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(It was 2016 when the rapper finally cleared up whether he had said “who sons who” or “who Sun Tzu” on “Incarcerated Scarfaces”.) On “Knowledge God,” in one of the greatest rap verses that exists, he describes a rich man named Mike Lavonia in intimate detail.

It’s not that the narrative doesn’t add up, it’s that two dedicated listeners can disagree on exactly what happened in a verse, bar or song, without one of them being proven wrong. His lyrics are precise and diffuse, digressive and focused, thematically consistent but constantly roving. He uses short staccato bars laced with internal rhymes to deliver fragmented stories, ones for which there is a range of interpretations. Raekwon established a unique rhyming style on Cuban Linx. He and Ghost took the first pair of verses on Enter the Wu-Tang, and his leadoff verse on “C.R.E.A.M”-“I grew up on the crime side/ The New York Times side”-was a minted classic. He had honed his skills through battle rapping and was already recognized as one of the strongest MCs in the crew. There was ample opportunity for a lateral move. “I had a name for myself on that street, so my time, my sand was running out,” he told Mao. He had been a hood, and he was tired of that life. And for Raekwon, a full-time rap career was simply the sensible option. (In 1996, a Harvard Business School professor, James Cash, said the Wu were at “the head of the class in terms of strategy development.”) The album was to be designed for a specific demographic, the street guys, who the Clan had never addressed quite so directly. “They didn't know each other as well as they knew me-it was my concept.”įor RZA, the concept of Cuban Linx was business-oriented as was so much else with the Wu-Tang: the order that solo records would be released, who would appear on each song, and countless other decisions were made with the bottom line in mind. “They kinda hooked up and seen that similarity in them, and that’s how it went down,” he told XXL. He saw the couple as a natural fit, notorious stick-up kids, former rivals raised in different parts of Staten Island, Ghost from the Stapleton projects, Rae from Park Hill. The sage of the Wu-Tang clan had known Raekwon since second grade and was living with Ghost in the early ’90s. Like I’ll say something and he’ll be like, ‘Yo, I was just gettin’ ready to say that, son.’” RZA brought the pair together. “That’s my heart right there,” he told Jeff “Chairman” Mao that year, shortly before the record was released, the third Wu solo album to follow 1993’s group debut, Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers).

That said, in 1995, Raekwon had no problem talking about what Ghost meant to him. But they are all deeply intertwined with the tenderness at the record’s core, which stands in contrast to the gritty image associated with the Wu-Tang Clan. All the gangsterisms, everything that made the album so palatable to many fans, those violent elements color the story. The plot needed to be cryptic and bloody. So to tell stories like the ones that Raekwon and Ghostface Killah tell on Only Built for Cuban Linx, you needed to disguise the narrative. You don’t need to have taken a course in masculinity studies to acknowledge that American men have been socialized to avoid overt displays of emotionality.