Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers)

Twelve songs and a spoken close in about an hour, and the subtractive test finds a core that cannot go and a margin that can, wider than the core would want. Protect Ya Neck, C.R.E.A.M., Da Mystery of Chessboxin’, Bring da Ruckus and Can It Be All So Simple carry the argument: the clan as one body with nine mouths, the economy of the block, the memory of a simpler poverty. The two solo showcases are required too, since the record is also a prospectus of separate talents. The test bites at the edges, and more than once. Wu-Tang: 7th Chamber, Part II sets verses already heard to a second beat; the torture skit before Method Man is funny once and inert after; the second track is the slightest; and on the posse cuts a weaker verse could often go without loss. The core holds the figure above the cap, and the margin keeps it close.

Score: 7.6 / 10

The disclosure can be stated and it holds. C.R.E.A.M. lays out the economy of a Staten Island childhood in the crack years: money as the only law, the drug trade as the only labour on offer, prison as its common end. Inspectah Deck’s verse, from “the crime side”, is close to testimony. Can It Be All So Simple adds nostalgia for an earlier poverty that seemed bearable, and Tearz sets a death by gunfire beside a death after unprotected sex, as moral tales. The detuned loops disclose as well, a place run down and a pressure that never lets up. What lowers the axis is proportion: most of the hour is boast, threat and play, the condition is stated in three songs, not across the sequence, and what the loops disclose is a mood more than a meaning, which the axis ranks below.

Score: 7.7 / 10

Elevation here is mostly dread and exhilaration, with one register of sorrow. Protect Ya Neck rises by accumulation, eight voices and no chorus; the opening of Bring da Ruckus sets the clan’s entry to a fanfare of menace. C.R.E.A.M. reaches a height of another kind: a plaintive piano loop under two flat, factual verses, so that grief arrives without being performed. Can It Be All So Simple holds a sweetness the rest of the record denies. On most tracks a verse lifts, Inspectah Deck’s above all, and Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s howl is a genuine wildness. What holds the figure well below Low (8.8) is frequency: the summits are moments inside a texture kept deliberately low and grey, the record rises in single verses more than in whole tracks, and the skits and the reprise break the line of height.

Score: 8.0 / 10

Here myth is built rather than evoked. Staten Island becomes Shaolin; nine young men from its projects become swordsmen of a temple of thirty-six chambers, the number taken from a Shaw Brothers film; verbal combat becomes swordplay in Protect Ya Neck, and the chessboard the field of war in Da Mystery of Chessboxin’. The film dialogue frames the sequence, names the two halves as two swords and gives every member a place in a brotherhood with its own lore. The particular stays particular: Park Hill, a mother on welfare, a brother shot. What holds it well below the bar is that the myth is assembled from a borrowed genre and the Five Percent lexicon, vivid in voice and costume more than carried as meaning, and no figure bears it in passage: the clan is an emblem more than a person.

Score: 8.1 / 10

The inheritance is the hip hop of 1992 and 1993: polished West Coast G-funk, the jazz-inflected warmth of the East Coast’s conscious groups, the Bomb Squad’s dense collage. The turn is away from all three: loops left raw and off pitch, drums dry, a mix with no gloss, film dialogue in place of hooks, and a crew of nine with no front man. The stake was real. Unknowns pressed their first single themselves, then signed a deal that let each member record alone elsewhere, a wager on the collective as a brand. The elements were inherited, the dusty soul loop from Marley Marl and Paul C, the Five Percent language from Rakim and Brand Nubian, the posse cut from the Juice Crew: the swerve is the joining and the stance. That holds it just short of the bar, a large turn made from parts already in use, with its boldest wager placed on the business as much as the sound.

Score: 8.4 / 10

Change the form and the record loses most of what it knows. The posse cut with rotating verses and no chorus is the clan’s form: Protect Ya Neck and Da Mystery of Chessboxin’ show that nine voices can be one body without a leader, which a solo album or a group with a singer could not say. The rough loop is the place: under C.R.E.A.M. the piano’s worn surface is the ruin it describes. The film dialogue binds the sequence into a rite of entry, from the opening challenge to the Conclusion. The sequence is counted here, once, and it is loose: Protect Ya Neck, the founding document, sits tenth; the reprise restates rather than closes; the skits interrupt more than they articulate. The form knows most track by track, and the album as a whole knows less than its best tracks, which holds the figure just below 8.0.

