From "Money (That's What I Want)" to "For the Love of Money" to "Paid in Full" to "C.R.E.A.M.," a venerable tradition in pop music history; a dose of gotta get paid urgent realities and cautionary tales set to some delectable funk. I clump Wu Tang and the Geto Boys and Outkast and E-40 together. Post-golden age of hiphop, post-NWA gangster rap, lots of fuck this and bitch that; rap seemed to be going in a pulpy cartoon hardcore direction I wasn't sure I liked that much. No way my wife at the time liked it. But my sister, now passed, more fluent with popular rap, made me this mix tape including those groups and others. I hesitated listening to it much at first; partly because I wouldn't have the occasion to unless I was driving somewhere alone. But two or three times through I was hooked and it became a regular driving to and from work, especially on the way home. Harder, darker than the golden age stuff but also more cinematic and more authentically underclass ethnography in the crack era in a way, say, Salt & Pepa or De La Soul could not be. Wu Tang was emblematic of a shift. The golden age days of cramming samples of esoteric old pop tunes, cut and spliced into small bits, was over. Wu Tang collaged the mood or feel of old soul hits, not the words, and then layered on top snippets from kung fu movies and spoken word interludes from TV history. It felt like DIY Black arts for the '90s. Their first album, Enter the Wu-Tang, was undeniable.
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