Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers)

The first Wu-Tang Clan single, "Protect Ya Neck," was recorded for three hundred dollars. According to the studio owner, RZA paid for the session in quarters. Nine MCs from Staten Island and Brooklyn crowded into a small studio in Brooklyn called Firehouse, which they could afford precisely because nobody else wanted to record there. To decide who appeared on each track, RZA made the members battle each other for spots. The process was combative enough that a battle between Method Man and Raekwon, recorded during those sessions, was eventually released on Method Man's solo debut rather than this album.

RZA produced every track himself, building beats from soul samples and lifting sound clips from kung-fu films he had been watching obsessively for years. Staten Island became Shaolin in Wu-Tang mythology, their neighborhood transformed into a martial arts kingdom where each MC represented a different style. The combination of gritty lo-fi production and the sheer lyrical force of nine distinct voices competing for space created a sound that had no precedent in hip-hop. "C.R.E.A.M.," "Protect Ya Neck," "Method Man," and "Can It Be All So Simple" stand as individual classics, but the record's power comes from the collective, from the chaos of all those voices and personalities colliding in rooms too small to contain them.

West Coast rap had dominated the early nineties. This album, recorded for next to nothing and released on an independent label, helped reclaim New York City as the center of hip-hop. It was certified platinum by 1995 and is now ranked among the greatest albums ever made. The Library of Congress selected it for preservation in 2022.