RDAT: Groups Final – ‘C.R.E.A.M.’ vs. ‘Player’s Ball’

Makkid Rap Debut Album Tournament,

RDAT Tournament – Game 12 – Groups Final

Wu-Tang Clan – Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) vs. OutKast – Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik

It would be years before I saw The Warriors, Walter Hill’s “hip, super-stylized action film” the way the director intended – without commercials and with the uncut violence and language that earned it an ‘R’ rating.

The film begins with all the street gangs from New York City responding to a summons by Cyrus to meet at Van Courtlandt Park in the Bronx. His plan to unite and control the city is shattered when someone shoots him. The Warriors are blamed and the rest of the film is them attempted to get back to their home base of Coney Island.

The total distance they would have to cover is roughly 25 miles. It sounds like a lot, but Manhattan is just 13 miles long and there are people from Harlem who have never been to the East Village and vice versa.

People put geographical limitations up on their own, whether that’s Boston’s Chestnut Hill to Quincy or Loganville to Duluth in north Atlanta. So for anyone not familiar with The A, hearing about two dope boys reppin’ East Point, College Park, Decatur and the SWATS sounded beyond foreign. It was completely out of this world.

Maybe that’s why the second album was titled ATLiens.

The sounds created by Organized Noize were different, filled with live instrumentals and a lack of prominent samples. ‘Players Ball’ sounds like it was pulled straight from a blaxploitation film from the 1970s. ‘Club Donkey Ass (Interlude)’ is a modernized scene from that same film, introducing a track I’m sure was played at strip clubs around ATL until Speakerboxx came out.

I’m sure many in the Tri-State area considered anything coming out of Atlanta the same as something coming out of Staten Island. That would be before the Wu-Tang brought the ruckus. The combination of samples from martial arts films lent a different sound to a group of hungry MC’s.

Which is another strange occurrence when thinking about the Wu-Tang Clan – the number of actual MCs within the group. Before 1993, most ‘groups’ consisted of a couple of people. N.W.A.’s original lineup was six deep, but Arabian Prince left before Straight Outta Compton and DJ Yella wasn’t on the mic, so it was just four. Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five were one more than that.

‘Bring da Ruckus’, the first track on Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers), features four MCs with RZA doing to chorus. Four of the 13 tracks feature more than six different rappers on the same track. It’s a result of recording in a small studio, so small that “to decide who appeared on each song, RZA forced the Wu-Tang rappers to battle with each other.” The results are evident on tracks like ‘Protect Ya Neck’.

Eight of the original nine members of the Clan is on this track, their first single. The video brings reference and relevance to the group; while the kung-fu was different, the bricks, broken-down exteriors and hoodies were straight New York. It was also a turn away from the perceived positivity promoted by those within and adjacent to the Native Tongue Family, which was dominating the radio waves at the time.

The Clan was a return to the git and grim of the streets of New York that was heard in everything from ‘The Message‘ to ‘Wild Wild West‘ to ‘Road to the Riches‘. It’s not that De La Soul or A Tribe Called Quest wasn’t rapping about the proverbial streets. It’s the sound of it wasn’t as rough as their predecessors. That couldn’t be said about the Wu or Kast. Both became a subtle mix of the hardcore gangster rap that would soon dominate the genre with each group outfitting it as they saw fit.

 

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