Method Man Breaks Down His 25 Most Essential Songs
http://www.complex.com/music/2011/10/method-man-25-essential-songs/
Method Man is a great rapper who gets a bad rap. Despite being one of the most prominent East Coast emcees of the '90s and the first breakout star of theWu-Tang Clan, he's often accused of being an underachiever who complains too much. "Eff a rap critic," he once proclaimed on wax. "He talk about it while I live it."
Yet, the fact remains: Tical had an incredible run during the '90s. One of the main architects behind Wu-Tang's classic debut, Enter The Wu-Tang: 36 Chambers, he was one of the few rappers who worked with both 2Pac and The Notorious B.I.G. Meth even collaborated with Mary J. Blige to make the greatest hip-hop love song of all time, "All I Need (Remix)." Needless to say, the man's catalog ain't nuthing ta fuck wit.
With Johnny Blaze headlining the Smokers Club Tour it seemed a perfect time to jump on the horn and chop it up about how some of his classic songs came together. Altough he's often had the reputation for being crabby during interviews, he showed Complex much love.
Method Man came across as a thoughtful, mature O.G. with lots to get off his chest and a treasure trove of Shaolin secrets to share—from meeting Pac for the first time while high on shrooms, to how the flooding of RZA's basement impacted the making of his solo debut,to who actually wrote the majority of Ol' Dirty Bastard's first album. So get your mind right, and prepare to learn the Method behind the madness.
As told to Insanul Ahmed
Wu-Tang Clan “Method Man” (1993)
Producer: The RZA
Album: Enter The Wu-Tang: 36 Chambers
Label: Loud
Method Man: “RZA and me were in his house one day and he was making beats. That’s when he made the ‘Wu-Tang Clan Ain't Nuthing ta F' Wit’ beat and he made the ‘Method Man’ beat. I happened to be there first, so I got to jump on it first. I had wrote this rhyme after I heard the Michael Jackson song [“Come Together”]—it was a remake of The Beatles song—it just fit perfect with the whole beat and everything, so we just put that shit down.
“I didn’t have an extensive record collection but I always grew up around music so I have an extensive memory of records. Even if I didn’t know the words to the song, I had my own version of the words. I said ‘Move it on your left! Ah!’ I was supposed to say ‘Set it up on your left! Ah!’ But that’s what it sounded like in my memory.
“When I did ‘Method Man,’ the way I got the hook part was half of it was Michael Jackson’s remake of the Beatles joint, and the beginning was a mixture of Hall & Oates, ‘Method of Modern Love,’ and the ‘Man’ part came from ‘Music Man’ by Masta Ace.
“That was just me making the record in my head. I was sampling it in my fucking head and saying it like it would be sampled. The ‘Hey, you! Get off my cloud!’ That’s Bootsy Collins. It just fit because we were talking about getting high.
“[The torture skit] ] was some block shit that we used to do because when dudes was snapping, a lot of personal shit would come out and dudes would get angry behind that shit. You’d be amazed at some of the mother jokes that come up. When you do it [like the Chef and I did it], you saying the most outlandish shit in the world knowing damn well nobody gon’ really do shit like that to you. But it’s funny at the same time, just some of the shit niggas think of.
“That’s just something we can call our own. It started on the block. We would have movie night—this is when VCRs got big [and TVs were] really heavy—and we would get a bunch of dudes together with three dime bags of weed and we’d all smoke it and watch a movie on VHS. After the movie was over, dudes would still be high, so dudes start geeking and snapping on each other. That’s where all that shit came from.
“We were just saying it off the top. We was just going in there, just whatever stuck. The same way with the rhymes. You go up in there and you spitting shit and if it didn’t work, you had to go. Every now and then, you had that shit that just gelled so well ya had to keep it.
“[Getting a solo song] just happened. In the same breath, GZA had his solo joint on there too. I don’t know why RZA did ‘Method Man’ first. I guess it was a sign of the times and what people were actually listening to. Leaders [Of The New School] and a few other groups [with] that frantic style where it was just all over the place were popular at that time. I guess RZA being who he was and being so in tune with what the flavor was, he was like, ‘Yeah. We gonna put this ‘Method Man’ joint on because this is something nobody has ever heard before.’
“I remember watching the ‘Method Man’ video on TV. I was eating white rice with ketchup on it. No food in the house. I think it was Thanksgiving too. I was feeling bad like, ‘Damn, this shit is not popping. This fucking rap shit is weak.’”
Wu-Tang Clan “Protect Ya Neck” (1993)
Producer: Prince Rakeem (The RZA)
Album: Enter The Wu-Tang: 36 Chambers
Label: Loud
Method Man: “RZA came to us and said, ‘I’m doing this record. I wanna do this record with all of ya.’ Wu-Tang was supposed to be just him, Ol’ Dirty, and GZA. All of us collectively, was just gon’ be on the posse cut. ‘Protect Ya Neck’ was supposed to be the posse cut. So, everybody that showed up with $100 got on the record.
