RDAT Tournament – Game 10 – Groups Bracket

No. 1 – Wu-Tang Clan – Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers ) vs. No. 4. – Run D.M.C. – Run D.M.C.

I don’t know the width of its viewership, but Video Music Box started in 1983 and could be found in the UHF portion of the dial…when you actually had a dial on your television set and had to physically turn the channel.

My adolescent memory places its broadcast network, WNYC, on Channel 69, but can’t recall exactly what time it came on. But that was the location to see rap videos, especially since a) most of us didn’t have cable so we couldn’t get MTV and b) MTV wasn’t playing rap videos.

So if you wanted to see ‘The Message’ by Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five,, ‘The Breaks’ by Kurtis Blow or anything by The Fat Boys, there was only one place to go.

So ‘Rock Box’ by Run D.M.C. was getting radio play and video air time in the country’s largest market.

The influence of this can’t be calculated as thousands upon thousands of youth in the greater New York City area were witnessing this new musical format on the screen, even if they weren’t hearing it being played on car radios and boom-boxes in the streets.

I wrote about the album Run D.M.C. in Game 2, and I have to believe they were influenced with the Wu-Tang Clan’s original members growing up in Brooklyn and Staten Island. According to Wikipedia, Russell Jones, Robert Diggs and Gary Grice were cousins and formed the group ‘Force of the Imperial Master’.

The martial arts influence likely came from another rabbit-ears TV staple, the Saturday afternoon Drive-In Movie. In New York, the outlet for poorly-dubbed films from the Far East featuring Asians kicking assorted asses for various reasons was WNEW Channel 5, that would eventually become Fox 5.

The first words on Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) are likely from Shaolin and Wu Tang, a 1983 film directed and starring Gordon Liu.

He was also the lead role of San Te in The 36th Chamber of Shaolin, Johnny Mo of the Crazy 88 Yakuza in Kill Bill: Volume 1 and kung fu master Pai Mei in Volume 2.

Clearly, Old DB, RZA, GZA and Quentin Tarantino were in awe of Liu’s work and paid homage. As the production mastermind behind 36 Chambers, RZA was artfully able to mine the same 70’s R&B records as everyone was at the time.

The list includes The Jackson 5, Otis Redding, Gladys Knight & the Pips, The Dramatics and Kool and the Gang. But he made it sound like everything was stolen from the Drive-In Movie sound lot. The exceptions to this are two of the tracks started by Raekwon – “Can It Be All So Simple” and “C.R.E.A.M.”

But even those remain true to the Wu with a haunting flute deep in the background on “Can It Be” and by the time you reach Cash Rules Everything Around Me, you’ve listened to eight straight tracks without thinking about skipping anything.

You can’t skip any song featuring GZA, who is the real star of this album. While Method Man may be the biggest mainstream star from the Clan and many would argue that Ghostface turned out the best albums…well, let me let Method say it himself.

It’s like this, I’ma start from the top
Inspectah Deck, he’s like
He’s like that dude that’ll sit back and watch you
Play yourself and all that, right?
And see you sit there and know you lyin’
And he’ll take you to court after that
‘Cause he the Inspectah, that’s why he the and
And also he the Rebel I.N.S.
You know what I’m sayin’?
And Shallah Raekwon, he the Chef
He cookin’ up some marvelous shit to get your mouth waterin’
On some “oh shit”
Then, then it’s, then it’s the Method Man
It’s like mad different methods to the way I do my shit

[Raekwon] You gotta smoke a bean in here, anyhow

[Method Man] And I’m tellin’ you, mine
Basically Method Man is like
Roll that shit, light that shit, smoke it
And then Baby U, he a psychopathic
He a psychopathic thinker
And and, then we got, then we got the Ol’ Dirty Bastard
‘Cause there ain’t no father to his style
That’s why he the Ol’ Dirty Bastard
Ghostface Killah, you know what I’m sayin’?
He on some “now you see me, now you don’t”
Know what I’m sayin’? And and, the RZA
He the sharpest motherfucka in the whole Clan
He always on point, razor sharp
With the beats, with the rhymes, whatever, and he DJ

[Raekwon] And the GZA, the G is just the Genius
He, he’s the backbone of the whole shit

[RZA] It’s self-explanatory, Genius, word

[Method Man] He the head, let’s put it that way
We form like Voltron, and GZA happen to be the head
You know what I’m sayin’?

What he’s saying is in the early 90’s when MTV had emerged to shine a spotlight on hip-hop and the light was focused out West, a group from New York, but not the traditional haunts that had dominated the genre like Queens or the Bronx, was about to stomp into the game like a 100 meter tall robot formed by joining lions into one being.

They went from a trio with an underground tape making the rounds in Brooklyn to opening a financial agency and getting drafted in the first round of The Racial Draft.