Liquid Swords 20th Anniversary Thread Nov 7 1995-2015

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Despite a lack of conviction in the disappointment that was A Better Tomorrow, members of the Wu-Tang Clan remain cloaked in myth more so than any other ‘Golden Era’ icons – bar, perhaps, Biggie Smalls. This seems partly self-fulfilled, but more often than not it is exaggerated by hip hop idealists like myself. I happily gloss over the evident lack of interest shown in the Clan’s latest album, crystallising them in a space in time when Ol’ Dirty still screams “Keep It Real” and RZA is yet to act alongside Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson. The unfortunate reality is that the clan’s importance inevitably wavers.





GZA, for me, has kept all the curiosity and intrigue of the early days in a more satisfying way than most. Whilst Raekwon and Ghostface pepper the media in promotion of their Only Built 4 Cuban Linx tour and The Purple Tapedocumentary, there has been not a peep from GZA about his own anniversary tour. RZA continues to appear in big budget Hollywood flicks and GZA still finds time to hang out in Brooklyn for a spot of chess. This is not to lambast the more media friendly members of the group for their successes, but I think we all find something admirable in someone who hangs back, complacent in the strive for notoriety.

For all of GZA’s idiosyncrasies, however, Liquid Swords has endured. But why? It never had the commercial vision of Tical, Only Built for Cuban Linx, Ironman orReturn To The 36 Chambers: The Dirty Version. There are no lead singles that spring to mind in the way that ‘Shimmy Shimmy Ya’, or ‘Criminology’ do and it never had the personality that was so integral to Ol’ Dirty, Raekwon, Ghostface and Method Man’s solo releases. I think the answer lies somewhere in its sonic similarities to Enter The Wu-Tang: 36 Chambers. There is a loyalty there to what was started in ’93. It is tyrannous in the continued use of the Kung-Fu motif, the choppy production, bleak imagery and “Life is like a game of chess” adage. RZA was heralded in the early days for being able to understand each member’s individual talents and compliment each one with stylised production. The person he understood most must have been GZA. Partly because they are cousins, but partly because GZA encapsulates what early Wu is about. That understanding comes together on Liquid Swords like no other Wu-Tang solo project.

This cohesion, however, could not last. After Liquid Swords, that bleak, choppy and gruesome sound was not really recreated to the same degree. As Wu expanded, there was a continued diversification and actually, the album didn’t influence other rappers in the way that Only Built For Cuban Linx would. It had more staying power with us, the listeners. It represents a moment in time where, for devotees, everything was perfect; a moment of enlightenment. The other major players in the outfit would continue to expand and develop hip hop into the powerhouse it is today, but GZA, unfortunately, would never release anything quite as good. Liquid Swords remains a moment when something magical happened and the rest, where something magical was happening.

A defining feature of GZA and something impossible to emit when talking aboutLiquid Swords, is the intelligence with which it is delivered. Even the most egocentric members of the clan have been known to step back from their culture of self-aggrandisement to give him props. Although GZAs moniker ‘The Genius’ was a self prognosis, it is difficult to find someone within the clan or out who can deny his mastery of words. This doesn’t come in the form of complicated issues either. Even trivialities are spoken about with the eloquence of a poet. The LP’s title track was made for the sole purpose of letting us know just how ill he really is. Lines like “I don’t waste ink, nikka I think / I drop megaton bombs more faster than you blink” simultaneously act as battle cries for other emcees, but are delivered with reference to science and hold hints of a satirical socio-political compass. In the same breath, he is not one to turn his nose up at quick one-line similes: “That’s minimum and feminine like sandals / my minimum table stacks a verse on a gamble.”

Throughout the narrative of the record we aren’t faced with anything truly surprising: life in the heart of the ghetto, stories about gun-slingers, the Nation of Islam and a penchant for self-aggrandisement. It is the eloquence with which it is delivered that makes it stand apart and GZAs ability to tell stories from an objective point of view. Raekwon and Ghostface are famous for their incredible ability to set a scene from the first person, whereas GZA is omnipotent and calculating – another extension of his chess conceit. Instead of a piece in the game, he is the player, foreseeing moves and timing a response. The thing that is most impressive, however, is that, for all his lyrical complexity, there is never really a time where he becomes over-bearing. We are never left feeling that something needs hours of contemplation to understand. In fact, this is the most satisfying thing about most good writing. We are made to feel intelligent by making us work just hard enough to challenge, but too much to leave us isolated.

