Critiques sur l'album

Leave it to the Wu-Tang Clan to defy hip-hop's first law of career dynamics: When a rapper announces he's back, he's over. Clan members repeatedly announce, "The Wu is back" on Iron Flag, the collective's fourth album amid countless solo albums and spinoffs. In truth, on Iron Flag, the Wu are not just back - they're overhauled and determined to compete.

The Wu-Tang Clan know as well as anyone else how hip-hop leaves its pioneers in the dust. They can't expect thanks for defining million-selling underground rap with their 1993 debut album, Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers), which introduced the combination of minimal and maximal: the RZA's ominous, hollowed-out tracks plus the information overload from nine rough-hewn rappers. They spewed stories, philosophy, chants, jokes, stories and smut. And just as RZA planned it, they turned out to be an all-star team, from Method Man's emergence as a ruffneck Romeo and movie star to the crime stories of Chef Raekwon to the cascading free associations of Ghostface Killah and Genius.

But best-selling hip-hop has traded the particulars of street hustling for the bling-bling celebration of what ill-gotten gains can buy. As visions of excess and luxury have edged out the Wu's ghettocentric grit, the Wu brand no longer guarantees a platinum album. Check the logos: Fashionable thugs have switched from Wu Wear to Jay-Z's Rocawear. Iron Flag also had its own worrying indicators. Ol' Dirty Bastard, the Wu's inspirational wild card, is behind bars, unable to contribute to the album. The RZA had lately spread himself so thin that even his last solo album, Digital Bullet, was a letdown. With solo projects in the works, other members might be tempted to hoard material.

But the RZA is clearly a rap wrangler supreme. He reconvened the group in New York, refocused them on the Wu as a team and returned them to the fount of underground hip-hop. It's no accident that the first cut on the album is "In the Hood," delineated by sirens, honking horns and gunshots. It's the same old place, full of hustlers, hotties, drugs, dice games, crumbling schools and corrupt police. But it takes the Wu to notice that it's also a place where "convicts still live with their moms."

Wu-Tang Clan have the same initials as the World Trade Center, a coincidence that didn't escape Ghostface Killah. He reels off a post-September 11th verse in "Rules," warning hijackers, "Fly that shit over my hood and get blown to bits," and later deciding, "Mr. Bush, sit down, I'm in charge of the war."

Iron Flag is nearly all brag, a belligerent romp amid bullets and blunts. Determined to reach the streets again, the rappers have trimmed away some of the Wu's layers of metaphysics, though there are still plenty of off-the-wall references. The exception to the self-promotion is "Babies," a story in which a woman trying to protect her child assaults a crooked cop and is shot and beaten; the GZA puts it in the perspective of a hopeless neighborhood.

For all their boasts, the Wu are now looking over their shoulders at their hip-hop rivals. They're making songs, as a woman sings in "Rules," for "Bangers in your cars/Bangers in your jeep/Bang that shit retarded," and they're no longer so avant-garde that they disdain hooks. The big change on Iron Flag is in the RZA's tracks. His minor keys, vinyl-sourced drums and martial-arts-movie sound bites are still in the mix. But on Iron Flag, the RZA has decided to fill in the wide-open spaces that made past Wu cuts sound like desolate streets.

Welcome to the midrange, where the RZA now inserts sound effects, scratching and his real discovery: soul horn sections. They sound as rough and analog as his usual loops, but they also provide bright, extroverted hooks in song after song, including the single "Uzi (Pinky Ring)." There are also strategic vocals, like the irrepressible Flavor Flav chanting in "Soul Power," Ronnie Isley crooning in "Back in the Game" and a blues-drenched unidentified woman in "One of These Days."

While insisting their heart is still in the underground, the twenty-first-century Wu-Tang Clan are aiming for the radio, too. And with any luck, they'll rough up hip-hop one more time.

JON PARELES
(RS 888 - January 31, 2001)

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