It can be argued that the last gasp of Grimy Hip Hop came on November 21st of the year 2000. It was Hip Hop in the American market before the crash and the Wu-Tang Clan was releasing their long awaited 3 rd release, The W. It had been four years since Wu-Tang Forever dropped and the anticipation was attracting interest that was usually reserved for the Puffy or Lyor Cohen type affairs. The rap industry was buzzing.
But the sand had already shifted under the super-group. The RZA had already stepped away from the captain’s chair to concentrate his creativity in other areas and the lack of his focused direction and guiding hand showed in the music. Cameras rolled as the life of Ole Dirty Bastard, the brilliant sad clown who was the heart of Wu-tang, began falling apart in front of an unsympathetic public. .Loud Records, the label which had provided Wu-Tang the launch pad for its world domination strategy, was struggling to remain competitive in the face of impending media consolidation. And a large portion of the changing demographics of the music’s audience simply had no use for music that didn’t do it for them in the club.
It seemed as though Wu's time had passed. With so many forces working against it, The W became perhaps the first double platinum Hip Hop album to be considered a flop. When the album failed to make a lasting impression on the new generation of bottle and tag poppers and faded from the charts, it took all of the financial aspirations of Hip Hop heads with dirt beneath their nails with it. It was the unofficial end of Grimy Hip Hop.
Yet seven years later, the Wu-Tang still remains and gritty and soulful Hip Hop music lives through. In light of this, we are sending a shout out to Ghostface (ne. Tony Starks, Pretty Toney) who has been working diligently to ensure that an almost lost arm of Hip Hop continues to move forward. You know Ghostface, the cat who hid his face behind a mask years before MF Doom donned his facial encasing. The cat that somehow made stream of conscious story-telling raps make perfect sense (at least most of the time). Ghost was part of the second wave of go-getta Staten Island cats, the crew that bridged the gap between the All In Together Now incarnation that consisted of the RZA, GZA and ODB and the fully outfitted Wu-Tang Clan that formed like Voltron and rushed global culture. A close knit fraternity of skilled lyricists and strong personalities it was unforeseeable that it would be Ghost who would both keep the brand relevant and round out the sound by adding new layers of depth and feeling. Once a new jack, Ghostface has matured into the torch bearer, the metal that won’t tarnish.
He is a veteran in every sense. Ghost has lived to tell tales of beefs with stick-up kids, hollow heart females and fellow rap icons alike. And like a grown man he has tidily resolved the remnants of these past conflicts and attributed them to youth and the two-many-lions-in-the-room effect while learning to live with regrets. Ghost is all grown up now. Six solo albums deep and already etched neatly into the history of the form, he has continued to refine his perspective and evolve his MC skills. And though, cursorily, his subject matter seems to stray little from other “street life reporters,” it is his natural and logical progression through the maturation process that sets him apart from the rest.
Call his development the natural expansion of the Blues into the 21st century. Five percent musings now flow from a Sunni Muslim source. He takes beats that would seem old in the hands of his contemporaries and makes them pop by slitting them open and pouring large amounts of frustration and reality inside. His vivid recreations of crack life play out in operatic vignettes that bleed both bravado and desperation all over the track. Beneath the flecks of coke dust are shreds of street anthems taped haphazardly to fantasies of dead end salvation. Who captures this sentiment better than Ghostface?
You see him sweating like bullets on stage, refusing to take off the coats, the chains, the burden of holding the door until the Grimy cats can come back in. The grown man crooning the blues over retextured soul classics has carried the “Soul Man’ legacy into the Hip Hop era. Ghostface, the most original rapper alive. The most soul-full rapper alive. Right On. Brother. Right On. |