All the members of Wu-Tang offer something. Raekwon, Ghostface, RZA and the late ODB may have found most notoriety, but, for me, GZA and this album will forever encapsulate Wu-Tang. The echoes of their importance continue to fade, but the lucidity of Liquid Swords can last forever; transporting us to a moment in time before A Better Tomorrow, when the movements of a chess board were cut with the chop of a Wu-Tang sword.
Champion Sound: Liquid Swords - A Retrospective / In Depth // Drowned In Sound
 
L68

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mson said:
20 Years, 20 Questions: GZA Revisits ‘Liquid Swords’

On September 15, 2015, nearly 20 years after it was first released, GZA finally received a platinum record in the mail from the RIAA for his seminal ‘90s masterpiece Liquid Swords. “It’s a good feeling,” he said of the honor. “It took a while.” No kidding.

When it debuted in November of 1995, Liquid Swords was part and parcel of a larger plan put into place by the members of the mighty Staten Island-based rap collective known as the Wu-Tang Clan (and its leader, RZA) to take over the rap game. It all began with the collective’s 1993 full-length debut, Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers), and was expanded over the next few years with the solo releases of Method Man’s Tical, Ol’ Dirty b*stard’s Return to the 36 Chambers: The Dirty Version, and Raekwon’s Only Built 4 Cuban Linx… All three of those solo albums clearly have their own signature flavors and motifs, but hardly any of them could match the cinematic flair, the tight and cohesive thematic strain, or the dense lyrical verbiage of Liquid Swords — the best-remembered LP from the group’s most famously verbose member, familiarly known as the Genius.
n honor of Liquid Swords’ 20th anniversary, SPIN recently hopped on the phone with GZA, an MC with one of the most formidable arsenals of words in hip-hop history, to talk about how the record came together, and to walk us through the process of creating his singular rhymes.

Liquid Swords was your second solo record, but your first after solidifying the Wu-Tang Clan and releasing Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers). How did your approach change between Words From the Genius in 1991 to this record in 1995?

I don’t think that the approach had really changed at all. I just think that the subject matter had broadened.

What was on your mind at the time that you were making Liquid Swords?

Everything. I get inspired by many different things. It can be an object, it can be a person; there were many things on my mind when I started working on this album. I really, really wanted to show my lyrical ability and my storytelling style and it felt like I had certain things to prove because of [promotional issues] in the past from the prior label I was on [Cold Chillin’ Records]. So I felt that I needed to just slash back.

You’ve been credited as having one of the largest vocabularies in rap history by unique word count. Do you make a conscious effort to try and incorporate a lot of different words into your writing or does that just come naturally?

It’s just kind of me. It’s always been like that since we were teenagers when we formed our first group called All in Together with RZA, [Ol’] Dirty [b*stard], and myself. Emceeing has always been about making the most intellectual, most creative, wittiest rhyme as possible regardless of any subject. It was always about bringing the best out of yourself.


There’s always been this competitive spirit within the Wu-Tang Clan. How has that impacted the way your write and record?

In different ways… I mean, when you have nine members within a group and they’re all in the studio writing to the beat, there’s a lot of pressure, so the competition is always there and it helps you advance. Sometimes you might hear a rhyme like, you know, for instance, when I heard [Inspectah] Deck’s verse on “Triumph” [from Forever in 1997] it was hard to follow that.

RZA has mentioned in past interviews about his vision for the Clan to reach different sets of demographics with each of the individual solo records and mentioned that Liquid Swords was an effort to reach the college crowd. Did you buy into that?

No. He may have said that, but that just wasn’t my aim, to get college kids. I mean, I think as an artist the overall goal is to teach and educate no matter what the song is about. Somewhere where a listener can get something out of it, something that can give them help to move forward, help them learn something, analyze something in a different way, or think about something.

