The 1980s demonstrated the flexibility of the genre, commercial hip-hop dividing into subgenres like party hip-hop, gangsta rap, conscious rap, and more (with some overlap across types). If the 1970s saw the birth of hip-hop, the following decade was its adolescence. In six years, a teenager’s hobby became an international sensation.
Then, in 1979, it broke into the mainstream with the release of “Rapper’s Delight” by the Sugarhill Gang, the fifteen-minute record which both captured the vivacity of live hip-hop and became the first rap song to enter “the American Top 40” for popular music. The citywide blackout on July 13, 1977, enabled the looting of new sound systems and equipment key to DJing, thus “boosting the authority” of aspiring hip-hop artists. The result: a new, exciting genre and culture that “stripped down and let go of everything” in music, save for “the rhythm, the motion, the voice, the name.” Over the next four years, this primordial hip-hop spread to other New York City boroughs, spawning acts like Grandmaster Flash and Afrika Bambaataa.
The motive was practical, throwing a party to make back-to-school shopping money for his sister and party host Cindy. Though hip-hop is a national and international phenomenon, it began in August 1973 in the West Bronx, New York, at a party DJ’d by then-teenaged Jamaican immigrant Clive “DJ Kool Herc” Campbell. Wu-Tang Clan’s rising prevalence in popular media participates in and reinforces the prominence of hip-hop music in the United States.
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Such media includes Showtime’s Of Mics and Men (2019), a four-part documentary chronicling the rise of Wu-Tang and their complicated group dynamics, and the Hulu series Wu-Tang: An American Saga (2019), “an epic bildungsroman and dank autofiction” about the formation of Wu-Tang. The hip-hop group’s more recent popularity permeates contemporary visual media as the story of Wu-Tang Clan is told to a younger generation of listeners who were not born at the beginning of Wu-Tang’s career. Hip-hop scholar Brian Coleman agrees with this when listing “the impact, the illness, the innovation, the size, and the longevity” of Wu-Tang, while BBC writer Kieran Nash praises the group as a “revolutionary force in hip-hop” that “changed both the sound and business of rap music forever.” Confronted with the realities of gang culture, poverty, and racist infrastructure policies present in late 20th-century New York City, Wu-Tang responded with bombastic lyricism and rhetoric which hearkened to their then-common religious affiliation: the Five Percent Nation (also known as the Five Percenters and Nation of Gods and Earths). Over 25 years after their debut album, Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers), hip-hop group Wu-Tang Clan maintains their legendary status. “Who is the Original Man? The original man is the Asiatic Black man the Maker the Owner the Cream of the planet Earth, Father of Civilization, God of the Universe.”-Student Enrollment Lesson no. “About 80 percent of hip-hop comes from the Five Percent … In a lot of ways, hip-hop is the Five Percent.”-RZA Surveying specific ideas, this article connects Wu-Tang Clan’s inclusion of kung fu to the Five Percenter idea of the “Asiatic Black man.” The reinforcement of this bridge between Wu-Tang and the Five Percenters gestures to the larger, undeniable impact the religious organization made on the hip-hop genre, especially in the early years of hip-hop. Drawing upon relevant scholarship in the area of hip-hop and religion studies, alongside Wu-Tang interviews and official Five Percenter websites, the ensuing analysis illuminates how the album, Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers), maps selected Lessons and concepts of the Five Percent Nation. This project pinpoints how Wu-Tang Clan incorporates and interprets Five Percent Nation ideologies in their iconic 1993 debut album. On the other hand, the Five Percent Nation (also known as the Five Percenters or Nation of Gods and Earths), a Black nationalist religious organization based in New York City, remains enigmatic save for occasional articles which denigrate the group. Amidst other popular artists, Wu-Tang Clan is a “revolutionary force in hip-hop” that has “changed both the sound and business of rap music forever” and impacted artists like Pulitzer Prize–winning Kendrick Lamar.