This Is Not a Choir
Will Ashon, Chamber Music: Enter the Wu-Tang (in 36 Pieces)
Granta, 384pp, £14.99, ISBN 9781783784035
reviewed by James Cook
‘Instead of opening a book,’ Will Ashon tells us on page 25 of his second work of non-fiction, ‘you’ve opened the box of a jigsaw puzzle.’ This assertion – or caution, perhaps – is apposite. Chamber Music examines the history of New York rap collective Wu-Tang Clan, and their first album, 1993’s Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers), often described as ‘the greatest hip hop album of all time’. But instead of an orthodox band biography and pedestrian track-by-track appreciation, Ashon has chosen to tell the story through 36 chambers (chapters), ‘some interrelated, some not’, each a piece of the jigsaw. It’s a method which he claims ‘reflects its subject matter . . . the non-linear, sample-heavy’, magpie nature of hip hop.
Here, at random, are some of the topics investigated in the chambers: a history of the projects; absent fathers; Ralph Lauren clothing; the story of the East Coast Native American Indian; the Shaw Brother’s martial arts movies, minstrelsy and blackface; the polemics of the rap skit; the Nation of Islam; prison; crack; battle rhyming; slavery; marijuana . Chamber Music successfully uses these heterogeneous subjects as jumping-off points to place the Wu-Tang Clan in the wider context of black American culture, while simultaneously weaving in character sketches of the key members – producer and founder member RZA, Ghostface Killah, Ol’ Dirty Bastard – and a sense of the group’s story being somehow ‘pre-ordained . . . unstoppable’.
Ashon, a former record label boss and journalist, is a formidably gifted music writer (this, from page five: ‘a finger snap turned up so loud, mixed so hard, it sounds like someone chipping marble from a sculpture’). He also has the distinct advantage of having spent time in a recording studio himself. One of the most satisfying chambers is a meditation on how an MC’s intake of air between utterances can be used as part of the performance. Sound engineers who erase the rapper’s breaths in an attempt to tidy up a vocal take, the author contends, ‘should be fired’.
But what we sense Ashon is really after are connections. He begins to make these as the narrative picks up pace, around the 11th chamber, where we find RZA walking Staten Island, plotting his dream group (‘Princes and geniuses dig down together now to form one clan’). Ashon links this to the moment when early 90s hip hop shrugged off the injunction to make people dance, and became downbeat, grimier. 92bpm – walking pace. In the 20th chamber, an examination of the ‘romanticism, perversity and vulgarity’ of the Wu’s beloved kung fu movies (‘the genre of the underdog of colour’ in which there are only non-white heroes) leads to the fascinating insight in the 22nd chamber that hip hop isn’t ‘like’ a martial art, it is a martial art, ‘a mental survival tool for the oppressed’. These movies, ‘where a skill was central’, were embraced by rappers; indeed, their structure, ‘an unbroken intensity of spectacle’ – would make good shorthand, the author suggests, for the definition of a hip hop album.
Towards the end of Chamber Music, Ashon’s impulse for making connections occasionally becomes reckless. ‘It’s tempting to get numerological’, he says in the 36th chamber, and he does. Yet he’s aware this might be a shortcoming, and manages to convince the reader of one of his more excessive ideas thus: ‘I know this sounds far-fetched, possibly conceptually confused . . . all I can say in answer is look at the world’. His self-awareness extends further. The book lacks the memoir strands of Ashon’s previous book, the excellent Strange Labyrinth – in which he roams Epping Forest talking to members of Crass, and psyching himself up to spend a night alone in a tree – for a reason. We discover late on, in the 34th chamber, why he has chosen to include so little that is personal: his sense of cultural appropriation. ‘I am white, I am Oxbridge-educated, I am from England . . . I shouldn’t even be in the index,’ he writes, but then adds, disarmingly: ‘what can I tell you? I wrote it, anyway, even knowing I shouldn’t’. Such charm is hard to resist.
What ultimately shines from the page is the author’s love and enthusiasm for his subject. He gives the reader a vivid sense of the ‘sheer fuck you panache of classic Wu’. This is refreshing, as much of rap’s early renaissance is old enough to be part of today’s heritage industry. The transgressive thrill of finding Public Enemy on the cover of Melody Maker in 1988, or hearing the startling ‘kettle whistle’ sample from ‘Fight The Power’ coming out of daytime Radio One are now long-gone – and cherished – pop cultural moments. Since then there has been a taming of rap’s radical and seditious elements, exemplified by dreary phrases such as ‘the best hip hop album of all time’, with its whiff of a Sky Arts documentary. Ashon, on the other hand, in encapsulating the Wu’s first record with the sinuous sentence ‘a stream of nihilist invention delivered in nine voices’, sends one straightaway to dust off the CD.
Those nine voices are key. The Clan were a groundbreaking idea: a committee of artists each with their own separate record deals, put together by a visionary genius, RZA. In one of the book’s most revealing insights, Ashon captures the essence of their dynamic. The Wu-Tang Clan, although a collective, had the individualism of hip hop wired in. It’s all ‘I’. ‘They operate as a group of highly skilled individuals carrying out individual actions, much like a cricket team or basketball team . . . This is not a choir.’ But, he reminds us, their individualism was not about conspicuous consumption, as much 90s hip hop was, but about battling. ‘Nine rap assassins crash in, swords drawn . . .’
