There Is No Thirteenth Day of Wu-Mas 2025

 

Yep, another Wu-Mas has successfully come and gone. It's time to take down the tree, throw away the platters of cookies and gin that were set by the fire, and put the sheet over the golden eagle's birdcage. We're done. It's over. Onward to 2026!

This site's going to take a bit of a break now, but don't worry: the Patreon will still get regular updates, and I might just add some stuff here if I get bored and/or ambitious again. For now, though, some well-deserved rest.

I want to thank all of you for continuing to support this site through the Wu-Mas shenanigans, through all of last year with the Wu-Wednesday side project, which I found fun and enjoyable except for all those instances when I was in a time crunch and deadlines were hovering over me like that dark cloud that follows us all wherever we go, and just through my idiosyncratic publication schedule as of the past few years. I know that I keep reminding you all to sign up for the Patreon (there's a free tier, and I do plan on releasing some of the older reviews there, I swear), but the fact that folks still visit this site even without the constant updates hits me hard. I appreciate all of the support, even if you're just coming here to fight with a younger version of me that no longer exists.

So no reviews (here) and no RandoMax Radio episodes. What now? Well, I haven't figured all of that out just yet, but with regard to the Wu-Wednesdays series, there is a running playlist over on both Spotify and YouTube Music that will continue to receive updates until every episode is represented in some way. I would actually suggest that you go with the YouTube version, because there are a lot more of the songs available there, and I plan on housing the RandoMax Radio and Max-Approved Mix playlists there once I've tweaked them a bit. Also, other stuff that has been running through my mind (different radio playlists? Artist-specific lists? Who knows?), so stick around and maybe I'll get my shit together long enough to keep you both entertained this year.

Again, thanks for everything. This isn't goodbye, this is "I'm over on a different site, come find me there, but if not, that's cool too." Hit me in the comments if you have any questions, concerns, suggestions, or simply want to chat. I'm around.

-Max

The Twelve Days of Wu-Mas 2025 - Day #12

Supreme Clientele 2 is the long-awaited sequel to Ghostface Killah's widely-praised second solo album, Supreme Clientele. Sure, that project was released in 2000 while its follow-up just dropped as a part of the 2025 Legend Has It... series Mass Appeal commissioned last year, but time is relative, right? The common denominator is Ghostface Killah, surely he is fully capable of recording and releasing a sequel to a beloved album without falling down the same booby traps as his peers in the rap game who tried to do the exact same shit, right?

I mean, it worked for Raekwon, right?

Supreme Clientele 2 allegedly features tracks that Ghost had tucked away over the course of the past quarter-century just in case this specific project ever came to pass, which helps explain why his voice changes throughout the album's twenty-two tracks.Unlike the original project, however, Ghost doesn't have the failsafe of an executive producer such as The RZA to help guide him through the goalposts, instead having to rely on his own creative mind, and look, all I'm saying is, RZA at least came back for Only Built 4 Cuban Linx... Pt. II.

Click here to read my thoughts on Supreme Clientele 2, a brand new Patreon post that has been unlocked for subscribers at every tier level, including "free", as a part of the 12 Days of Wu-Mas. Enjoy!

-Max

The Twelve Days of Wu-Mas 2025 - Day #11

Back in the late 1990's, RZA was working every angle he possibly could to reach his goal of complete world domination. He had actually managed to secure outside record deals with the rest of his Wu-Tang Clan brethren, so he figured he could do the same with the myriad affiliates the group had collected since their debut like so many grains of sand in their respective shoes after a trip to the beach. Groups Sunz of Man and Killarmy, both of which were comprised of members who would later bring their friends, and then they would bring their friends, into the hip hop sphere, were first, after which RZA laid his cards down with The Swarm, a compilation project featuring many of the lesser-known associates of the Wu all in one place. The Swarm, naturally, led to other acts, both individuals and groups, who would not only release their own projects, but then try to put their friends on, and then their seeds would marry the seeds of other affiliates, and that's how to keep Wu-Tang money all up in the family.

