the more obvious choices were abandoned for what I ultimately chose, but I was going for a specific vibe: I wanted this to actually sound like a Wu-Tang album in some ways. With that in mind, there are kung-fu flick samples, RZA beats, other Clan members chiming in as needed (but not every Clan member - figured it's more realistic this way), R&B singers on hooks, shit-talking, reflection, and even one opportunity for a guest to drop by and potentially steal the entire project away from the hosts. There's also more Raekwon than I thought there would be, albeit not as much as what actually appeared on Wu-Massacre.
Wu-Massacre 2 (A Fake Album) TRACKLIST:
1. Duel of the Iron Mic (featuring Ol' Dirty Bastard)
2. Sound of the Slums
3. Silverbacks
4. Cold World (RZA Remix) (featuring D'Angelo)
5. Pencil (featuring The RZA)
6. Tiger and the Mantice
7. Musketeers of Pig Alley (featuring Raekwon)
8. Drivin' Round (featuring Sheek Louch & Erykah Badu)
9. Breaker, Breaker (Remix)
10. Rockstars (featuring Raekwon, Thea Van Seijen, & Stone Mecca)
11. Street Corner
12. Guillotine (Swordz) (featuring Raekwon & Ghostface Killah)
Give Wu-Massacre 2 a spin and let me know what you think. Let it play through to the end: I'm trying to give an album's worth of experience here, so don't skip ahead. Or do, I don't mind, it doesn't belong to me anymore.
-Max
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