And it was like all we did was be a part ofour environment to the fullest. Like Cap was telling you, it was like, "Yo, wewas still kids, we was still going to school." I remember going to school andsaying, "Alright, I missed one day." Then I missed three days, it’s like,"Three days ain’t bad." Two weeks. I’m like,"How am I going to tell my moms this shit? But we wasstill growing up as kids, and like he said, finagling. There was a lot ofthings going on in our neighborhood, so Staten Island had their own way ofdelivering their rhymes. And our rhymes is fresh from the neighborhood, fromcats that just was freestyling, and you know what I mean, they was partydoctors.
It was natural because it was a way of having some kind ofknowledge and walking around not lost. Because it’s so easy to be led in thewrong and hard to be led in the right. Our neighborhood, it was so much goingon. You had to either be one way or the other.
As the group catches on, we hear, beat-by-beat, how the song "C.R.E.A.M." was constructed. We hear phrases and rhymes that now feel stitched into rap’s fabric. "I grew up on the crime side, the New York Times side." "The combination made my eyes bleeeeed." "I’m alive on arrival," Deck raps, a simple inversion made manifest. RZA, the architect of the group and fulcrum of this film, calls upon his hook-writing secret weapon, Method Man.
We called ourselves the Ghostface Killahz (back then, your crew wasn’t legit unless you substituted a "z" for an "s" in the plural), named after who we thought was Wu-Tang’s sharpest and most vivid rapper. And in the same way that every Wu-Tang member gave themselves wu tang name generator-Gambino aliases (Noodles, Johnny Blaze, Tony Starks, etc.) in addition to their main monikers, we also gave ourselves Wu-Gambino names. There was Jocko the Unique Manifique, Shakes the Handler, and Screwnino. I adopted the name Johnny O’Malley. Going raah, raah like a dungeon dragon, Ol’ Dirty Bastard fulfilled the wildstyle quotient for the wu tang generator name-Tang by becoming the Clan’s drunken master. He predated codeine rap, but his hazy, woozy style, particularly on the seasick "Raw Hide," had to have informed the next-generation of lean-inspired hip-hop.
What starts out resembling the sort of lumpy, customary "Here’s the promo for our new project! " final segment of so many music docs soon transforms into a scam-artist adventure built around the producer and longtime RZA disciple Cilvaringz. It’s an odd but oddly fitting end to the story of a group without precedent.