By letting this be the first song that "leaks" (more like "stumbles out of the wild, grizzled and malnourished") from their much needed return album, Wu-Tang preemptively address/threaten all the peeps prepared to hate. What's fun is that they're doing it with a track that's so easy -- but not necessarily correct -- to hate on. Former CMG comrade Connor Morris puts it simply: the beat here is "boring." In a sense that's certainly true, the music pretty much just a simple string descent where the last held note comprises the bars and the drums kick-snare along ploddingly. Billed as a DJ Scratch and RZA co-production, I imagine that "co-production" consisted of the Prince throwing a beat-up vinyl at Scratch with a command of "sample this." Shit's low and surly, and in early RZA tradition it feels like it was recorded in a small cave; the dwarfish synth trumpet that announces the beginning is perhaps intentionally hilarious.

But RZA explains in The Wu-Tang Manual why he originally got into producing: to create beats that'll make rappers jump off -- grimy beats that'll spark then firmly underpin a barrage of vivid imagery, morose anger, and ecstatic absurdity. Maybe this is why he's soundtracking for Tarantino. There's nothing ornate or polished about classic Wu, and as a statement of revived aesthetic that returns to its inceptive principles, acting like Iron Flag (2001) never happened, "Watch Your Mouth" is both lazy and incendiary. The rapping's representative, illustrating just how half-successful the track is in the context of RZA's schema while also playing out like your majority of Wu-Tang songs. It's always been true: some of the Clan got more to jump off with than others.

Raekwon opens less than auspiciously, cool and technically adept but showing all the passion of a dude who woke up between naps to drop a few bars. Masta Killa, however, kills it, coming off more distinguished after two solo albums than I would have expected from him back in the day -- verbal tics break through his flow with the impact of gunfire. Method Man scowls over the mic, remembering everything that made him "Method Man," spitting the name "Wu" at one point like the very utterance of the syllable will split skulls. Ghostface is Ghostface, sweating charisma and grilling the streets "like George Foreman." Indefatigable, GZA lays down a concise mission statement to close the song, "Put my Clan in the front / Reunite them," and then drops some choice lines prescient to an instance in Chicago this August where the Clan, um, dealt with a heckler at Rock the Bells ("You can roll as a whole / and they'll send you back in fractions"). But Deck's flow and timbre fall flat, and U-God, inevitably, sucks.

U-God sucking, though, is just part of the fact that this sounds like Wu-Tang; whatever the merits relative to their other work, that it sounds like Wu-Tang makes it inherently good. That's probably a cop-out, but if it is, it's an ineffably beautiful cop-out to us disciples. Better watch your motherfucking mouths, haters.

permanent link ::