31 Days Of Panda, day 19 (WIN)

I liked yesterday's walk so I did it again this evening, taking a different route through the south side of Stanley Park and finding some rapidly-narrowing paths which instantly put me in mind of "Doctor Who and the Seeds Of Doom". Suitably scared, I kept up a brisk pace and got to Stadium station just as my album-for-the-night ran out, which tells me I walked for, eh, let's call it just under 90 minutes, which if my Sun Walk time was anything to go by means I covered maybe 8.5k. I'm enjoying this.

Unfortunately tonight's album - in fact today's music, since I listened to an album at home this afternoon - was pretty poor. This "Complete Adventures Of The Style Council" pack I've got has been woefully tagged, and having listened to CD2, then CD1, tonight I found myself listening to CD5... and woe was I, for CD5 is the one with a round dozen 12" mixes. Now the Style Council appear to have done a whole lot of songs which only just filled out three minutes, so listening to them stretched out in late 80s style to six or seven minutes was.... somewhat excruciating. I couldn't honestly tell you anything about any of them, even just an hour later, except that the first one was called "Promised Land", and had about thirty words of lyrics all told. Woeful stuff, honestly. The things I do for the sake of fairness. I suppose the pacey drum machines kept my walking speed up, but ugh... Paul Weller is not Prince, nor should he have tried it on for size...

So the other album I listened to today was, and I'm not making this up, U-God's "Dopium". Yes, there exists in the world a mong so spectacularly mongly that he thinks "Dopium" is such a cool portmanteau word that he must title not just a song but his entire album accordingly. To give the full-spectrum analysis of this album I must take you back about fifteen years (but trust me, it won't take us fifteen years to get back to here - although it might feel like that long if you don't like how I write).

FX: TARDIS noises, and here we are back in 1994. Yr Host is living in St Albans, age 24, and getting well into music thanks to the local libraries. At this time I was getting and listening to 10-12 albums a week from libraries, and dramatically expanding my musical horizons. I was also reading three music magazines a month: Q, Vox, and Select. UK music magazines were, frankly, awesome; they pissed all over Rolling Stone in terms of quantity, and if they didn't have Rolling Stone's extensive (and, now that I've read it, really boring) political commentary attempting to engage "ver yoof" with the world around them, well, so what? We grew up watching Ben Elton on "Friday Night Live" - we already knew about politics.

So one month I pick up, I think, Select, and there's a big article about the new rap sensation coming across from New York, namely the Wu-Tang Clan. And I was hooked. This was a group of nine, count 'em, nine distinct, differentiated, high-quality rappers, who formed like Voltron into an invincible super-rap outfit and then split off to emit their solo albums. At the time the Wu-Tang catalogue comprised the collective's "Enter The Wu-Tang", Method Man's "Tical", and GZA's "Liquid Swords", with a bunch of followups soon after, such as Raekwon's "Only Built 4 Cuban Linx", ODB's "Back To The 36 Chambers", RZA's "Bobby Digital"... and I'm not even getting into the "Wu-affiliates". But trust me, just reading the article was like an electric wire to the brain. I bought those first three albums the next day, and "Liquid Swords" in particular has stayed with me; the Wu-Tang Clan made extensive use of samurai movie samples, moving on to mobster movies and Hong Kong actioners, and their production was this fantastically gritty lo-fi thing which now underlies UK grime such as Dizzee Rascal. I've had a bunch of musical revelations in my life, but this was a major one, and it was thanks to a magazine. It didn't at all hurt that not long afterwards Select started a two-page-spread feature analyzing a song's lyrics every month, and it was noticeable that the song they picked from "Liquid Swords" ("Cold World") was dense with allusion, NYC-specific facts, and references to black culture, whereas the crappy white limp-rock songs they picked in subsequent months were full of comments like "La, I just thought it sounded cool, right?" from the songwriter. These albums were packed with lyrics, and with anger and comedy and sorrow and energy.

And, of course, as the years rolled by, the Wu-Tang Clan became less relevant. Their second collective album has some stunning tracks and a few fillers; their third was maybe two-thirds good; their fourth started to lose the plot; their fifth, I can't honestly remember a single track from it.

