More than any other musical genre, hip-hop is a quintessentially American phenomenon. And as an art movement, it is undeniably postmodern. First gaining the attention of the general public following the breakout success of New York City trio The Sugar Hill Gang’s massive 1979 hit “Rapper’s Delight,” the genre had spent most of the decade simmering quietly at underground venues and gatherings across the South Bronx. It was there that in the early 1970s, a local DJ by the name of DJ Kool Herc began experimenting with different ways of extending the rhythmic and percussive breaks on the funk records he would play at dance parties, creating heavily syncopated and danceable loops in the process. And it was the likewise syncopated and stream-of-consciousness exhortations that he directed at his hired crews of dancers at these pioneering happenings that laid the foundation for the musical form that would ultimately come to be known as rapping.

Throughout the 1980s, the music’s popularity exploded, in part due to the rise of music videos. In just a few short years, MTV brought the burgeoning sound to millions of homes across the country and around the world. Artists like The Sugar Hill Gang, Fab Five Freddy, Afrika Bambaataa, and Grand Master Flash offered young listeners a fresh sound that aptly fused the libidinal and jubilant allure of genres like funk and disco with the optimism that characterized many of the era’s flourishing youth and urban art movements, particularly those associated with the cultures of graffiti and breakdancing. As the decade wore on, hip hop became an umbrella term of sorts used to describe a variety of stylistically divergent sounds, all of which shared some specific aesthetic qualities. Chief among these was the genre’s foundational belief in sampling as the cornerstone for songwriting. Unlike the traditional approach to composition, followed almost uniformly across all other genres, in which a song’s structure depends inherently on the harmonic relationship between chords, and in turn, their relationship with various rhythmic principles, hip hop approached song-building in a radically different way. 

Rather than engineer new numbers based on the principles of harmony and melody, hip hop approached the creative process through a rhythmic and collagist lens, taking the harmonic structures found in existing songs and splicing them together before looping them in ways that accentuated both the distinct origins of the sampled compositions and the unifying power of rhythm. This radical approach effectively opened up the door for a flurry of experimentation that defined the genre at the start of the 1990s. It was at this time that two major trends had come to dominate the still inchoate art form. The first was the stylistic preference, particularly among West Coast artists, to plumb the psychedelic-funk movement of the late ’60s and early ’70s for sampling material, best exemplified by LA-based artists like Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, and Tupac, whose work popularized a synth-heavy and groovy style of hip hop dubbed G-Funk.

The second involved the genre’s overnight takeover by groups based out of the West Coast following the critical and commercial success of NWA’s 1988 debut album Straight Outta Compton. What had once been an artistic and cultural phenomenon with a distinctly urban East Coast character had rapidly metastasized to the palm tree-lined streets of sunny Los Angeles and the very heart of the record industry. But as history would have it, the West Coast’s uncontested reign over the still-developing art form wasn’t meant to last. On November 9th, 1993, East Coast hip hop began what’s today known as a period of artistic and commercial renaissance with the release of one of the genre’s most groundbreaking, influential, and iconoclastic releases: Wu-Tang Clan’s debut album Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers). 

A mind-numbingly perverse and viscerally raw oeuvre, 36 Chambers dealt a violent and unexpected blow to the otherwise lofty and pretentious sensibilities of New York-based contemporaries like A Tribe Called Quest and the hedonist and sensual stylings of West Coast G-Funk. Produced, mixed, arranged, and programmed by de-facto band leader RZA, the album’s 12 hard-hitting tracks were recorded at Firehouse Studio in New York. To emphasize just how innovative the album was and how it broke with all expectations regarding style, performance, and production would be to chart the genre’s development after its release. In other words, the album didn’t just lay the groundwork for a Renaissance in East Coast rap. It single handedly drafted the blueprint that hip hop would follow to critical, cultural, and commercial domination over the musical landscape beginning in the 1990s. 

Compositionally, 36 Chambers took the notion of collaging and splicing together different musical samples to a new level. Prior to the album’s release, artists and producers primarily seemed to seek out material from a limited pool, mostly opting for numbers that spanned the brief period in the early ’70s when the psychedelic funk of bands like Parliament-Funkadelic was in vogue. Another alternative, often favored by New York rappers, was to cull from works released at the height of the Cool Jazz movement at the end of WWII. Though successful in their own right, these earlier experiments tended to build songs out of harmonic changes and melodic lines usually plucked from one specific number and repeated throughout the track. In 36 Chambers, RZA severed ties with tradition, choosing instead to piece together songs made up of upwards of three or more samples. This unprecedented method dominates the album from the very first track “Bring Da Ruckus,” a bass-heavy and hard-stomping number that masterfully blends the soothing sounds of Melvin Bliss’ “Synthetic Substitution” with the funky polyrhythms of Carlos Bess’ “CB#2” and the soulful tonic of The Dramatics’ “In the Rain.” 

The formula, unorthodox as it was at the time, is repeated throughout the record with incredible success. Sampled artists include the likes of Thelonius Monk, Syl Johnson, Lonnie Smith, Gladys Knight, Otis Redding, and The Jackson 5 to the point that parsing through the long list of borrowed material is to get a crash course in the numerous contributions to music made by African American artists throughout the twentieth century. What’s more, in 36 Chambers, RZA and the Wu-Tang Clan employ a medley of vignettes that precede many of the tracks, in which characters who stand for each of the group’s members interact with one another in sketches that are entirely divorced from the album’s musical and thematic context. This narrative trope, at heart prototypically postmodern, would go on to feature prominently in the works of later hip hop luminaries like Jay-Z, Kanye West, and Kendrick Lamar. 

Even more alluring than the formal innovations brought about by the group was the raw talent of each of its members. Witty and superfluous, funny and indignant, droll and acerbic are ways to describe the wide emotional range covered in tracks characterized by the breathtaking use of free-associative lyrics and freestyling. Straying far from the retrograde optimism of their contemporaries, the group weaves together Dickensian tales rife with urban blight, spiritual and moral bankruptcy, destitution, and the overwhelming anxiety and despair borne of knowing early on that the odds of getting ahead in life irrefutably stand stacked against them; an honest and unfiltered description of life in some of the most economically depressed parts of a city unraveled by the effects of outsourcing, globalization, and deindustrialization. A postmodern take on La Comedie Humane for the harsh conditions of urban life at the end of the century, the album initiated the kind of gritty thematic realism that characterized hip hop through the rest of the ‘90s, and which in some ways, remains an integral part of the genre to this day. 

For these reasons, it’s no surprise that the album became the colossal cultural touchstone and commercial success that it did. Inspired by its blunt and violent production techniques and the dark realism of its lyrical content, other New York artists like Biggie Smalls, Nas, Mobb Deep, and Jay-Z soon adopted the Wu-Tang’s successful blueprint, returning East Coast Hip Hop to a place of prominence while achieving commercial and critical success of their own. 

Larger than life on and off the record, many of the group’s members would likewise follow down that path, creating a record-industry empire that by the end of the decade had released dozens of albums both by Wu-Tang members and affiliates and turned them into household names. In retrospect, only during the 1990s, at the dawn of the Digital Age and in the twilight years of the American Century could such a rags-to-riches story unfold seemingly overnight. Particularly, one driven by an inherently subversive inclination to blur long-standing definitions of artistry and authenticity. In a sense, these plot points don’t just simply recount the history of hip hop as a product shaped by the reigning forces of its time. Rather, they evoke the story of our ever- expanding National Songbook—a story that continues to this day.

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