How the Wu-Tang Clan changed history, more than 30 years ago

A concert not to be missed, especially if you love rap, is the great return of the Wu-Tang Clan to Italy, more than ten years after the last time. The “Wu-Tang Forever: The Final Chamber” tour celebrates the collective’s repertoire in its entirety, starting, obviously, from the historic debut album “Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers)”, which came out exactly 32 years ago and still sounds like the pillar of hip hop which one it is.

In 1993, the East Coast scene was in a transition phase. While G-funk dominated on the West Coast, in New York the air was harsherunderground. RZA, founder and leader of Wu-Tang, gathered nine MCs (“Master of Ceremonies”, rappers, those who entertain an audience by rapping over a beat) – including GZA, Ol’ Dirty Bastard, Ghostface Killah, Raekwon, Method Man, U‑God, Inspectah Deck and others – and produced the album entirely in a small studio in Brooklyn, the Firehouse Studio, with a limited budget and artisanal means.

Its release marked not only the official debut of the collective, but also a paradigm shift: a raw, experimental sound rooted in New York street culture and sampling old records and kung-fu films. The title of the album in fact recalls the tradition of martial arts (in particular the film “The 36th Chamber of Shaolin”) and the mythology that the group built around it: nine members, four “chambers” each.

The most distinctive element is RZA’s production: soul samples, jazz, minimal rhythm, dark atmospheres, rumbles, urban noises, dialogues taken from martial arts films. An atmosphere that countless rappers (Nas and The Notorious BIG above all) would then try to replicate in the following years. Each member of the group finds space to show their personality, within a repertoire that speaks of street lifeof competition, of pride, of neighborhood dynamics. CREAM (“Cash Rules Everything Around Me”) is perhaps the best example of this: “The only way to make money was to deal drugs, and that’s how we start, son, running around with this and that, pulling out guns for fun.”

There are many reasons why “36 Chambers” changed the rules of the game. He helped bring East Coast hip-hop back to the forefront, at a time when the mainstream was dominated by the West Coast; the raw, but very powerful sound created a model for hardcore rap in the years to come; it’s difficult to imagine a better debut than this for a collective made up of nine voices, who manage to coexist without losing uniqueness; And a journey into the archetypes of hip hop culture which, not surprisingly, was included in the National Recording Registry for its cultural relevance.