It's a good time to be a music video fan with a DVD player. Seems like every time I look around, there's a new video compilation to snatch, and for kids like me who have an ample amount of grainy little MPEGs on their computers, usually encoded by god knows who and probably obtained from a junk server of dubious legality, it's nice to upgrade.
The present is also a wise time to release a DVD of definitive Wu-Tang Clan videos: ODB's death has put the cap on the Clan's lineup, RZA just wrote a bestselling book about "the philosophy of the Clan" or some nonsense, and the Wu Wear clothing line is decreasing rapidly in popularity. Strike while the iron is hot, or at least while the market exists, anyway.
But even pushing those things aside, the Wu-Tang Clan videos are worth being released of their own merit: they're fun, quirky, important, and above all else, very entertaining. These videos did, after all, catch the public's attention and contributed heavily to the Clan's booming popularity back in the early '90s. And if you see them as an extension of the members' imaginations, as snapshots of where they were at any particular point in their careers, then watching them is an even more crucial step in fully scoping the Clan's artistic ethos.
The videos are presented in chronological order, and are probably best watched that way: Wu-Tang's four albums have fairly representative videos, and plenty of them. Fourteen videos for four LPs is a pretty hefty number, after all. Meanwhile, the individual videos themselves stretch in appeal from gritty street scenes to warped, imaginative fantasy scenarios. We're talking about the rap group who refer to themselves as "the killer bees" and reference shlocky kung fu flicks, after all: the imagination of the Clan is a skewed one. The last music video disc I reviewed was the Sugarcubes' video set, which had some pretty weird stuff crammed into its grooves as well. But the Wu-Tang clan might have an edge on them with the bizarre happenings in these videos. A violin gets thrown down a stairwell and explodes. The Wu-Tang Clan goes back in time. A swarm of killer bees attacks downtown New York. You get the picture.
Legend of the Wu-Tang begins with the fairly low-budget street epics of 36 Chambers, the Wu's debut album. These are pretty standard, although the huge posse element of the music, and thus the videos, was pretty unheard of in 1993. The shift from this dark grit to the overblown indulgence of 1997's Wu-Tang Forever is by far the steepest transition on display here. The Clan goes from grainy, burnt-out facades in the projects to montages of the members rapping for huge crowds of white kids and sitting around in furs, while archetypal video-girls make eyes at them in posh limos. Luckily, this only lasts for a couple of videos, until “Triumph,” the third single from Forever, kickstarts the group's tastes for bizarre kids-on-a-playground scenarios and special effects on a budget. It was even directed by action/comedy somebody Brett Ratner (Rush Hour, X-Men: The Last Stand, and perhaps most strangely, producer of shlocky 2005 slasher Santa's Slay. Seriously, look it up.).
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