Macklemore, who referenced Wu-Tang Clan in his “Can’t Hold Us” single, recently reviewed Wu’s Enter The Wu-Tang (36 Chambers).
“I remember starting to listen to it when I was in the sixth grade, so I was probably a little bit late from when it first dropped, but once I found it, it became the soundtrack to my entire existence,” Macklemore said in a review of the album on xxlmag.com. “The styles were just so different than anything that I had ever heard before. I grew up on a lot of West Coast gangster rap up until that point, and when I first got introduced to Wu-Tang, it was like all these different voices and cadences and personalities, and the charisma was completely different. You had Snoop [Dogg] with this really silky, pimp delivery, and then you had somebody that’s a complete, polar opposite like an Ol’ Dirty Bastard or a Method Man, where it was grimy, where it sounded like four-track recordings of spitting saliva.”
Macklemore also spoke about the album’s “raw” nature.
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“It brought a level of grime to the game,” Macklemore said. “It brought a raw, malt liquor, my-hair-half-braided element of ‘I don’t give a fuck.’ That’s what was refreshing about it to me. There was something that Wu-Tang grabbed onto that felt real and organic. They felt very free. It wasn’t manufactured. They were capturing a moment in their recording and doing it in a way that was completely innovative in its own way, and no one really had a sound like that when Wu-Tang came out. ‘Protect Ya Neck’ was one that stood out, ‘C.R.E.A.M.’ But the whole project, I could literally listen to the whole thing. What’s crazy is that these guys still do Rock The Bells damn near every year, and there’s always a new generation of Wu-Tang fans. They’ve solidified their place as the greatest Hip Hop group of all time.”
On “Can’t Hold Us,” Macklemore says that Wu-Tang Clan raised him. “That’s what you get when Wu-Tang raised you,” Mack raps on the track.
Wu-Tang Clan released Enter The Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) in 1993 via Loud Records. The group is celebrating the album’s twentieth anniversary this month.
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