Anyway, the Wu-Syndicate was one of the recipients of a bump in interest post-The Swarm. The Virginia-based trio (why only two of the members made the album cover is a mystery to me - one could claim it's because the third was indisposed at the time of the photo shoot, but then why would he be in the liner notes as a part of the same setup/ Why did I have the bowl, Bart?), made up of rappers Joe Mafia, Myalansky, and Napoleon, were very loosely affiliated with the Clan, coming on to the scene through sheer willpower and a co-sign from RZA himself, which makes perfect sense when you remember that he was trying to expand his empire by any means necessary at the time. Wu-Syndicate specialized in criminal raps over harder beats, as their self-titled debut album would attest, and they frequently discussed not just the prizes they won from the street life, but also the sacrifices and losses that they suffered, which, I know, makes them sound like every other rap act in fucking history, which is why they didn't make it much further than this debut.

At least not until Black Stone of Mecca arrived on the scene...

Catch up with my thoughts on Wu-Syndicate, a Patreon-exclusive review that is now unlocked for subscribers at every tier, including "free". Enjoy!

-Max

The Twelve Days of Wu-Mas 2025 - Day #9

The story goes like this: actor Tom Hardy has always been a fan of hip hop, underground hip hop in particular, and was particularly fond of this crew who named themselves Czarface, a comic book alien ambiguously-motivated hero-type, created as a love letter to the type of superheroes and supervillains rappers Esoteric and Inspectah Deck, along with producer DJ 7L, grew up reading about. Tom Hardy was the lead (and producer) of the film version of Marvel villain-slash-antihero Venom, an antagonist of Spider-Man comprised of a human man and an alien symbiote who grafts onto him in order to survive, but slowly begins shifting Brock's personality. That synopsis reads more horror-thriller than its execution, which ran with the whole "Spider-Man movie without Spider-Man" aesthetic, adopting a sarcastic tone with occasional extreme violence to keep the teenage boys off their goddamned phones for a moment.

Anyway, Venom was so successful that Sony Pictures commissioned a sequel, one for which Tom Hardy would continue to be a producer on, except now with much more authority to make creative decisions, such as influencing who gets included on the accompanying soundtrack. This is how Czarface made it to Hollywood, an event believed to be so unlikely when the crew originally linked up but now just seems like it was always a foregone conclusion, an event memorialized by the Good Guys, Bad Guys EP, a vinyl-exclusive extended version of a single of the same name released to streaming at the same time as the movie. The Czar boys may have been so thrilled that they extended an invitation to a certain actor to participate, as well...

Click here to catch up with my thoughts on the Good Guys, Bad Guys EP, a Patreon-exclusive write-up that has now been unlocked and is available for subscribers at every tier, including "free". Enjoy!

-Max
 

The Twelve Days of Wu-Mas 2025 - Day #8

 

Black Samson, the Bastard Swordsman is another one of those Wu-Tang Clan albums that isn't officially credited to the Clan proper for a variety of reasons, many of them having to do with its production process. An indirect follow-up to the 2017 compilation project The Saga Continues, Black Samson, the Bastard Swordsman is also entirely produced by Allah Mathematics, the Wu-Element who also serves as the group's tour DJ and is also responsible for creating the Wu-Tang logo, so to say that he was there from the very beginning is the mere definition of the word "understatement."

While not a sequel by any means, Black Samson, the Bastard Swordsman is advertised as being "from the The Saga Continues collection", which is Math's way of threatening us Wu stans with a good time. It purportedly features all nine living members of the Clan, making this the first project in a decade that they all appear on, doing so alongside a number of artists from outside the Wu bubble who share the gift of criminal slang and colorful metaphors, or so they'd hope.

Although my write-up for Black Samson, the Bastard Swordsman appears over on the Patreon, to help ring in the new year I've made that brand new post available to subscribers at every level, including free, so go ahead, click on the link, create an account if needed, and enjoy!

-Max

The Twelve Days of Wu-Mas 2025 - Day #7

Today's Wu-Mas gift is something that I've been working toward for just over a year now, and... well, would you look at that, today just so happens to be Wednesday.

Huh.