It may just have been that college kids were more interested in learning and dissecting and researching and trying to figure it out. That’s just how it unfolded, but that wasn’t really part of the plan. I strive to get everyone.

Is there a group of people that you think this record doesn’t really speak to?

With the profanity on it, I would say that it’s not suitable for children or young kids… You know, at one time I stopped using profanity on lyrics. I mean, it was many, many years ago, but I had a line off 2002’s Legend of the Liquid Sword album where I said, “I’m the obscene slang kicker, with no parental sticker / Advising y’all that wise words are much slicker.” It would be a universal record as far as hip-hop though, with the beats and the way the rhymes are put together and the style of it and the certain things I’m speaking about.

What was it about the film Shogun Assassin, which was sampled for the opening of the record that resonated so much with you? When did you first see that one?

You might be surprised by this answer, but I don’t think that I watched the movie until after the Liquid Swords album [was released].

So including the dialogue from that film came purely from RZA, then?

Yeah, RZA did that in the last stages of the album. We were actually beyond mixing the album, the album was mixed already and we were mastering the album and he sent the engineer out or someone from the studio and said, “Bring me back Shogun Assassin,” and threw it on the album. That came at the very last minute.

Can you talk about your relationship with RZA, how you two collaborate as writers and how he approaches you as a producer?

I think the chemistry is great. Before RZA started producing he was a DJ… well, a DJ, an MC, and a beatboxer. So was Dirty. As far as myself, I was just an MC and I did a little graffiti back in the day, but I wasn’t one of the great artists who had their name and work walls posted all over the neighborhood and stuff. But before RZA was a producer, he was an MC, then he became a producer but he was also a human beat box specialist.

Plus we were in a group together as teenagers. We were always rhyming and battling so we kind of knew each other’s style and flow well. He was aware of that going into this project and the chemistry is great. And him being an MC, he would sometimes ask me to switch a rhyme around, throw a line in there, ask me if I could say something in a different way or if I could change the flow of it. I understood a majority of the time where he was coming from.


You have a unique and frankly dense storytelling method. How do you put together something like “Gold,” which is about coming up through the criminal underground? There’s a lot of metaphor in that song.

It’s just an urban street tale and when I want to tell an urban street tale, I try and tell it from a different perspective than the average way you would hear a story. I have different ways of doing it, like on “Clan in Da Front.” I’m not a sports person, but every now and then I incorporate sports in my rhymes because I’m always grabbing from certain things and getting inspired by something whether I’m totally involved in it or not. So on “Clan in Da Front” there’s a line where I say, “I’m on the mound, G, and it’s a no-hitter / And my DJ the catcher, he’s my man…” That’s more braggadocios.

But on “Gold” I’m like, “I’m deep down in the back streets, in the heart of Medina / About to set off something more deep than a misdemeanor…” So it’s really about hustling and street activity, but it’s just told in a different way.

Speaking about doing songs in a different way, how did you get the idea to open “Cold World” in a “Night Before Christmas” framework?

That’s just how my mind thinks. The great thing about writing is that you create your own world and you bring listeners into your world depending on what you write. I’m always hearing something or seeing something that has some sort of inspiration in it. Even if it’s not so good, I can try and pull the good or the beauty out of it. I just thought it was a cool start for that story.

Every single member of the Wu-Tang Clan is present on Liquid Swords in one way or another. Was there a conscious effort made to include everyone?

It’s always great to have the help and support from your brothers, especially within the Clan… I was always open to having anyone and it was the early stage of Wu, and thought it would be great to have a member on the album, but I didn’t necessarily want to depend on that to complete an album. You know, nowadays artists put out albums and they have 50 different features or guest appearances on the album and it kind of overshadows them sometimes. As an MC for so long, we were used to holding our own weight.

