Frequently Asked Questions.

We're at the end of our weekly 18-month run, so I wanted to take this last moment to answer some of the most common questions I get from the three people who have contacted me about it.

Why did you start doing this blog?

My first exposures to Wu-Tang Clan were in 1996 or 1997.  Before Wu-Tang Forever came out, our local record store got some promo cassettes to give to fans to promote it and I tried one out.  I knew it was unlike anything I'd heard, even though I'd hardly listened to any rap music before that, so I made sure to catch them when they came around on tour (to Maui, one of the two Hawaii shows featured in the video for "It's Yourz").  I can honestly say I've been a fan since then, although it took me until much later to collect all their albums.

Meanwhile, I've spent the last 15 years writing what I know.  Since 2000 or so, I always focused on non-fiction.  In 2005, I wrote a story for a third-year Creative Nonfiction college course about driving to Orlando with some of my friends to go see Wu-Tang Clan at the Hard Rock Cafe.  I ended up with an A for the semester after turning the story in and I used the piece, "Celebrating the Life and Death of Osiris," as the opening story in my first book.  The only of their albums I officially owned at that time were Enter the Wu-Tang, Wu-Tang Forever, Only Built 4 Cuban Linx..., Return to the 36 Chambers (The Dirty Version), the Ghost Dog soundtrack and No Said Date.  With apologies to the Wu, I initially pirated the others that were out by then so I could listen to them all.  My plan was to pick up my favorites at some point soon, then grab the others later on.

Then life got in the way.  In mid-2007, thanks in part to my car breaking down, I found myself in $5,000 debt literally overnight while working a $7 an hour job.  So I moved to Virginia and stayed with my parents for a bit while finishing my first book and working retail to dig myself out of the hole.  I'd picked up Fishscale, More Fish and The Big Doe Rehab by Ghostface as well as The W, Iron Flag, 8 Diagrams and the first Afro Samurai soundtrack.  My wife and I got married and had a daughter and it wasn't until 2012 that I finally got financially stable enough to start thinking about buying anything that cost more than $10 at a time.  Coincidentally, Amazon was having a huge rap sale and I ended up getting something like five more Wu solo records for about $30.  Now there was no turning back - I had close to 20 albums.  Every month or two I squirreled away enough to get another three or four albums between bills, necessities and other recreational purchases.  Whenever I bought an album, I'd delete my bootleg of it, rip the new CD in high quality and keep them both for my own listening.  I was a lot more hardcore about supporting artists by this point, so I didn't share my own rips; I instead took some pride in my collection.  Then around Christmas 2013 I realized I was down to within, maybe, five or six albums before having all the Wu-centric records released.  

It was a shitload of albums - about 65 all in.  It seemed like an accomplishment or achievement in some way.  To date the only one I haven't actually paid for is Ol' Dirty Bastard's A Son Unique.  I didn't have iTunes the day it was released and pulled online, so since there's literally no legal way to buy it, I feel less guilty about having downloaded it.  I made it up to the ODB estate by buying a friend a copy of Return to the 36 Chambers.  I was within a couple months of finishing my third book and decided my next project would be a blog.  It would be a weekly music blog.  It would be a Wu-Tang blog.

So I Googled info on all the albums - mostly release dates, but there were some good behind-the-scenes stories too.  I thought it would be a cool thing to trace the evolution of the group as a whole and individually over the past 20+ years, so I made a chart of every one of the albums and put them in order of release date and got to work.  I stacked them all up on my dining room table, took some pictures, Photoshopped in the release dates and the Map of Shaolin was born.  It started out a bit more ambitiously than it ended up - I was certain I'd review most of the movies sampled on the albums (The Killer, Five Deadly Venoms) and other involved films (Ghost Dog, The Man with the Iron Fists, Afro Samurai etc), and that I'd have wild stories revolving around every single album I covered.  The early responses to the blog were good but most feedback I got was actually in favor of more in-depth album reviews, so I ended up going nearly track-by-track for most of the albums and letting the film reviews go.

What did you learn from doing this blog?

