Though the summer brought a whole slew of promising new albums, including a few others involving Wu-Tang Clan affiliations, I couldn’t help but develop some pretty high expectations for Only Built 4 Cuban Linx Pt 2, the sequel to Raekwon the Chef’s initial 1995 solo project, one of the best efforts produced by any member of the Wu stable. Sweating my way through tyrannical New Jersey humidity, my car’s CD changer was kept busy during the long vacation with no shortage of new material, hip-hop and otherwise, but none of it had me quite as enthralled as the mystique, the wonderful possibilities that swirled through my head around that cover, a futurized purple throwback to the original, which inevitably became a go-to listen once again.
Let me be a little honest. I’m a sucker for hype. Trying to stay musically hydrated during the dog days of summer, I was swilling something like a personal thirty-rack of Cuban Linx Kool-Aid a day, but based on other recent offerings which I had been excited for, which I had enjoyed, but which I could not love, my outlook grew more skeptical as August waned.
Regardless, September 8th was a doubly exciting day. Not only were classes to begin again, but the new Purple Tape was finally, actually coming out and my schedule definitely allowed me more than enough time to borrow a car and drive to Meriden for my very own shrink-wrapped, price-tagged, plastic disc. And one for a friend, though he has yet to pick it up.
It wasn’t a disappointment, which, in the case of a release that was preceded by such immense build-up, is fairly impressive. Before I get mixed up in the innards of a massive album that I couldn’t hope to pull apart in a single Blargus post (let alone a first Blargus post), I should say that the record’s success is in its balance. Aside from just being full of good music, it maintains a level of freshness while also simply doing what it was expected to do.
As even the cover art suggests, the album is truly a sequel; this is Only Built 4 Cuban Linx dressed up for the new millennium. It’s a little less gritty and a bit shinier, removed somewhat from the strictly street-level perspective of the original and maybe more obvious, slightly less clever. Regardless, the Cuban Linx status quo is maintained with strong, storytelling driven flows. I’ve always thought that listening to a good Raekwon verse is a little bit like watching The Wire. Early tracks like “Sonny’s Missing” maintain this aesthetic, but the inclusion of some especially savage details—“Chunk of meat flew off his cheekbone, broken teeth / Had a hole in his ‘lo shirt and took all his weed”—presents a new picture of a grizzled veteran speaking to a rougher world. Other cuts, such as “House of Flying Daggers” and “New Wu” feel more like Wu-Tang family records than Raekwon solo jams, as if this album were not only an update on its stated predecessor but also Enter the Wu-Tang or Wu-Tang Forever. Given the disaster that was 8 Diagrams, the most recent group effort, this is pretty encouraging.
The wildcard factor, as far as the State of the Wu-nion, is the RZA, who maintains an executive producer credit but only contributes a pair of beats, and whose voice is only heard on “Black Mozart,” wherein he chooses to rhythmically wail rather than rap. Something special is definitely missing due to his lessened input, but that may have been inevitable. Always the mastermind a step ahead of his peers, it’s as if he’s actually moved beyond this sort of thing. It makes sense, thinking about the progression of his own career and his latest project, Wu-Tang Chamber Music, which brought together Wu and non-Wu lyricists over orchestral arrangements styled after his Shaolin aesthetic. Any visionary, especially one so prolific, is bound to get bored if they never change up their output. When RZA took greater control over 8 Diagrams, there were problems, so while his mysterious touch is certainly missed here and OB4CL2 couldn’t be the same as the first without him, perhaps his moderate withdrawal was a necessary one.