The RZA built a new rap aesthetic, dirtying up the classic crate-digger soul-loop style of DJ Premier and Pete Rock and Large Professor, making those pianos and disembodied voices sound broken and ghostly and lost, making the drums rattle and clank messily.
They remade themselves, changed their names to the RZA and the GZA. They lost their record deals, retreated back to Staten Island. Those two kids, Prince Rakeem and the Genius, both released albums into the crowded golden-age New York rap marketplace, and both of those albums flopped. Two kids from the Staten Island projects, cousins, became rappers, slowly built names for themselves, had the beginnings of actual careers. The Wu-Tang Clan had an origin story, and it was a good one. And that’s also how it felt if you were a music-dork kid when Enter The Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) erupted into the world.
You have to immerse yourself, to throw yourself into the deep end, to submit to the grand tangled incomprehensibility of all of it. But it takes time, and thought, and effort. You trade your comic books for other kids’ comic books, and that fills in some blanks. You slowly piece things together, making connections where you can. Maybe you keep following the storyline, or maybe you move onto something else, something just as difficult to parse. Maybe the comic you find is a self-contained storyline, but it’s more likely that you’re right in the middle of something unfolding, and you have no idea what else might be happening. You don’t know the extent of everyone’s powers, or whether their real identities are secret or not. But you don’t know anything about the characters’ relationships, their old grudges, their burning inner desires. You probably recognize a character or two, or maybe more it’s not like there’s a child alive who doesn’t know who Spider-Man is. And then you buy that one, and you attempt to make sense of it. You look at covers until one grabs your imagination. Instead, you flip through the racks at Walgreen’s or Rite-Aid or Barnes & Noble or maybe even an actual straight-up comic book store (which, nowadays, might actually be the only place you can do this). When you get into comic books as a kid, you don’t start with the origin stories - at least not if you’re doing it right.
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