Sitting down with ForbezDVDPromo, Wu-Tang Clan mentor and affiliate Popa Wu shared his thoughts on the impact of the group throughout the 1990s.

“You can’t go through me nor around me to get to my brother,” he said, apparently speaking to the strength of the group dynamic. “That’s how we always was and the media—as you get bigger and bigger, I watched us go from children that had nothing and took nothing to make something and turned out bigger than The Beatles.

“We got attacked like that sometimes,” he added. “I didn’t even know what was going on ‘cause I was just the road manager and I’m scared to death. I’d jump under the table. It was real like that. But I didn’t know people loved it like that. And they loved us ‘cause of what we were saying. It was different than what anybody else was saying. We was telling them the truth through our music to all the youth in the street. We was giving them knowledge of themselves…Knowledge means to know and look, listen, and deserve. You have to deserve the things that you around. We in the Universe man and this is hell. It was prefixed for us. It was ordained for you to come through a womb and go through hell first before you could see heaven. But it wasn’t above your head nor was hell below your feet. You put these things there. Heaven is not above your head nor hell below your feet. Heaven and hell is within. Heaven is what you make it and hell is what you got to go through. But most of the time you put yourself through hell. So you got to learn what you put yourself through to come out right. [Ol’] Dirty put himself through everything he did and he came out. He came out. He came out and we are still in.”

Popa Wu is the father of other Wu-Tang Clan affiliate ShaCronz and Free Murda and a member of the Five Percent Nation. Earlier this year he spoke about the still-developing story of the making of the group’s forthcoming A Better Tomorrow. “It’s here already,” the Wu-Tang Clan mentor said in January. “It’s just that it’s got to be closed up by Rae[kwon]. Rae’s the only one that’s got to close up. Everybody did what they did…They even got the treatments for videos and all that shit. RZA’s ahead of his game right now. It’s just that Raekwon’s just compromising…you know how a person gets…when you’re a person that never had nothing and then when you get something and then its [taken] away from you, it’s hard to adjust back.”

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