All-TIME 100 Songs

The Wu-Tang Clan’s improbable blend of kung-fu-movie mysticism and the paranoid apocalyptica of the Five Percent Nation gave them an unrivaled mystic appeal among teenage hip-hop fans. But the eschatology would have counted for naught if the WTC — inter alia Method Man, Raekwon and Ole Dirty Bastard — hadn’t been brilliant rappers, and if their leader and producer, RZA, hadn’t been a musical genius. That much is clear on C.R.E.A.M.,” off their legendary 1993 debut album Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers): A moody string-and-piano sample from an obscure Charmels song loops like a nagging question. A pervasive sense of unease and gloom is an auteurial constant in RZA’s work. And on “C.R.E.A.M.” it provides the score for a true-crime confessional. “Cash rules everything around me,” the clansmen intone. If they weren’t making it selling records, like the song says, they’d be selling drugs and “sticking up white boys in ball courts.”

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