The album I did before Liquid Swords, Words from the Genius, didn’t have any Clan members on it even though they existed at that time. RZA wasn’t on it, Dirty wasn’t on it. I approached the album with open space for any of my Clan brothers to get on, but if not, I had to be able to fill that space.
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Thanks ..never read this
 
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BuddahMAC said:
GZA breaks down Liquid Swords track by track

“Liquid Swords”
This track is just braggadocios. It isn’t meant to stand for anything. I’m talking about my skills and how I’m better than the rest. Usually I take a beat home and write to it for a few days, but it wasn’t like that with this track. I think RZA played the beat for me and I just spit to it right there. The hook was actually a routine from around ’84 that me RZA and Ol’ Dirty would do: [sings “When the emcees came, to live out the name.”] Just like that.

“Duel of the Iron Mic”
This might be my favorite track on the album. I like how I delivered on this one, and I love RZA’s beat. I remember writing to it and that it took me a while because I was trying different things. I remember being so happy after Ol’ Dirty [b*stard] blessed the track like he did. I love how the recording sounds too. When we perform this song live, the music gets real low for Deck’s part, and then it comes in real loud and it still always gets me hype. I also love the skit at the beginning. I just love that shyt.

“Living in the World Today”
I just remember sitting in the basement for hours and writing it over and over. I don’t know what actually transpired during the making of this. But as far as the song itself, it was another old-school hook taken from a crew we knew from the Bronx. They used to say something like: “And if you listen to me rap today, you be hearing the sounds that my crew will say. And we know you wish you can write them, we’ll don’t bite them, well okay…”. So I flipped it and said: “Well if you’re living in the world today, you’ll be listening to the slang that the Wu-Tang say…” and so on. It’s just another old-school hook we took and had some fun with.

“Gold”
This is a great track. I really love the beat a lot. It has sorta has a rock vibe to it, and Meth helped with the hook. The whole song is on a street-hustling-vibe tip. The whole song is talking about hustling and stuff like that, but I don’t say it plainly. It’s a street tale, not a let’s-get-your-grind-on song. And the hook is actually kind of taken from the Diana Ross and the Supremes song, “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough.” In the ’80s we’d used to harmonize a lot and we sang a similar hook: [sings] “No neighborhood is rough enough, there is no clip that’s full enough… See? Like that. We used to sing the chorus and harmonize with each other. That’s how that one came bout.

“Cold World”
Just another dark, gritty street tale. Normally, when I hear a beat, I already know where to go with it. I can picture the track and just vibe off it. As soon as I heard the beat to “Cold World,” I knew it would be another inner-city story. And the beginning is obviously taken from “The Night Before Christmas.”

I have this cousin who we call Life. He sang a little bit of background on the album, and he was in the studio when we were making this track. He’s got a great voice, not a great as it used to be [laughs], but he’s been singing his whole life. He was singing Stevie Wonder’s “Rocket Love,” where the hook goes, [sings] “Took me riding in your rocket, gave me a star, but at a half a mile from heaven, you dropped me back down to this cold, cold world.” RZA was the one who told Life to change the words and use it as a hook. So we added the hook and we got [Inspectah] Deck on it and boom! That’s how that one went.

“Labels”
My whole negative experience with Cold Chillin’ was part of why I made this song—but it wasn’t the main reason. I wasn’t deliberately trying to write a song dedicated to problems with labels and so on—I just threw Cold Chillin’ in there because they were an established label at one time. It actually started when I heard my friend say: “Tommy ain’t my boy!” Then it just kind of clicked in my head to use “Tommy” and “Boy.” I mean, I like doing songs based around wordplay with one theme. I actually love doing those kinds of songs. It comes naturally to me for my rhymes to have double meanings.

“4th Chamber”
Crazy, crazy song. If I ever do a rock album, not saying I would, but if I did, it would have to be on that kind of vibe. It would musically have to sound like “Rock Box” from Run DMC. Making “4th Chamber” was crazy because I didn’t have a rhyme ready for that one. That’s why I went last on it [laughs]. Plus, Ghost killed it with his verse so I knew I had to come correct.

This is one of three songs that crowds always go crazy for when we do a Wu show. As soon as they hear the [imitates opening guitar sound] they just explode. It’s not even a GZA song to me—it’s a Wu-Tang song. And Ghost’s verse is [just] incredible to me. He delivered so well. I don’t know if you saw the video, I directed that too. This song, the guest verses, the video, the crowd response, all turned out perfect for this one.

