I wasn't about to let the year slip away from us without bringing back The Twelve Days of Wu-Mas, the blog's annual tradition shining the spotlight on the Wu-Tang Clan during the winter holidays. 2023 has been a rough year for many of us, including myself, which you two may have surmised by the complete lack of updates on HHID throughout the entire goddamned year, but even though life happens, my goal is to persevere and help brighten the days for some of the two readers who like using this site as a way to pass the time while at work or school or whatever. To that end, I wish you all a happy holiday season no matter which holiday you celebrate, and I sincerely thank you all for sticking with the site (and its accompanying Patreon) through these turbulent times. I plan on doing right by you all, I swear.
That being said, the first day of this year's Wu-Mas celebration will be devoted to a project of mine that I've brought up a few times before, including last year, but it's never a bad time to revisit my imagined Wu-Massacre 2 album from 2019. It's a side project I'm quite proud of, even though, as with my own writing, all I can hear are mistakes and adjustments I'd make today, but I believe it's still deserving of a much wider audience. And who knows, perhaps if it finds its ways into the right set of ears, maybe Inspectah Deck, Masta Killa, and GZA/Genius can work to make this a reality, am I right?
RandoMax Radio Presents: Wu-Massacre 2 (a fake album starring GZA, Inspectah Deck, and Masta Killa)
Some quick context for newbies:
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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