Ghost should win an EGOT for, Stanislavski style, inhabiting Ricochet Rabbit, Tweety Bird, Elmer Fudd, Shaggy, and a slew of other Saturday morning favorites. It features some of the self-proclaimed Wally Champ’s most imaginative darts. And while “Flowers” certainly lost some of the original version’s warped, nervous stick-up-kid edginess, it nonetheless showcases an in-his-prime Ironman lyrically besting his estimable Wu brethren.īut if it feels like the label stepped on his product, watering it down - like the work Stringer Bell forced his lieutenants to sling in season one of The Wire - Ghost makes up for that with “The Forest,” which is nothing but that uncut raw. So maybe RZA was as frustrated as Ghost was when the samples didn’t clear. I know that other producers and engineers don’t know that.” That probably explains why Ghost’s manic, hair-trigger timbre is not as effective when he rhymes on synthesized tracks. His voice should be compressed on 90 MHz and sloped down. In a 2005 interview RZA said of his erstwhile neighbor, “He’s more high-pitched when other producers work with him. The Abbott, of course, sampled James on another Ghost banger - 1996’s “Daytona 500.” He knows that generation of soak-the-labels-off-in-the-tub breakbeats naturally compliments Ghost’s tone. And here, that classic call-and-response feel is referenced with a nimble verse from Method Man, who spits, “When that Absolut and Hennessy mix (Ultimate! Ultimate!)/ Wu shit, my whole clique (Ultimate! Ultimate!).” Ghost’s free-associative assault (“In slow motion when yo’ head hit the meter/ You lost two liters, at the same case speeder/ Peter slid through, shook ’em down for his reefer”) redeems RZA’s processed interpolation of Bob James’ immortal “Take Me To The Mardi Gras.” Wu’s legacy has always been aligned with old-school icons like the Cold Crush Brothers. The song is a bravura display of ferocious rhymes over a cinematic bells-accented track - a high-powered park jam for the peak TRL era. But despite RZA’s 11th-hour beat switcharoo, “Flowers” deserves its, well, flowers. It’s not the version critics fawned over when they got their advance copies of the album. A bootleg favorite, “Flowers” retains much of the militant magnetism that made it an essential posse cut when it leaked months before the album’s release.
The syrupy “Never Be The Same” following the radical lost classic “The Sun” on the OG tracklist is a head-scratcher and had to have been the label’s decision. Initially conceived as a seamless amalgam of psychedelic street cuts and authentic airplay staples, the Bulletproof we know and love is less hallucinatory, but it flows even more seamlessly. In a recent interview with Wax Poetics, he told the writer David Ma, “I wasn’t too happy with Bulletproof, because RZA forgot to clear some samples on there and shit became a real distraction for me and everyone around.” He’s such a high-level conceptualist and visionary that the Bulletproof Wallets that arrived on record-store shelves two decades ago, while not as extravagant as the version he’d handed to his label, is still stellar. Never mind that Ghostface doesn’t particularly like Bulletproof Wallets. Not for nothing was he sporting that championship belt in the “Cherchez La Ghost” video a year earlier. Even if you were outside at the time, up to your eyeballs in bright-ass Iceberg sweaters, it’s easy to undervalue how pivotal Ghost was to his group’s relevancy going into Bulletproof Wallets, released 20 years ago this Saturday. For some time, Ghost had almost single-handedly held down the Wu-Tang imprimatur, most recently via 2000’s widely beloved Supreme Clientele. Ghostface Killah’s rep in November 2001 was as bulletproof as the order window at whatever chicken spot he probably visited with that woman in the “Ice Cream” video after the shoot.