![]() ![]() It also lowers the album’s stakes, at least in the early going. The palette is loose and hooky, and it underlines Ghost’s humor. Working first from his estate in Ohio, the Abbot played Ghost beats over the phone: Al Green’s God-fearing “Gotta Find a New World” morphed into an impish bounce on opener “Iron Maiden.” Bob James’ “Nautilus,” a staple sample for rap producers dating back to the late ’80s, is made to sound, on “Daytona 500,” as if it’s gasping for its first breaths. The idea for the Blaxploitation riff came from RZA, whose creative whims dictated every Wu release he helmed. Over scythelike RZA beats that recall the Blaxploitation films of the 1970s, Ghost recreates the New York underworld of his adolescence in impressionistic fits. Whatever sorrow or delusion bleeds through the mix ends up making the rapper seem like a method actor, whipping himself into such a frenzy that he can convincingly render a world where there is a bag of cash sitting in the trunk of every bait car, an assassin in every vestibule. ![]() But this fragmentation is a natural complement to his written and vocal style. Where on Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) he wrote concentrated bursts of athletic threats or longer, mostly linear reflections, here his internal logic is scrambled, the syntax shifting, time an afterthought. Recorded in that fog and against a deadline-the last one he would ever accept from a record company- Ironman captures a Ghostface who is scattered, overflowing with angst, lashing out. “I couldn’t come behind that, not feeling how I was feeling.” “I couldn’t write to those records,” Ghost told Billboard last year, referring to tracks his collaborators had prepared for him. And in the spring of ‘96, his best friend was arrested for a murder he did not commit. By the time he was diagnosed with diabetes, his drinking had gotten so bad that RZA was patching together disparate vocal takes to work around Ghost’s frequent slurring. Between Wu’s 1993 debut and the release of Cuban Linx, Ghost, then in his mid-20s, was losing weight and suffering headaches and blurred vision. ![]() But where that was a creative decision (Rae, Ghost, and RZA agreed that Ghost’s extended pickup attempt would seem more unnervingly intimate if left alone), these new ones were symptoms of a yawning depression. These absences had precedent on Wu-Tang records: Cuban Linx’s “Wisdom Body” is a solo Ghostface song. Yet once again, the headliner is nowhere to be found. ![]() Just two tracks later, on “Assassination Day,” RZA’s instrumental is taunting in its sparseness he, Rae, Inspectah Deck, and Masta Killa trade verses about stalking enemies “like prey” and the devil “poisoning the birth water,” the blurring of lines between literal and metaphysical, criminal codes and animal chaos that are tenets of Ghost’s writing. But when his verse ends (“All my Spanish niggas love us/We movin’ like Russia, bone crusher/At the flick, stick the usher”), Ghost is nowhere-the song is simply over. It’s the sort of pulp crime-meted out in bursts of improvised slang and girded by Five-Percenter moralism-that he and Ghost had perfected on Only Built 4 Cuban Linx, Rae’s monumental debut from one year prior. The mutation suits Raekwon, who raps about locking down the cocaine trade in coastal Georgia, ripping off his Korean suppliers, arranging murders for hire from remote British territories. ![]()
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