Summer of 1976: A young kid who had just come back from North Carolina into the streets of Staten Island. There was a block party being thrown by a local D.J., I think DJ Quincy. The D.J. had jacked power from the street lamps, plugged up his system and was playing music. And even though I was a kid that shouldn’t have been there — it was past bedtime — I was there. The music, the turntablism of him spinning the record back and forth, the guy on the mic reciting lyrics, DJ Punch. Immediately, I fell in love. I had to be 7 years old.

I remember the lyric the guy said: “Dip, dip, dive/so socialized/you clean out your ears and you open your eyes.” When you just look at those words right there, it really makes a lot of sense.

It was a life-changing year for me. I stayed in New York that summer, and then we went back down South. I had to come back to New York in 1977 and was stuck here ever since.

My cousin, the GZA, who lived on Staten Island at that time, had cousins in Queens and in the Bronx. Soundview Projects in the Bronx was one of the founding projects of hip-hop. Being a few years older than me, GZA would take me up to the Bronx and that’s where I would hear M.C.s. We could say our style is traced back to the Bronx because it was Soundview Projects that really put the most inspiration on us. And of course, Jamaica, Queens.

At 11, you was almost an adult, especially in poverty situations. I’m talking about going from Park Hill, Staten Island, to the Wilson stop in Bushwick on the L train, and I did that every morning. That was just New York life.

GZA was already an M.C. I would just recite whatever he said, copy it. At the age of 9, I wrote my own first lyric. I would sit in school and just write lyrics all day. That was the kind of brain I had.

Before the Sugarhill Gang had a record on the radio, all we had was tapes. COLD CRUSH versus the Fantastic Freaks, Cold Crush versus the Force M.C.s, Busy Bee versus Kool Moe Dee. Those tapes, those Harlem World tapes, those uptown Bronx tapes circulating through the neighborhoods, those were our teachers.

But when I heard them on the radio, I was convinced that one day my voice was going to be on the radio. Me, O.D.B. and the GZA, we just pursued it. We would travel throughout New York, any opportunity that we could to show that we had talent.

We had bad contracts. The first contract, I’m glad I didn’t sign it. GZA and Ol’ Dirty signed it — we was probably 15, 16 years old, and it didn’t work. My first contract of course was with Tommy Boy at 19 years old, and that didn’t work either. I felt abandoned by the label. I felt that the best way to do it was to do it ourselves.

I formed my own company first, Wu-Tang Productions, and started selling records out of the trunk. Then when Loud got wind of us and offered us a deal, I went, “Nah. I can’t tie every member of this crew down to one location. This crew is big and we have to spread our wings. We have to take our talent and spread it through the industry.” I felt it was going to be impossible for all this energy to come out of one faucet. “Nah, I need more spigots.”

I thought that hip-hop was losing its roots.

And I knew that me, the GZA, Ol’ Dirty, Method Man, Ghost, we were purists. My plan was to infiltrate the industry. The purity of the culture was taking a left turn already in the ’90s, and I felt that we should enter the arena but spread it out like 36 chambers. We want our chambers to be everywhere.

You think about before us in the ’60s and ’70s, you got Elijah Muhammad making different temples around the country. Or Marcus Garvey giving us the idea that we as Black men and women have to stand up and be noble and plant our flags, calculate our lives. Those things were in the back of my head as an entrepreneur and as an artist.

Prior to us entering the industry, we always felt that Eric B. & Rakim, KRS-One, Run-DMC, Big Daddy Kane, LL Cool J — there was a moment in hip-hop, between like 1985 and 1988, that was just powerful, influential and pure still. And then ’89, ’90, ’91, it started getting diluted.

So then when we came in, we felt we was bringing it back pure, and our contemporaries, as well: Biggie Smalls, Nas, Mobb Deep, Busta Rhymes, Outkast. Our early shows, it was Outkast and Wu-Tang, popping up in Chicago. Ice Cube was probably the headliner, and we were the opening act. And a few of the underground peers who didn’t fully hit the chart surface: Brand Nubian, of course, De La Soul, Duck Down.

Hip-hop is a sport. Now Wu-Tang, of course, being nine M.C.s and egotistic, even though those were our peers, we felt we were the best. We felt nobody could beat Wu-Tang. That’s the Wu-Tang spirit.

When we hit No. 1 on the charts in the summer of ’97, beating the country artists and rock artists, it was like, “Wow, we did it.” And the cool thing about it was like it was without being pop. It wasn’t like we had a Top 40 record. It was just the culture itself, the path we walked.

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"This is the streets, and I am the trap." � Jay Bilas
http://www.popmatters.com/pm/archive/contributor/517
Hip Hop Handbook: http://tinyurl.com/ll4kzz