Perhaps I’m just showing my age. The Wu’s epic reign over rap music in the 1990s coincided with the height of my Hip-Hop appreciation, when the only sounds playing in my 1983 Volvo and in my college dorm room where the beats and rhymes of rap. And while I flirted with the No Limit craze and always appreciated Redman and certainly got excited about Jay-Z and Eminem and the Alkoholics and a bunch of other great stuff from the back half of that decade, it was always about Wu-Tang for me. At 29, maybe I just represent the target market for the 2007 version of the Wu. It is entirely possible that I’m just getting old.

However, I think it is more than that, because while I certainly fall somewhere in the general description of a “hipster” rap fan, I don’t quite glean my opinion from the hordes of snobby blogs and pretentious music websites like so many other hipsters out there. And I also don’t necessarily think that Ghostface is the greatest musical artist alive, which I believe is important.

You see, the Ghostface fascination has reached a point where he can do no wrong. From his genuine classics like Ironman and Supreme Clientele to his albums that were more scattered-but-still-treated-like-classics such as 2004’s The Pretty Toney Album and 2006’s doubleheader of Fishscale and More Fish (don’t get me wrong, I loved them all, but they weren’t as good as everyone made them out to be) to his cameo on 30 Rock to his children’s book (okay, I made that last one up), Ghost can do no wrong in the eyes of the hipsters and the critics.

So when he and Raekwon came out and launched a war against the RZA and tried to discredit 8 Diagrams while alternatively pushing Ghost’s new The Big Doe Rehab as the “real” Wu-Tang album, I think that a huge segment of the music critic population was influenced. To put it bluntly, they let their love of Ghostface blind them to the actual merits of 8 Diagrams, trusting his opinion over their own. They never gave this RZA masterpiece a chance. Never really listened, the way I did that first night (and probably never would have, had I too been aware of what Ghost was saying).

Because when you really listen to 8 Diagrams, what you hear is an incredible hip-hop album. RZA has arranged a collection of songs more varied and creative and atmospheric than anything else that came out this year. I’m not sure he could ever top Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) or his work on GZA’s Liquid Swords but he gives those albums a pretty good run for their lives. His production work is just off the charts, which is saying something considering how impressed I was with Kanye’s work on the boards on Graduation. I’ll go as far as to say that if the RZA were to be the sole producer on a 50 Cent album, he could single-handedly restore 50’s credibility with just one record. He’s that smart and talented and aware of what he’s doing.