Wu-Tang Forever!

Chamber Music about the Wu-Tang ( in 36 Pieces) by Will Ashon
Reviewed by Mr Kemp

This book is a sort of history and meditation on the influential hip hop group Wu-Tang Clan’s first album, Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers). Annoyingly, it doesn’t work. Ashon doesn’t really seem to know exactly what he wants to do with the book. And it shows.

At once Chamber Music is a history of hip hop, a potted biography of RZA, GZA, ODB, Method Man, Raekwon, Ghostface Killah, Inspectah Deck, U-God, and Masta Killa, a treatise on race relations and socio economic equality, as well as being a catalogue of Wu-Tang’s influences from Asian philosophy and martial arts films. As this sounds, it is a mess. The parts don’t cohere into a satisfying whole.

This is a shame, as bits are really strong.  The chapter charting the genesis of the squealing saxophone sound used by RZA in the beat of 'Protect Ya Neck' is absolutely fantastic. Ashon traces the bizarre wailing noise from the J.B.'s 'The Grunt' to its sampling in Public Enemy's 'Rebel Without a Pause' to Ultramagnetic MCS's 'Ease Back' to the Geto Boys, and finally to Wu-Tang.  This chapter was the highlight of the book, and really helped illuminate how referential hip hop has always been. Ashon's encyclopaedic knowledge of hip hop, from his years as a music journalist and manager of Big Dada Recordings, is unbelievable here.  I just wish the rest of the book was like this.

I am really drawn towards the extent of Ashon's hip hop knowledge, and I think I would have liked to have read this as a history book. However, much of this book is pretentious, woolly, po-faced, sententious, and almost cringingly earnest. At times this is unquestioning hagiography, particularly in the exculpatory chapter on ODB. At other times, the level of 'wokeness' is so much that it feels insincere. Far too often, the book feels like Ashon is trying to write like Geoff Dyer: hip, intelligent, wry, and smarter than you. But it doesn't really end up like that. It ends up inchoate. This is a shame, because there's a lot that could work here. Maybe it's worth picking up Jeff Chang's history of hip hop, Can't Stop Won't Stop, instead.