Wu Note

You can find the Blue Noted ODB album cover above here, along with a bunch of similarly reworked Wu Tang family covers. Pretty fantastic . . . I guess some of them (Cuban Linx) are a little too easy, and the seams show pretty much everywhere.

Imagining Wu Tang as something that happened forty years ago, as these covers do, got me thinking about the "classic" status of something like 36 Chambers. It's hard to imagine the record soundtracking dinner parties like so many Blue Note albums do now. Last year Wu Tang came to play at Harvard's Yardfest–I reviewed it for the Phoenix, here–and I was completely surprised to see almost ninety percent of the students react with complete indifference or hostility. I could just be too wrapped up in talking to the same people all the time, but I had thought Wu Tang had made it at least into the periphery of "We-will-respect-this-if-not-exactly-embrace-it" territory. This has something to do with what a nice job upper-middle class white cultured types have done concealing a pretty broad disdain for rap. Nobody minds pop music with rapping in it, of course–and the point of this post is not to criticize rap that hangs out with pop–but Yardfest was a straight-up rap concert, and a lot of people just wished they could eat their hot dogs in peace.

This is also why I picked the ODB cover. Talk about someone who's going to stay disreputable. Also one of the most creative people of the last two decades.