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.