The Twelve Days of Wu-Mas 2025 - Day #6

Ekphrasis is defined as the use of detailed description of a work of visual art as a literary device. It is also the title of a collaborative project from Wu-Tang producer Bronze Nazareth and Brownsville criminal poetry influencer Roc Marciano, one where the beats fall on Marcy's shoulders more often than not. The word choice is understandable, given our hosts, as it sounds plausibly pretentious enough for music critics to use the term as a way of describing just what it is that Roc Marcy does behind the microphone, but the problem here is, of course, Bronze Nazareth is the primary emcee, not Marcy, and Bronzey works from an entirely different set of circumstances. Sure, there is some crossover with subject matter and choice of guest collaborators, but Nazareth is looking at all of this from a different angle, not through a Wu-colored lens exactly, but definitely informed by wildly varied life experiences.

Will these two be able to find common ground before time runs out to save the community rec center from Octavio Moneybags and his unlimited evil resources? Find out by reading my review for Ekphrasis, a Patreon exclusive that has been unlocked for subscribers at every level for this Wu-Mas season, and yes, that also means "free". Enjoy, you two!

-Max

The Twelve Days of Wu-Mas 2025 - Day #5

Today's contribution to the 2025 edition of The Twelve Days of Wu-Mas is an exclusive-to-the-free-site brief write-up for a Wu-Tang side project that, somehow, it just occurred to me to write about this month. I must be slipping in my old age. Anyway, I hope you enjoy it!

The Twelve Days of Wu-Mas 2025 - Day #4

In 2021, rapper Killah Priest and mostly producer, sometime rapper True Master joined forces for Divine Intervention, a full-length collaborative project that you'd think they would have done at least twenty years prior, given how long both artists have been a part of the Wu-Tang Clan's story. Priest has obviously been around since the very beginning, helping form what would become Sunz of Man, one of the first spinoffs from the main narrative, before going solo and continuing an off-again, on-again relationship with both the Wu and its various members, all while slowly becoming one of the most prolific affiliates in the group's shared history, while True Master has hung around the same length of time, kicking off his career as a part of the late Guru's Gang Starr Foundation before finding a path with the Clan.

Divine Intervention is comprised of ten guest-free tracks fully produced by, and occasionally featuring, True Master. With that Powerpoint looking-ass album cover setting up proper expectations, Killah Priest spends the duration of the project doing things as he's always done, audience be damned, his quasi-religious hyperbabble sharing equal time with his pointed observations of street life and his gift of storytelling, usually to the detriment of "conventional songwriting practices" and "general rules of what makes a song work". In short, you're either exactly the type of Wu stan who would seek this out, or you'd avoid it at all costs, there is no middle ground, and Priest couldn't give a shit either way, which is at least sort of commendable.

Click here to read my write-up for Divine Intervention, which has now been unlocked and is available to Patreon subscribers at any tier, including free! Enjoy!

-Max

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

The Twelve Days of Wu-Mas 2025 - Day #2

 

Cut Throat City is a heist film released in 2020 that takes place in a post-Katrina New Orleans. It was directed by The RZA, but not written by him - that credit goes to Paul Cuschieri in what appears to be his only credit. It features big-name actors such as Terrance Howard, Wesley Snipes, and Ethan Hawke playing alongside Shameik Moore (Miles Morales in the Spiderverse animated films), Demetrius Shipp Jr. (2Pac in All Eyez On Me), and Denzel Whitaker (no relation to the Ghost Dog). A good heist film is entertaining as hell when done properly, each con and double-cross keeping the audience on their collective toes, and setting one in the aftermath of one of the worst natural disasters in United States history only raises the stakes for the participants.

So why has nobody ever heard of Cut Throat City? That's a question with multiple answers. One could blame a lack of promotion, issues with distribution, general apathy from the intended audience when it came to RZA and his little moviemaking hobby, take your pick. I lean toward using streaming services as an excuse, especially since this was released during the COVID era - even if your local theater was open, how high would the quality of the film have to appear to be in its promotional materials to convince you to risk your life, as opposed to just waiting a week or so and then catching it on Netflix or something?

The point is, this is a film you've likely never heard of, and its accompanying "soundtrack" (it's comprised of just six songs) failed to do its lone marketing job. But these type of things don't usually slip past hardcore Wu stans such as myself, so my Patreon write-up for the Cut Throat City soundtrack has been unlocked and is now available for subscribers at all levels, including the free tier.

Enjoy, folks!

-Max

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.