The 12 Hours of Wu-Tang: #12 - My Gut Reaction: Wu-Tang - The Saga Continues (October 13, 2017)

The final write-up of the day goes to the Wu-Tang Clan proper, although it isn’t a real Clan album. Instead, it’s a compilation put together by producer (and the group’s longtime deejay) Allah Mathematics, The Saga Continues, which received the blessing of The RZA early on in the recording process, because there’s no goddamn way Prince Rakeem will ever record another Wu-Tang Clan album that sounds like their older, much more revered work. Let’s just say they won’t be touring to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of A Better Tomorrow when the time comes.

The 12 Hours of Wu-Tang: #11 - My Gut Reaction / Something (Sort Of) Different: Banks & Steelz - Anything But Words (August 26, 2016)

The weirdest project I’m writing about today isn’t from the only girl group out of the Wu to date, nor is it the Dutch homage to kung-fu flicks. No, it’s the rap-slash-indie rock album from the pairing of The RZA and Paul Banks, Anything But Words, that dropped upon an unsuspecting public in late summer 2016.

The 12 Hours of Wu-Tang: #10 - My Gut Reaction: U-God - Venom (March 30, 2018)

Lamont “U-God” Hawkins, the Wu-Tang Clan member forever at odds with the Wu-Tang Clan due to financial issues stemming from The RZA’s leadership, had a busy first quarter this past year. After having announced it two years prior, his fifth solo album, Venom, finally hit store shelves thanks to Babygrande Records. He also appeared in a completely different medium: his autobiography, Raw: My Journey Into the Wu-Tang, dropped a few weeks prior, providing important context for some of the more personal tracks on Venom, in addition to those from the rest of the man’s discography. I had toyed with the idea of another one of those Max’s Book Club entries featuring U-God’s book, as there are some specific topics I'd like to broach,but I haven’t yet gotten around to it: if that sounds like something you’re interested in discussing, let me know in the comments below, but don’t actually discuss the book in the comments, as that would defeat the purpose.

The 12 Hours of Wu-Tang: #9 - My Gut Reaction: Czarface & MF DOOM - Czarface Meets Metal Face (March 30, 2018)

Following 2016’s A Fistful of Peril and 2017’s First Weapon Drawn, an instrumental narrated storybook adventure that we won’t be getting into but rest assured it does exist, Czarface, the group consisting of the Wu-Tang Clan’s Inspectah Deck alongside Boston underground stalwarts 7L and Esoteric, decided to follow the Marvel Cinematic Universe blueprint for their fifth album. To do so, they partnered with a rapper-slash-producer so enveloped in pop culture references that his rap moniker and general aesthetic was swiped from a comic book supervillain. I’m speaking, of course, about Daniel “MF DOOM” Dumile, and the project was called, unsurprisingly, Czarface Meets Metal Face.

And it was a team-up that made so much sense that hip hop heads would have felt that something was missing from our chosen genre if these guys hadn’t worked together.

The 12 Hours of Wu-Tang: #8 - Moongod Allah - Ten Tigers Of Kwantung (2001)

Figured I couldn’t get through today without tackling one of the more out-there Wu-Tang Clan-affiliated projects, just in case there are actual Wu stans that still follow my writing, so this write-up will focus on Dutch producer Moongod Allah’s homage to both kung-fu flicks and the Wu-Tang Clan themselves, the 2001 album Ten Tigers of Kwantung.

The 12 Hours of Wu-Tang: #7 - Killah Priest - Priesthood (July 10, 2001)

While doing my research for today’s series of posts, I noticed that I hadn’t written about Wu-Tang Clan affiliate and Sunz of Man founding member Killah Priest in over nine years. I’m sure he’s popped up here and there, but I haven’t approached any of his albums after Heavy Mental and View From Masada. This is partly due to sheer intimidation on my part: some of Priest’s songs sound like homework, as though I should have acquired my Master’s in theological studies before pressing ‘play’. But the main reason I haven’t gone back to the Killah Priest well is because I find most of the music I’ve heard from him to be really goddamn boring, so much so that I feel my life is better because I haven’t actively sought out his later work. This is likely a wrongheaded assumption on my part, and I admit that, so I offer up the first step toward reconciliation: the last Killah Priest album I’ve ever listened to, his third project Priesthood.

