Pardon what appears to be an opening digression, but there's a point here, which I'll get too in reasonably short order, I promise.
There was something oddly, disconcertingly, hard-to-put-your-finger-on familiar about Avengers: Age Of Ultron this summer - beyond, obviously, the fact that all the key players had been introduced and built up as three-dimensional characters via a string of preceding films, and notwithstanding their appearance for years beforehand in the comic books the Marvel Cinematic Universe films are based on. Rather, what I found nagging at the back of my mind was the formal similarity the film bore to... something I couldn't quite place. In particular, the way that the film's centre of gravity was located not around the expected big guns - the smart-alec Iron Man, the haunted Hulk, or Thor, the demigod with the neat line in self-aware humour - but on the relationships developed by Jeremy Renner's Hawkeye and, to an only slightly lesser extent, Scarlett Johanssen's Black Widow, neither of whom have, as yet, had their own film out. Eventually, what I'd recognised in there finally hit me. It was reminding me of a late-period Wu-Tang Clan album. Not Forever, the record which, in terms of project cycles, Age Of Ultron appears to be the corollary of; but Iron Flag or 8 Diagrams, records where the Clan members you instinctively look to for highlights are subtly but forcefully overshadowed by less heralded members of the group. They come to the fore by dint of their obvious work ethic, the simple fact of their relative ubiquity on the record, and ultimately because the quality of their contributions wins you over. In the same way Iron Flag belonged to Inspectah Deck, or how you often found yourself thinking that the best verse on an 8 Diagrams song had come from U-God, so I ended up feeling that Age Of Ultron was Hawkeye's film.
They may have patterned their concepts on kung-fu and mafia movies rather than superhero ones, but it's not just Method Man's occasional use of a persona called Johnny Blaze that amplifies the similarities between the Wu-Tang's discography and the MCU. Rza's first five-year plan for the Staten Island crew has long been the stuff of music-business legend - the deliberately opaque collective, more brilliant rappers than you could shake a stick at, introduced to the world by a group album but with the contract structured to allow each member to sign their own deals and make solo records. After Enter The Wu-Tang set the group's stall out, the first phase of the master plan called for solo LPs, on which each featured member would be supported as required by fellow band mates, and would benefit from Rza's production.
So instead of seeding the individuals first, then having them team up - the "form like Voltron" comparison included during a sampled radio-interview interlude on Enter The Wu-Tang isn't quite accurate - the Clan's strategy called for the collective to hit first, then splinter and send out its constituent parts to stake claims across the hip hop map before regrouping. First out of the blocks was Method Man's Tical, on Def Jam - an obvious choice in every regard, the Clan's most conventionally charismatic emcee hitched to hip hop's most iconic imprint, though the partnership would never quite scale the heights one might instinctively have expected. Ol' Dirty b*stard's idiosyncratic, iconoclastic, inspired Return To The 36 Chambers followed, on Elektra, around the turn of the year. Rza's other group, Gravediggaz, released an album and then in the summer of 1995, Raekwon's Only Built 4 Cuban Linx and Gza's Liquid Swords - both worked on in parallel, in Rza's basement studio, over the preceding year - were unleashed.
It's fair to say those two records reaped the full critical - if not necessarily commercial - benefits of the years-long preparatory effort. ...Cuban Linx tends to be the purists' choice, and its iconic status to hardcore fans remains undimmed. Liquid Swords - perhaps in part because it was released by Geffen, a label largely untested in the hip hop market, who promoted Gza's album as if it was an independent rock record because those were the routes to the public that they best knew how to exploit - eventually got the nod from the non-rap-specialist music media and it tends to be the Wu-Tang album that people who wouldn't call themselves hip hop specialists like the best. While "hip hop album rated highly by people who don't like hip hop very much" is hardly a ringing endorsement, in Gza's case it's an evaluation we can trust. This may not be the unequivocal choice of everyone with a view on the matter, but if it's not the best of the first phase of Wu-Tang albums, it's one of the top two; and that means it's among the greatest hip hop releases of the 1990s, and one of the best of all time.
It's also, in a sense, the second Wu-Tang Clan album, in that it's the first of the solo albums to include all nine original founding members of the group. Tical is very much a conventional solo LP, with just a third of its tracks featuring other emcees. Six members appear alongside Dirty on his album, but there's no sign of Deck or U-God. Dirty doesn't appear on ...Cuban Linx (unless you count 'North Star (Jewelz)', a bonus track that only appears on CD versions of the album and wasn't considered a canonical part of the whole when Get On Down released their Purple Tape collector's edition in 2012.) Dirty's and U-God's contributions to Liquid Swords are limited to choruses, but everyone who contributes a verse offers something meaty and meaningful. Indeed, there's a case to be made that some of the contributions here (Meth's two verses on 'Shadoxboxin'', Ghostface Killah and Rza on '4th Chamber', even Deck on 'Cold World') are among each man's greatest moments on record.
