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.

 

I know this seems like a repeat, but hear me out.

So in 2019 I got bored 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, 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.

And now I’ve chosen to revise it a tiny bit.

I’d been meaning to do this for a while, since I located a track that would have made the cut had I found it even a couple of days earlier, which has been eating away at me forever. I’ve also taken this time to clean up some of the dead air, add in a handful of interludes that sound very Wu-appropriate, shuffle a couple of songs around, and generally just improve upon the listening experience.

So I introduce to the two of you, Wu-Massacre 2.1.

RandoMax Radio Presents: Wu-Massacre 2.1 (a slightly different fake album starring GZA, Inspectah Deck, and Masta Killa)



Obviously I didn't have access to any unreleased recordings from GZA, Deck, or Masta Killa (apart from one, wink wink), nor do I know the artists personally: if I did, this would be a very different blog. So I compiled my version of Wu-Massacre 2.1 (which is still A Fake Album, not actively seeking a lawsuit here) 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 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.

Tracklist:

1. Sound of the Slums
2. Duel of the Iron Mic (featuring Ol' Dirty Bastard)
3. Silverbacks
4. Cold World (RZA Remix) (featuring D'Angelo)
5. Pencil (featuring RZA)
6. Tiger and the Mantice
7. Musketeers of Pig Alley (featuring Raekwon)
8. Drivin' Round (Unreleased Version) (featuring Sheek Louch, Ghostface Killah, & 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 2.1 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