Chamber Music is an eclectic triumph; a scholarly, exhilarating account of a group and its times. And in choosing the unusual jigsaw form of disparate or interlinked chambers, Ashon proves that in music writing, as in hip hop, ‘there is no orthodoxy . . . beyond the simple (and complex) stipulation that the result should be dope.’
Here, at random, are some of the topics investigated in the chambers: a history of the projects; absent fathers; Ralph Lauren clothing; the story of the East Coast Native American Indian; the Shaw Brother’s martial arts movies, minstrelsy and blackface; the polemics of the rap skit; the Nation of Islam; prison; crack; battle rhyming; slavery; marijuana . Chamber Music successfully uses these heterogeneous subjects as jumping-off points to place the Wu-Tang Clan in the wider context of black American culture, while simultaneously weaving in character sketches of the key members – producer and founder member RZA, Ghostface Killah, Ol’ Dirty Bastard – and a sense of the group’s story being somehow ‘pre-ordained . . . unstoppable’.
Ashon, a former record label boss and journalist, is a formidably gifted music writer (this, from page five: ‘a finger snap turned up so loud, mixed so hard, it sounds like someone chipping marble from a sculpture’). He also has the distinct advantage of having spent time in a recording studio himself. One of the most satisfying chambers is a meditation on how an MC’s intake of air between utterances can be used as part of the performance. Sound engineers who erase the rapper’s breaths in an attempt to tidy up a vocal take, the author contends, ‘should be fired’.
But what we sense Ashon is really after are connections. He begins to make these as the narrative picks up pace, around the 11th chamber, where we find RZA walking Staten Island, plotting his dream group (‘Princes and geniuses dig down together now to form one clan’). Ashon links this to the moment when early 90s hip hop shrugged off the injunction to make people dance, and became downbeat, grimier. 92bpm – walking pace. In the 20th chamber, an examination of the ‘romanticism, perversity and vulgarity’ of the Wu’s beloved kung fu movies (‘the genre of the underdog of colour’ in which there are only non-white heroes) leads to the fascinating insight in the 22nd chamber that hip hop isn’t ‘like’ a martial art, it is a martial art, ‘a mental survival tool for the oppressed’. These movies, ‘where a skill was central’, were embraced by rappers; indeed, their structure, ‘an unbroken intensity of spectacle’ – would make good shorthand, the author suggests, for the definition of a hip hop album.
Towards the end of Chamber Music, Ashon’s impulse for making connections occasionally becomes reckless. ‘It’s tempting to get numerological’, he says in the 36th chamber, and he does. Yet he’s aware this might be a shortcoming, and manages to convince the reader of one of his more excessive ideas thus: ‘I know this sounds far-fetched, possibly conceptually confused . . . all I can say in answer is look at the world’. His self-awareness extends further. The book lacks the memoir strands of Ashon’s previous book, the excellent Strange Labyrinth – in which he roams Epping Forest talking to members of Crass, and psyching himself up to spend a night alone in a tree – for a reason. We discover late on, in the 34th chamber, why he has chosen to include so little that is personal: his sense of cultural appropriation. ‘I am white, I am Oxbridge-educated, I am from England . . . I shouldn’t even be in the index,’ he writes, but then adds, disarmingly: ‘what can I tell you? I wrote it, anyway, even knowing I shouldn’t’. Such charm is hard to resist.
What ultimately shines from the page is the author’s love and enthusiasm for his subject. He gives the reader a vivid sense of the ‘sheer fuck you panache of classic Wu’. This is refreshing, as much of rap’s early renaissance is old enough to be part of today’s heritage industry. The transgressive thrill of finding Public Enemy on the cover of Melody Maker in 1988, or hearing the startling ‘kettle whistle’ sample from ‘Fight The Power’ coming out of daytime Radio One are now long-gone – and cherished – pop cultural moments. Since then there has been a taming of rap’s radical and seditious elements, exemplified by dreary phrases such as ‘the best hip hop album of all time’, with its whiff of a Sky Arts documentary. Ashon, on the other hand, in encapsulating the Wu’s first record with the sinuous sentence ‘a stream of nihilist invention delivered in nine voices’, sends one straightaway to dust off the CD.
Those nine voices are key. The Clan were a groundbreaking idea: a committee of artists each with their own separate record deals, put together by a visionary genius, RZA. In one of the book’s most revealing insights, Ashon captures the essence of their dynamic. The Wu-Tang Clan, although a collective, had the individualism of hip hop wired in. It’s all ‘I’. ‘They operate as a group of highly skilled individuals carrying out individual actions, much like a cricket team or basketball team . . . This is not a choir.’ But, he reminds us, their individualism was not about conspicuous consumption, as much 90s hip hop was, but about battling. ‘Nine rap assassins crash in, swords drawn . . .’
Chamber Music is an eclectic triumph; a scholarly, exhilarating account of a group and its times. And in choosing the unusual jigsaw form of disparate or interlinked chambers, Ashon proves that in music writing, as in hip hop, ‘there is no orthodoxy . . . beyond the simple (and complex) stipulation that the result should be dope.’