Saturday, June 8, 8 p.m., $55+
Red Hat Amphitheater, Raleigh
In a scene from the new, four-part Showtime docuseries Wu-Tang Clan: Of Mics and Men, director Jim Jarmusch—who cast Wu-Tang Clan’s RZA and GZA in his 2003 film Coffee and Cigarettes—had this to say about the legendary rap crew: “You cannot destroy the strength of ideas, and Wu-Tang celebrates that. They are warriors of the imagination, and the power of the imagination is far stronger than guns or money.”
In 1993, I met the three guys that I still cherish to this day as my best friends. We were all freshmen at a suburban high school in south central Kansas. What we had in common at first (military kids, hoop dreamers, and hip-hop heads) was enough for us to gel and insulate ourselves from some of the racial antagonisms that come with attending a majority-white high school. But Wu-Tang’s genesis that same year, with the release of the single “Protect Ya Neck” and the adventurous album Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers), introduced us to a world that we could escape to, just as some of our peers were doing with comic books.
We called ourselves the Ghostface Killahz (back then, your crew wasn’t legit unless you substituted a “z” for an “s” in the plural), named after who we thought was Wu-Tang’s sharpest and most vivid rapper. And in the same way that every Wu-Tang member gave themselves Wu-Gambino aliases (Noodles, Johnny Blaze, Tony Starks, etc.) in addition to their main monikers, we also gave ourselves Wu-Gambino names. There was Jocko the Unique Manifique, Shakes the Handler, and Screwnino. I adopted the name Johnny O’Malley.
In our imaginations, we were the students and swordsmen of the Wu-Tang ethic, and we took pride in vehemently defending the Shaolin rappers’ originality in a hip-hop climate when living in the Midwest meant that you were expected to identify with non-East Coast artists such as Dr. Dre on the West Coast, Scarface and UGK in the South, or Bone Thugs-n-Harmony further north. But to us, the synergy of ten unique emcees who based their aesthetic on kung-fu flicks, street culture, and the Islam-influenced Five-Percent Nation’s knowledge-of-self foundation was just too mighty to deny.
Over the next three years, our devotion to Wu-Tang gained strength as each member released his solo album. Method Man’s maniacal Tical helped us develop heavy-handed attitudes; Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s Return to the 36 Chambers showed us how a savant could be hell-raiser, agitator, and stylist alike. We digested the opulent street tales from Raekwon’s Only Built 4 Cuban Linx… to the point of indoctrination, and the GZA’s methodical Liquid Swords intellectualized our understanding of lyricism.
For me, however, the most meaningful part of my relationship with Wu-Tang was using their music’s many Five-Percent Nation references to explore my own “true existence” as a black adolescent in a white supremacist environment. And while the Five-Percenters’ Supreme Mathematics and Supreme Alphabet were a bit too abstract for me to fully immerse myself in the movement, eventually, it was Wu-Tang and other socio-politically forward-thinking hip-hop acts that led me down a principled path to converting to Orthodox Islam at the age of seventeen.
By 1997, Wu-Tang Clan had achieved megastar status, with the reception of the group’s double-album, Wu-Tang Forever, hitting a global fever pitch. On its release day at record stores around the world, lines were hundreds of people deep.
That day, back home in Wichita, Kansas, Screwnino had camped out for hours in front of our local record store to be the first in line to buy Wu-Tang Forever CDs for all of us. We had just graduated a month earlier and would all soon be off to our separate colleges and walks of life. That would be the last time that our crew would ever be in the same city to experience a Wu-Tang release date together. Unfortunately, that also might have been the last time that a Wu-Tang Clan release mattered so much to its legions of fans.
So, we came up with a plan to eternalize our brotherhood and love for our rap heroes. We made a pact to get Wu-Tang logo tattoos before the summer ended, and since Screwnino was the artist of the crew, we’d let him design them. But my newly adopted religion prohibited getting tattoos—especially one that promoted idol worship—and I soon opted out of the agreement.
As the years went on and my passion for new Wu-Tang solo projects persisted, I began to regret pulling out of the tattoo pact. As I examined my life, I realized that Wu-Tang Clan logo was a beacon of nostalgia—my own north star and lasting symbol of my formative years.
So finally, as a forty-year-old grown-ass man celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) and a Wu-Tang concert heading for Raleigh this Saturday, I walked into a black-owned tattoo shop in Durham’s Five Points neighborhood and got the Wu-Tang logo tattooed on my left arm. A pact is a pact, and if there was anything to be gleaned from the Wu-Tang documentary, it’s that the brotherly bonds need maintenance and nurturing, even with a gesture as cliché as a tattoo.
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