347. GZA, "Liquid Swords"

 


Before we proceed we must pause and acknowledge what some have referred to as the Best Tweet Ever:

I don't know if it's the best ever, but it's really good.  The image of an old white guy stunting on the first black President with his superior rap knowledge is a powerful one. 

Alas, this is not my favorite Wu Tang album (remember Ghost's Supreme Clientele from a while back? Yeah, that's the one), it is certainly a very good album.  (One of the top Google results for "liquid swords" is "Why is Liquid Swords so good?")  It's got the perfect blend of everything that made Wu Tang famous: hustling, street life, kung fu, and tight rhymes.

Lyrically, this probably outstrips Clientele and maybe most other Wu albums.  You can pick a verse from almost any song, but it's shit like this (from "Gold"):

Snake got smoked on the set like Brandon Lee
Blown out the frame like Pan Am Flight 103
He got swung on, his lungs was torn
A kingpin just castled with his rook and lost a pawn
A regular on the block that played lookout
For playing predator with a Glock, he should have took out

I mean, just for the chess analogy alone this is hall of fame stuff.  I only learned what "castling" is a couple of years ago when my kid started playing chess and I got her a book.  Basically, it's the only time in chess when you can move two pieces at once, where the king switches places with the rook.  Here, it suggests the kingpin dealer switched places and sacrificed a lower-positioned member of his crew to save his own life.  That's A+ metaphor, the kind of shit Shakespeare would nod approvingly at.

The album was produced by RZA and has a musical style perfectly suited to the lyrical content - brooding, menacing, and hooky as hell.  It's a journey.

Does this album deserve to be in the Top 500? Yes.

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