Score: 7.9 / 10

Evidence over thirty-three years, of two kinds. The words keep yielding: dense with slang, the Supreme Mathematics of the Five Percent, film reference and private lore, the verses have been decoded line by line by listeners for three decades, and the lexicon of Shaolin has been extended by the members’ own later records and by RZA’s books on the clan, which serve as commentary. The sound keeps yielding too: producers have traced and studied the loops as a lesson in what a sampler could do with little. What holds the figure at 8.0 is that much of the return is decoding and lore rather than meaning deepened on each hearing, and that the depth sits in a few tracks and many single verses more than in the whole: the full hour yields less on return than its best songs do alone.

Score: 8.0 / 10

The record reorganised what a hip hop record could sound like and what a group could be. It made rawness a method, the loop rough, the mix murky, the beat built from very little, and with Illmatic and other New York records of the next year it returned the centre of the music to New York. It showed that a collective could be a federation of distinct voices with a shared mythology and business. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the members’ solo careers, the grim Queensbridge sound, loop-based underground production into the 2010s, the crew as label, and martial lore as a lasting vocabulary in rap. The force was shared with its contemporaries.

Score: 8.8 / 10

Survival is weighed over thirty-three years, on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: the recording survives as issued and has stayed in print. Presence is continuous and wide, among musicians and the public: C.R.E.A.M. and Protect Ya Neck are still played and quoted, the title of the first has passed into common speech, the clan’s emblem is among the most recognised in popular music, and the record is placed high whenever the hip hop of its decade is counted. Popularity is presence, not proof. The fabric is charged, and it holds the figure short of the bar: the murk of the mix was a choice and also a limit of the means, voices sit at uneven levels, and the surface is fixed to the production and slang of 1993, though the subject has not dated.

Score: 8.4 / 10

Command of the recorded medium, with invention credited elsewhere and the words weighed only for their delivery. The best of the making is load-bearing: the C.R.E.A.M. loop, chosen and cut so that a few bars of piano carry a whole life; the eerie detuned figures of Da Mystery of Chessboxin’; drum programming that keeps time behind voices of very different weight. The rapping is a craft in the medium, and at its height, in Inspectah Deck, GZA, Ghostface Killah, Raekwon and Method Man, it is exact in cadence and timing. The faults are real, spread across the hour, and they weigh: a mix muddier than the aesthetic requires, voices at uneven levels, weak verses from the less practised members, slack skits and a routine reprise. The roughness is part of the point, but it also limits command, and the making is load-bearing at its best and loose at its edges.

Score: 7.9 / 10

One law governs the record: the clan as a fighting order, rawness as its sound, the film’s code as its frame. The two most distant elements are the second track, Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s comic, unhinged showcase, and the sober memoir of C.R.E.A.M.; or the sweetness of Can It Be All So Simple against the menace of Bring da Ruckus. They obey the same law: each is a voice of one order in one grey sound, and the dialogue between them keeps every turn inside one world. The range is wider than the texture suggests, from clowning to grief, from nine voices to one. The skits sometimes stand outside the law, as sketch comedy rather than rite, and Tearz leans to a plainness the rest does not share. Some of the unity is a shared grey texture more than one law the parts obey, and narrowness of sound is not coherence.

Score: 8.0 / 10

Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. The neighbourhood and its economy are held fully: the drug trade, money, the projects, the police and prison. The family enters through the mother in C.R.E.A.M. and the brother in Tearz; the body through violence and disease; the sacred through the Five Percent’s teaching and the temple of the film; the brotherhood of the clan is the record’s society, integrated on every posse cut. Consciousness is held in two or three verses of memory. What holds the figure lowest is integration and absence: most orders arrive in single songs or lines, present more than held together, consciousness enters only as memory, the state is a presence at the edge, and labour beyond the street trade, the couple and the natural order are absent.

Score: 7.2 / 10