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