“Shadowboxin”
Meth delivered well on this one too. I even do his verse when I do it live! I mean, “I breaks it down to the down bristle,” is so dope. It’s hard not to rap along to this one. Just like when I hear “Triumph,” it’s hard not to do Deck’s verse. I think I was actually [just] the filler for that song anyways [laughs]. It always seemed more like Meth’s track. I remember RZA telling me I needed to get on it, so he put me in between. It’s an incredible song though, and I love performing it. It’s just another emcee lyrical joint with crazy smooth cadences.

“Hell’s Wind Staff / Killah Hills 10304”
This is another one of my favorites. It’s a very special song as far as the album’s concerned because it’s long as hell and has no hook. It’s up-tempo and is straight through. My cousin Life who did the hook on “Cold World” also did some singing on this too. This song has a lot of depth in terms of sound ’cause we used to layer weird shyt over it.

For example, myself and Killah Priest were in the city one day with a portable ADAT recorder I just bought. We were just walking around, going to stores, buying water, juice, whatever, and just recording the random stuff, you know, just picking up sounds and shyt. I think we recorded the Hells Angels riding by [us] too. RZA was in a restaurant talking to some guy, and we were banging forks on the tables, and we just recoded all those sounds too [laughs]. So we incorporated all that into the production.

As a song, it’s a street story, but not told in a regular street way. I’m talking about slanging on the block, but not just your average street dealer. These were more sophisticated cats. Some of it came from a documentary I saw on the infamous Pablo Escobar. He was sending judges intimate photos of their wives and things like that. I think this is [probably] my first real Mafioso track. It’s like a dense, short film.

“Investigative Reports”
I don’t remember this one that much. RZA kicked us the beat and Rae just set it off. RZA decided to put all that news footage in there and U-God did the hook and I just followed it up. This one was just all of us doing our parts. I think it was just a simple track we put together.

“Swordsman”
This is another one of those hard ones that I love. The beat just knocks. The hook also came from a routine we used to sing a long time ago. But like I said, we used to harmonize often back then: [sings] “Every emcee has his place, to begin in the emcee race.” The melody is from an Earth, Wind and Fire track. It’s just a dope, recycled hook. I love this song a lot too. I think I delivered well on it.

“I Gotcha Back”
This was a short rhyme I wrote for one of my nephews. When I said, “My lifestyle so far from well, could’ve wrote a book called Age Twelve and Going Through Hell.” It’s for my nephew who was twelve at the time, and whose father, my brother, had been locked up since ’88. So he wasn’t around for my nephew when times were rough, so I wanted to up my nephew a bit with this track.

It was actually part of the soundtrack for the movie Fresh. I don’t know if a lot of people know this, but I directed the video for that song. The interesting thing about that [one] is how the video blends in with the movie itself. I had two nephews in the video, they were both real young at the time. And in video, they both had met up and shots rang out from some young gangsters. It’s a shame because both those kids in the video, both nephews of mine, ended up getting in trouble for ringing out shots and are both doing time right now. It’s kind of ironic. One of my nephews ended up getting eights years for that shyt. So the whole song is a sad irony to me now.

“B.I.B.L.E. (Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth)”
I really wanted to get [Killah] Priest on the album. And when I did, he said he could cover the whole track, so we let him do it. It’s incredible to me, man. Some people still tell me that that it’s their favorite song off the album. I mean, it’s a really deep song. He broke down lots of things: preachers, ministries, churches, details, and a lot of insight on a lot of stuff. “The earth’s already in space, your bible I embrace, a difficult task I had to take…” The song’s just perfect and ends the record out brilliantly.

Wu-Tang Clan's GZA runs down every track off Liquid Swords - Wax Poetics
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Nice
 
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Spidey Man said:
Still my favorite Wu solo even over Purple tape
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Yep my personal favorite and November 7th 1995 was a Tuesday too. Wish they made a doc on the first run wu solo albums before forever. I got LS in 2001 at the second semester of my freshman year at coconuts. Got return to the 36 too. Discovered it on UGHH like a few months before. Got the CD version thankfully. One of the best decisions i ever made
 
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