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.

1971

Mr O'Keeffe

Someone once said that writing about music was like dancing about architecture. Whoever it was clearly hadn’t read 1971, a brilliant book which shows that when David Hepworth writes about music it’s like losing yourself on the dance floor to your favourite song or admiring a particularly beautiful building.

Hepworth’s thesis is simple – that 1971, for various reasons, is the greatest year in rock, the greatest not only in terms of the music that was recorded and released in that year but also in the way it marked so many significant transitions.