You suggest in the book that the group members – all of whom had grown up around drugs and gang-related violence, many of them had seen people killed – would have been suffering from undiagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder. That’s what really intrigued me about the group. People are forced into that type of lifestyle when really, they have so many talents they don’t even know about.
He was kicked out of his house by his mum and he had hurt his leg, and he had no other way to survive. Even when I was talking to him then, back in the day, he was like, he never wanted to do this. They certainly don’t glorify it, especially people like Method Man. When we were interviewing them in the 90s and everything was fresh and new, obviously dudes are not going to want to talk about their history in drug dealing and stuff like that. There’s also a sense that perhaps they’re ready to talk about their lives in a way they maybe weren’t until relatively recently. That’s not something that you should take for granted. To me, that’s the most amazing part of the story, how these ten kids from the projects with absolutely no chances or opportunities to improve their life just basically took it upon themselves to join together for a common cause and work for a common goal, which was to escape from hell.
But these guys who had absolutely no opportunities. Bill Clinton was president a lot of people didn't even think about politics because everything was going so well. The 90s in America was a kind of comfortable time for a lot of people. I think it was time to really tell that story, with the eye on the bigger picture of what America was going through. What about beyond personally – were there things about the musical, social, and political climates that meant the time was right for you to write the book, too? Wu-Tang has always been influential and important in my life, and I feel like I’m kind of giving something back to them now by writing the book.” It was like aural testosterone – like, keep your spirits up.
“It was a very hairy time to be there, right after the invasion,” he says, casting his mind back to Iraq, “but the thing that really kept me sane was listening to the Wu-Tang. Now living in Baltimore, he spent most of the first year of the COVID pandemic returning to the Clan and crafting his latest book, From The Streets Of Shaolin, the definitive history of the band in their imperial phase.
Wu tang clan forever first album ever tv#
At one point he found himself making TV commercials to encourage Iraqis to vote in the country’s first post-Saddam election. He ran the independent label WordSound, made a feature film, trained in (and taught) culinary arts, even launching his own brand of curry powder inspired by recipes from his Sri Lankan extended family. His is the voice that turns up midway through GZA’s Liquid Swords LP, playing the part of Mr Greico – a dealer trying to stiff the Clan – in a skit that, he says, was acted out with startling verité by RZA, lapels grabbed and spittle flying in a staged but unscripted and visceral encounter in a New York studio.įernando spent the decades since pursuing a bewildering range of creative endeavours. Fernando Jr had catalogued the career of the Wu-Tang Clan from the group’s first steps out of Staten Island.Īlong the way, Skiz found himself crossing the tracks that separate journalists from artists, his fly-on-the-wall reporting of the making of a string of classic albums not only affording him unbeatable access to the group as they broke out of the rap underground and changed the way the music business worked, but also seeing him become a part of their long, strange trip. Fernando Jr.)Īs a regular contributor to The Source and Vibe in hip-hop’s late golden age and the author of one of the first hip-hop histories, the 1994 book The New Beats, Brooklyn-based S.H. Fernando, Jr, with Method Man, November 1994 (photo: Christian Lantry via S.H.