And then there's the decline in the quality of the solo albums. GZA, the best lyricist of the bunch, has made six albums in total, including one which predates the Clan - the lyrics are fine, the beats are this dreadful boppy late-80s junk which is just embarrassing to hear now - but his latest effort, "Pro Tools", is a bit of a mixed bag, and includes a couple of grave missteps, such as a diss track about 50 Cent which I'm afraid (and I'm not even a 'Fiddy' fan) sounds like your dad complaining about kids today, and a live bonus track which demonstrates why people shouldn't go to rap concerts. Oh, how the mighty have fallen.

The rest of the Clan haven't really fared any better. Ghostface has put out about eight albums and the last six have all sounded the same. You could make the same accusation about many rappers, sure, and you could also note that many rappers already sound like they're repeating themselves after just two albums - or just on the second half of their first one, in some cases. But he's got fabulous breath control and a real imagination... he just doesn't seem to get the beats, not since his excellent second album, "Supreme Clientele" (see, even the title is good). As for Raekwon, the fast talker and slang king who brought the Wu into the world of the mobster... I can't even tell what he's talking about these days. It's like glossolalia meets Tourette's.

But... and here we come back to the point... the weakest link in the Wu-Tang Clan was always, not the unpredictable and frankly often crap Ol' Dirty Bastard, but the completely predictable and always crap U-God. ODB was generally out of material, but my god, did he sound like nothing else on Earth when he was at the mic. There's a track he did with GZA which fires up the normally relaxed and restrained GZA into such a frenzy that they pass the lyric between each other and sometimes you can't tell who's talking. Fabulous stuff.

U-God: not so much of the fabulous. Basically, he just sucks. He really does. He was always the most jaw-droppingly dull of the Clan when he 'dropped' (note cool authentic slang there) a verse on a Clan track, but his was the last solo album I picked up while still in completist mode. Why did I stop? Because his first solo album was crap. It was called "Golden Arms" (see, even the title is crap) and even before it had finished he was out of ideas, his rhymes woeful and childish, his imagery nonexistent. Disaster!

So, today, while sitting at home hacking around the Finale file for "Tonight" in preparation for Strongbow Chorus on Tuesday, I listened to U-God's most recent album, "Dopium", having picked it up in the same sweep which netted me "Pro Tools". And, dear god, he was out of ideas by track two. Let me repeat that: track two. How the hell do you manage that? And no, it wasn't just the track sequencing: all the subsequent tracks had nothing to recommend them. At all. Argh.

As a capstone to this humiliation, the album ends with three remixes of the tracks which I suppose were the least laughable potential choices for release as singles. Remixes! Of a Wu-Tang song! Techno remixes! Dance remixes! Oh god, U-God, you are such a loser. I pity the record executive who had to okay this album. Presumably he knew he wasn't going to get anything better out of the man.

What all of this has been in aid of is: when you find something you find you love, you never consider that you will, most likely, outlive it. We think of love as being eternal, and perhaps I'm weak and flighty and not a True Believer. But more likely, the Wu-Tang Clan has just lost it, their youthful energy diluted by success, family, and not having to work for it. They can do what they want, and they have many options available to them, and making awesome, no, crucial records is no longer a priority. That's fine. It's just a pity, because for a while they were electrifying.

It reminds me of when Franz Ferdinand's third album came out earlier this year. I'd been really looking forward to it, and I'm afraid I thought it was tripe. And yet, look at all the reviews. Look at how many of them are basically positive. I'm happy to say, actually, that since I last looked at this page shortly after the album came out, there have been a bunch more low-end reviews expressing the view that Franz Ferdinand misfired badly with this one. But the one I like is that last one, and I'm pretty sure it'll stay the last one no matter what else, because only an independent magazine would dare to give a big commercial release a rating as low as 13%. And I quote: "Truly, the four dapper Scotsmen that constitute this group should be ashamed of their tuneless, thoughtless, meaningless new offering, which distorts the proud legacy of a band that once mattered."

"A band that once mattered." I know exactly what they mean.