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also around the time he stopped making those fly-word-jumble type of rhymes that he was doing on joints like 'One' & 'Nutmeg'.
Lyric/concept-wise a lot of it felt a bit too on the nose, an album like Cuban Linx was a cocaine creation in a multitude of ways but it wasn't actually coke-rap in the vein of what followed shortly thereafter.
It certainly had a hand in creating coke-rap as subgenre along with the mafioso-isms that followed in its wake but it was a Wu album and those Wu albums made during that fertile period between Chambers to Forever (with Clientele given belated inclusion) are too strange, cinematic and multifaceted to be anything else but Wu albums/classic rap records.
If they'd been using a canvas they might deploy/distribute the colors differently to create each picture but they're still working with the same selection of paints.
The production on Fishscale was also like an OKP wet dream in the mid-2000s (3-4 joints from Pete Rock, MF DOOM & J Dilla) but:
-Pete wasn't really bringing his best heat at that time since he's a sample-based producer who by then was trying to avoid using samples or at least multiple on one song (it's not an accident that 100 Blocks From Tiffany's was his best beat work since Soul Survivor, it was a free album so he didn't have to worry about clearing anything & could just dig/chop/loop like he used to do).
-MF Doom just handed him a copy of Special Herbs Vol 1 and 2 so it was Ghost rapping over old beats that Doom had already put out at least once in some cases twice.
-J Dilla had already passed so he was rapping over joints off Donuts and beat tapes.
In the last two cases, the disconnect between production and rapping felt obvious, like a mash-up or a mixtape.
Ghost's discovery of both was relatively recent in '06, not sure whether he even knew those beats had been used before or just knew not many would know and/or care.
Maybe if RZA had been around to executive-produce he could have tweaked the music a bit, trimmed some of the fat (this album is over an hour & feels at least that long, can't remember the last time I let it roll front to back) and sequenced/engineered the album it might have felt more unified sonically or cohesive thematically.
The Just Blaze joint was cookie-cutter.
The Wu posse cut was underwhelming, that was also around the time when we started wondering what was wrong with Deck's voice for a year or two (luckily he seems to have recovered fully now).
None of the features had any kind of 'oh shit' memorable verse or quotable to add to the cannon, it mostly just felt like Theodore Unit with a large dose of Rae who was awkwardly trying to catch a little light from Ghost's shine since his star had dimmed in the post-Immobilarity/IceWater era.
It was the album that gave the non-rap-specific music critic base (Village Voice, Rolling Stone, Spin, Entertainment Weekly, Pitchfork, USA Today) a current Wu/Ghost album to gush over since they were likely championing Beck, Smashing Pumpkins, late-career REM/Pavement albums or trying to sell 'electronica' as the next major genre to dominate as 'alternative' rock stars died or grew rich/bored/drug-addicted during that '93-96 period when rap was cranking out double-digit classic albums annually and prepping for commercial dominance in the following few years.
The same crowd came out again for Cuban Linx 2 but were careful not to lavish quite the same amount of praise because Rae didn't have the same cultural cache at the time plus sequels to classics are always a bit controversial.
Rae's follow-up got basically no buzz amongst critics or fans (neither did Ghost's last album, since his rep for quality control started taking hits by then since he had cranked out More Fish/Big Doe-Rehab/etc and his R&B album-maybe his only attempt at doing something besides Fishscale-style records-was unfairly ignored/derided).
But I'd say the first Wu Chamber Music volume, Shaolin vs Wu-Tang & Czarface are easily three of the five or so best albums anybody in the collective made since their last unassailable classic in Supreme.
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