#12, “Wu Tang Clan Ain’t Nuthing Ta F’ Wit’.” Wu Tang Clan (1993)

150 Favorite Songs: #12, “Wu Tang Clan Ain’t Nuthing Ta F’ Wit’.” Wu Tang Clan (1993)

Did you know that Enter the 36 Chambers, the first Wu Tang Clan album, is as old today as Elvis’s “Return to Sender” and “Can’t Help Falling in Love” were when Chambers was released? The Beatles wouldn’t even play Ed Sullivan until two years later. We are as far from the Wu Tang Clan as they were from the age of Chubby Checker, Sam Cooke, and Bobby Darin.

I say this not to make you feel old, if you remember 1993 well and still think of Wu Tang as vaguely contemporary, but to offer perspective: Pop music, as an art form, is simply not that old, and the midpoint since its origin continually moves forward in time. If Wu Tang doesn’t feel like an oldies group to you, well, I guess now you know how forty-somethings felt about Elvis back in the nineties. (Incidentally, if you jump that same distance back from “Return to Sender,” you’re at “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime” and “Minnie the Moocher”! Time is wild.)

Honestly, I think dividing the history of popular music into thirds, with Cab Calloway, Skip James, etc, as the beginning of the first act, the Elvis-to-Beatles transition as the start of act two, and Wu Tang as the launch of the third, you’d have a pretty good grasp of how trends and tastes and styles change. (Also, if “Wu Tang Clan Ain’t Nuthing Ta F’ Wit’” doesn’t sound dated to you, consider how references to Richard Dawson and Lawrence Taylor play to a teenager today.)

I think this is useful context for considering “Wu Tang Clan Ain’t Nuthing Ta F’ Wit’,” which is as good a song as “Minnie the Moocher” or “Can’t Help Falling in Love,” just calibrated to different sensibilities.

The thing I love most about this song is just how fucking joyful it is. The opening notes are vaguely spooky—more on them in a minute—with the “tiger style!” kung fu movie sample lasting only one repetition before somebody, I’ve never been able to tell who, can’t help but join in and say it with the sampled voice of Lo Lieh. There’s just so much exuberance on the song. It sounds like a bunch of dudes in a basement who are either cousins or who grew up together, just playing pretend with made up kung fu and superhero names they gave themselves, armed with a sampler and the creative impulse to show each other what they’ve got behind a mic, and maybe tell the world—as if the world would care—just how tough and cool they are. Over a sample, twisted to sound vaguely spooky, from the theme song to the Saturday morning superhero cartoon parody Underdog. They just took everything they liked and threw it into the mix, because why not?

Did anyone know who the Wu Tang Clan were when they recorded this song? They did not. But that only made it more important that they declare, proudly, that Wu Tang Clan ain’t nuthin ta fuck with. How else would people know?

The group recorded Enter the 36 Chambers in a tiny studio in Brooklyn, too small to even hold all of the group’s original nine members at once; in order to decide who would appear on each song, members had to battle on the mics for the right to do so. On “Wu Tang Clan Ain’t Nuthing Ta F’ Wit’,” the winners were RZA, the group’s leader and producer; Method Man, its most charismatic vocalist; and Inspectah Deck, its most intricate lyricist. The record doesn’t sound slick, as a lot of rap records in 1993 did; the biggest singles that year were “Informer” by Snow, “Whoomp! (There It Is)” by Tag Team, “Nuthin’ But a ‘G’ Thang” by Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg, and “Shoop” by Salt-N-Pepa, all of which—whatever you may think of some of them—sound fantastic, cleanly produced with clear highs and lows. This song, meanwhile, is decidedly lo-fi. Even thirty-one years later, it sounds better on cassette than anything else.

And it also just sounds fun. A friend of mine once asked, if you could swap in to play any part on any song every night, like to be the drummer on “Back in Black” or to play guitar on “Smells Like Teen Spirit” or whatever, what would you pick? And I think I would pick being Inspectah Deck in a Wu Tang cover band to do this song. Each verse flows effortlessly from rapper to rapper, each of them passing the mic to one another and giving each other shout-outs, dropping references to the things that make them happy—comic books and kung fu movies and afternoon game shows and football and cake and pie—and then shouting out pretty much everyone they know. The last minute and a half of the song are just RZA name-dropping friends from all five boroughs, and then from pretty much everywhere else—Ohio, Texas, Chicago, Detroit, California, “the fuckin’ west coast to the whole east,” D.C., the HBCU Morgan State, various radio DJs, and on and on and on, like he just wanted to make sure everybody felt the love he was feeling.

There’s just such a sense on this song of a group of young people carving something out for themselves that nobody was ever going to even consider giving to them, and doing it fully and completely on their own terms. Despite the fact that Wu Tang became the sort of institution that comparing them to Cab Calloway and Elvis Presley makes sense, until they turned up, nobody was demanding a rap record that sounded like this. There are a lot of great songs that are an example of someone perfecting a trend or successfully capturing the moment, and I love a lot of them, but this song sounds like “take it or leave it, this is us” from a group of young dudes who knew that what they were making was more likely to be a cool thing they did once than an enduring classic remembered as a turning point in the history of pop music.

I think there’s something cool about artists who recognize their moment and step up to it, but I think I ultimately relate more to the ones who just wanted to put something creative and unique that they were excited about into the world on their own terms, happy to let the world decide if it was what it wanted or not. Either way, RZA and Meth and Inspectah Deck got the most important message across: They declared that Wu Tang Clan ain’t nuthing ta fuck with, and I bet they weren’t even surprised when the rest of the world agreed.