The 12 Hours of Wu-Tang: #6 - My Gut Reaction: Black Knights - Every Night Is Still A Black Knight (March 31, 2014)

The Wu-Tang Clan-affiliated group Black Knights has had a much more storied career than one may have expected, given their relatively unimpressive roots. Part of The RZA’s attempt to expand the Wu brand to the West Coast, the Black Knights began life as a part of a supergroup called Black Knights of the North Star, where the four Knights (Crisis the Sharpshooter, Rugged Monk, Doc Doom, and Holocaust) joined forces with Christbearer and Meko the Pharaoh, performing together as a package deal in part because of their respective contracts with Wu-Tang Records. The Black Knights quickly splintered off to do their own thing, as did North Star, although all anyone can remember about those guys is the unfortunate incident in which Christbearer, high on PCP, forcibly separated his body from his penis.

Hilariously, but also not so much, even though he was able to get it reattached successfully, that action caused The RZA, the ringleader of anything music related in the Wu world order, to immediately deny that he ever knew Christbearer, even though we all knew that shit wasn’t true. It was quite Trumpian of him, really.

But this post isn’t about North Star.

The 12 Hours of Wu-Tang: #5 - Not Available In Stores! Deadly Venoms - Pretty Thugs (2000)

Fun fact: this write-up for the second attempt at a debut album by the Wu-affiliated group Deadly Venoms, Pretty Thugs, was written five years ago, which will become very apparent at one specific point of the review that I chose to leave in just because it amused me to do so. Click here to find out more!

The 12 Hours of Wu-Tang: #4 - My Gut Reaction: Masta Killa - Loyalty Is Royalty (September 29, 2017)

Loyalty is Royalty may be the fourth solo album from Wu-Tang Clan founding member Elgin “Masta Killa” Turner, but it was supposed to be his third. My understanding is that the music he was recording at the time veered off into a direction different from what he imagined a project entitled Loyalty Is Royalty sounding like when he first announced it in fucking 2010, so he put this album on pause and released a drink coaster called Selling My Soul instead. However, he felt that album title was too good for him to waste, so after exorcising his pseudo-R&B demons, he quickly got back to work on what was originally supposed to be his retirement album (not sure where he stands on that now), dropping Loyalty Is Royalty in the fall of 2017,.

The 12 Hours of Wu-Tang: #3 - My Gut Reaction: Czarface - A Fistful of Peril (October 25, 2016)

Czarface may be the only team-up in our chosen genre that mirrors the seemingly random nature of comic book heroes and villains banding together to battle a common foe. I realize that’s the entire point of the collaboration between the Wu-Tang Clan’s Inspectah Deck and the underground producer-slash-emcee duo 7L and Esoteric: the comic book artwork that adorns every project they’ve released since their debut, simply titled Czarface, dropped back in 2013 is proof that these guys are proud of the association. But I suppose what I hadn’t been expecting was the level of consistency each successive album has reached – one would have assumed that the pop culture references and purposefully-limited worldview of the artists involved (they like staying in character, so what) came with a built-in expiration date.

Despite the odds, Czarface has stuck around through multiple waves of new trends in hip hop, sticking to their guns and evolving at their own pace – hell, they have a new album scheduled for release next February that is a full-length collaboration with fellow comic enthusiast Ghostface Killah. So obviously this act is working for them.

The 12 Hours of Wu-Tang: #2 - My Gut Reaction: Raekwon - The Wild (March 24, 2017)

Fun fact: Although I was cognizant of the releases from various members of the Wu-Tang Clan in 2016 but just couldn’t find the time or the wherewithal to seek them out for whatever reason, the seventh (!) full-length project from Corey “Raekwon” Woods, 2017’s The Wild, was the first where I legitimately didn’t give two shits if I ever listened to it or not. Life just gets in the way sometimes, you know? So this review should be a fun one, is what I’m saying.

The 12 Hours of Wu-Tang: #1 - My Gut Reaction: Ghostface Killah - The Lost Tapes (September 26, 2018)

When it was announced out of the blue earlier this year, The Lost Tapes seemed like the perfect convergence of events. A new album from Dennis “Ghostface Killah” Coles, the Wu-Tang Clan rap veteran who was still in the phase of his career where he essentially does whatever flight of fancy interests him at the time, resulting in many different full-length collaborations with artists such as Adrian Younge, CZARFACE (oh wait, that comes out next year, shit) and BADBADNOTGOOD? An album fully produced by Big Ghost Ltd., the blogger-turned-respected producer whose entire shtick back in the day was pretending that he was Ghostface Killah on social media? It sounded fascinating enough to work despite its mysterious origin. I mean, Big Ghost still hasn’t revealed himself to the public – for all we know, it really was Coles just fucking with the Interweb for his own amusement, although if that were the case, I have to respect the long con of handling the beats for artists such as Westside Gunn, Crimeapple, and Ankhlejohn all for the sake of a prank.