It was a much bigger task than it seemed when I started it.  At the same time, I started to really care about each of these nine guys.  There's genuine sadness in some of the albums released in the mid-2000s, after ODB died.  They lost a family member and it's the elephant in the room for awhile in 2005 and 2006.  Another thing in terms of the whole group is, RZA lamented what happened in 1997 after Forever came out and his five-year master plan for the band ended, and I'll concede that there's a definite lack of cohesion from 1998 to about 2003 as each band member learned to strike out on his own, but I think it's led to a big misconception that every album after Wu-Tang Forever just sucks and that's simply not the case.  Every member of the Clan has released at least one incredible album since Forever, in some cases two or three.  Then it's like, one of my first struggles getting someone to try some new music was getting my old-school Wu friends to try out No Said Date and Resident Patient in college and they just wouldn't give them a chance, which drove me nuts when I covered them in the blog and saw such good reviews for them.  I wanted to say "See?  They were awesome and the critics even recognized it!"  I hate for good friends to miss out on good music, so the post-Forever hate is some falseness I've tried really hard to rip apart in the last year or so.

Individually, it's been one of the most rewarding research experiments in my life seeing how each member of Wu-Tang has evolved and changed with the times since they stepped out from RZA's umbrella.  Ol' Dirty Bastard going from a Joker-off-his-leash force of chaos to an endearing folk antihero was a heartwarming and enjoyable history to relive.  I've mentioned Inspectah Deck and Ghostface Killah settling on on comic culture in recent years, which is the most obvious change.  Masta Killa was a slow burn, with just one verse on 36 Chambers then a shitload more on Forever but no solo debut until 2004.  As one of the most popular and successful members, Method Man had a pretty hard backlash against the label-led Tical 0 then he bounced back with 4:21 and The Meth Lab.  Similarly, U-God had an underrated debut with Golden Arms Redemption before the Wu-free and really bad Mr. Xcitement, but I think he came back solid with Dopium and that The Keynote Speaker is his strongest yet - a huge comeback that somehow went under the radar for most.

They're an endlessly interesting group of artists who took the planet and made it theirs for a time, now settling into more long-term plans.

I've also learned that I'm now much less sensitive to rappers using the word "nigga" in their lyrics.  And that among my friends I'm now "the Wu-Tang guy."

What's been the most popular blog so far?

Oddly enough, my advance review of this year's Every Hero Needs a Villain by Czarface got almost double the page views of my next most popular entry.  Go figure.

What will happen now to/with Map of Shaolin?

Now that we're all caught up on Wu-Tang's 22-year history, I'll leave it alone until a new album by any of the members (or the group) is released, at which point I'll make another entry.  I'm assuming the next step will be GZA's Dark Matter but I don't know for sure.  Everyone asks me to make this into a book but would you pay $15 for 70 reviews from my dumb ass?  Neither would I.

What's next for you?

Like I said, I always write what I know, so my first three books were about growing up geek in the '80s and '90s, real-life superheroes and essays on video games, and now Wu-Tang.  I started up a fourth proper book about comic con life, but it's fizzled for me personally so I'll likely release that free as an ebook at some point.

So what's actually next for you?

I'm taking a bold step and working on a sci-fi project.  There's not a huge overlap between rap and sci-fi, so it may not be of much interest, but I'll say that everything in it is completely normal to today's world save for the fact that we've had to build cities on the backs of 2,000-foot tall colossi that emerge from the sea after the land becomes uninhabitable for us.

Who's your favorite Wu-Tang rapper?

It's hard to say.  I think GZA is their best lyricist.  Inspectah Deck and Method Man have the best flow.  My personal favorite is Masta Killa, because he seems the most reflective and humble and his style is really unique.  Also I love his voice.  Who wouldn't?

Where can I find your other writing?  (Ok, I asked this one myself)

Paperbacks of all three of my books (and Kindle versions of the first two) are available by searching Amazon.com for my name, jonny Lupsha.  Even better, my publishing company, A Carrier of Fire, has its own website with links to the product pages on Amazon and their related blogs.  You can also like A Carrier of Fire on Facebook.

Keep your eyes on the Map next Wednesday for our final regular entry, "Step Seventy:  Method Man: The Meth Lab."  Thanks for everything guys.  It's been a trip.