In fact, there's so much of everyone else it's remarkable that Gza doesn't get overshadowed on his own album - but it's conversely a mark of his artistic authority that the record remains definably and definitely his own. As well as those stellar contributions from the other Clan members, acolyte/associate Killah Priest doesn't just take a (great) verse on '4th Chamber', he is - bafflingly yet brilliantly - given the whole of the closing track, 'B.I.B.L.E. (Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth)'. This, too, manages to work as a demonstration of Gza's personality: Priest was, after Master Killa, one of Gza's "students" (the kung-fu concept of the master and the pupil lives large in Wu-Tang mythology, and Rza in particular has spoken at several points over the years of how members of the group brought other emcees to the collective and took them under their wing, offering support, mentorship and tutelage) and giving him the closing track feels like an act of baton-passing and fatherly encouragement. If one were of a mind to extend an irrelevant comparison way beyond breaking point, one might also muse that Liquid Swords thus [SPOILER ALERT!] ends in a similar way to Age of Ultron, by introducing the audience to the next generation of lyrical superheroes.
(Please forgive the digression, but there's a footnote worth inserting at this point: readers wanting to ignore this and crack on with the Liquid Swords-specific stuff, please feel free to re-join us at the appropriate point below.
In the late 2000s, a court case brought by Ghostface against Rza over royalties on early Clan solo albums revealed a curious truth to the outside world. The Clan member whose name was on the label - the titular solo artist; ie, Meth for Tical, ODB for ...Dirty Version, Rae for ...Cuban Linx and Gza for Liquid Swords - got half of the songwriting copyright on the songs that were released on their albums. Regardless of who appeared on the track, the split for royalties was half to the producer, and half to the "solo" artist - and on the first Clan album, every member of the group got publishing royalties from every song, even if they didn't appear on it. In a 2004 interview, Method Man told me he made quite a tidy sum from his cut of the royalties after Lauryn Hill sampled 'Can It Be All So Simple' on her song, 'Ex-Factor', even though Meth didn't appear on, or contribute any work towards, that particular Wu-Tang song.
"Wu-Tang Clan should be considered as one entity, one lyric, as the vocal part of every record - that was our original deal," Rza told me in an interview in 2008. "This is a verbal deal we had: we said, no matter who put out a solo album, that whoever else raps on that album, they get no publishin'. The publishin' will go to the artist whose album it is. And we'll do that for each one of us to each other. On ...Cuban Linx, for instance, Ghostface is not gettin' no publishin' - all of it goes to Raekwon."
This changed, though, with the 1996 release of Ghost's solo debut, Ironman, and royalties were broken down more accurately to reflect lyric-writing input from guests on specific tracks. "That's years later," Rza pointed out. "Method Man had signed a publishin' deal with BMG, Raekwon signed a publishin' deal, Rza signed a publishin' deal, Ghostface even signed a publishin' deal. Now you got a third party speakin' up for the client, so now you gotta give it to them. And that's why, when we got to Ironman, it was different."
The court case came about, in part, because Ghost - or those working on his behalf, at least; Rza stressed that there was no animosity on a personal level between the two men - felt he'd been short-changed compared to his bandmates and the monies they'd received for those earlier solo albums, most particularly on ...Cuban Linx, where he appears on almost every track, yet would have received no publishing royalties whatsoever.
"Ghost still was able to keep all his advances and everything for his self, but the royalties? Raekwon would get royalties," Rza continued. "So I said, 'Yo, that's something for you and Raekwon to settle.' Because he said, 'How come on my album you didn't do the same thing?' I said, 'Yo, your album was the first album that we didn't do it on.' He said, 'How about the Gza album?' I said, 'Nah, the Gza album, you didn't get no publishin' - everybody didn't get no publishin'! Gza got the publishin' on that shyt'."
The question naturally occurred to me: does that mean that Gza received 50 per cent of the songwriting royalties for 'B.I.B.L.E.', a track on which he does not appear? Rza thought for a moment, before answering.
"Gza may have got the publishin' for 'B.I.B.L.E.'!" he chuckled, clearly only asking himself the question for the first time. "Gza may have got the publishin' for 'B.I.B.L.E.'. He may have gave that to Priest, but I doubt it very seriously. I think Gza got the publishin' for 'B.I.B.L.E.'. I know, that's deep, right? But listen, that's how... Look, on the song 'Method Man'? Who was rappin' on that song? Method Man, and me producin' it, right? But on 'Method Man', if you look at it, it has all nine of our names. Everybody gets publishin' off 'Method Man'."
For his part, Gza was largely unconcerned.