“But it wasn’t just anybody, it was dudes that fucked with each other. Every Friday we’d be up in RZA’s house making joints. Dirt Dog and GZA came about later on. GZA was already established, so niggas wasn’t doing songs with GZA like that. It was just the Park Hill niggas: myself, Chef, U-God every now and then, Inspectah Deck. Streetlife was there back in the day too, he was on this shit named ‘6 Man Symphony.’
“We all paid our $100 to get on the joint to pay for the studio time. Niggas was hustling on the block at the time, so $100 was like sell 10 cracks and you in. That’s how that song came about.
“As far as the order went, I don’t know how that shit happened but it just happened. We all went in there one after the other after the other and it just fit. It wasn’t no ‘Go back in and put his verse here and move his verse there.’
“Instead of saying, ‘Make me cough,’ I wanted to be different so I said, ‘Make me [Cough].’ I just felt like saying it like that. It was myself, a MC named King Just, and a few others who used to use sound effects in our rhymes. It was a Park Hill thing.
“[As far as the sound effects on the beat], none of that shit was there at first. After the song was done and we heard it, I heard all that shit. You know why [RZA] did it? Because of curses and for edits. The kid’s a genius.
“If anything had RZA’s stamp on it, those sound effects over curse words did. That’s the whole reason why Prodigy got so much flack over using that shit. That’s something nobody ever did before. Next thing you know, you see them on everybody’s fucking record.”
Wu-Tang Clan “C.R.E.A.M.” (1993)
Producer: The RZA
Album: Enter The Wu-Tang: 36 Chambers
Label: Loud
Method Man: “‘C.R.E.A.M.’ was the one that really put us on the map if you wanna be technical. I wasn’t there when they recorded ‘C.R.E.A.M.’ I came in after the fact. RZA was like, ‘Put a hook on this song’ and I put a hook on it. That’s how it always went. I liked doing hooks.
“The hook for that was done by my man Raider Ruckus. We used to work at the Statue of Liberty and when we were coming home we used to come up with all these made-up words that were acronyms.
We had words like ‘BIBWAM’ which meant, ‘Bitches Is Busted Without A Man’ and all this other crazy shit. Raider Ruckus was so ill with the way he put the words together. We would call money ‘cream’ so he took each letter and made a word out of it and killed it the way he did it.
“Something like that had never been done before as far as a hook or even a way of speaking. This is just showing and proving that we paid attention in class when we was kids. You can’t do shit like that unless you got a brain in your fucking head! You got to have some level of intelligence to do something like that.
“The best acronym for a word that I heard was ‘P.R.O.J.E.C.T.S.’ by Killah Priest. He said ‘People Relying On Just Enough Cash To Survive.’ And he’s the one that came up with ‘Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth,’ the acronym for B.I.B.L.E. This ain’t no fluke shit man.
“There’s a reason you got millions upon millions of fucking kids running around with Wu-Tang tattoos. You don’t just put something on your body permanently unless it’s official. At that time, when you’re coming out brand new and representing where you come from, everybody from that area wants you to win because they win. That’s what it was like for us.
“We were the only dudes from Staten Island doing it so everybody from Staten Island wanted us to win. Not just dudes from Staten Island, but dudes from Brooklyn too because they had peoples in the group too. Then it was just grimy niggas who loved to see real shit, saying, ‘We riding with them Wu-Tang niggas. Fuck all that shiny suit shit!’ That ain’t no take on Puff, a lot of niggas was wearing suits and shit man, but that ain’t us.”
Wu-Tang Clan “Wu-Tang Clan Ain’t Nuthing ta Fuck Wit” (1993)
Producer: The RZA, Method Man
Album: Enter The Wu-Tang: 36 Chambers
Label: Loud
Method Man: “That was one of the records when RZA was making the beat for ‘Method Man.’ He made two beats that day: ‘Wu-Tang Clan Ain’t Nuthing ta Fuck Wit’—and everybody knows that’s from ‘Underdog’ because I remember he had the CD and it had all the children’s songs on it. He just sat there and chopped that shit. He ain’t do too much to it really.
“RZA may dispute this, but I remember it vividly: I told him to use the Biz Markie beat part. I told him to put that beat underneath that shit. Those two beats were made that same day and I rhymed on both of them.
“I forgot what the rhyme was that was on the original ‘Wu-Tang Clan Ain’t Nuthing ta Fuck Wit’ beat, but that was a solo joint that I did too. He turned it into ‘Wu-Tang Clan Ain’t Nuthing ta Fuck Wit.’ It was either that one or ‘The Ice Cream Man Is Coming.’ I was getting it in that day.
“At that point in time in my career, that’s all I wanted to do. It wasn’t like bang out as many as we can at this time. It was like, ‘Yo, what time we going to the studio? I’ll be there. I got a $1.50 in my fucking pocket! I’m hopping the fucking turnstile and I’ll get there.’
“[After all the songs started coming out] things didn’t change overnight. It was still a grind. We saw the pitfalls. There was a lot of shit going on. We had to whip some ass on the way up. That’s real shit. And we were getting treated like second-class fucking citizens.
“I love Tha Alkaholiks, but when we went out on the road with them, since they had a video getting burn on MTV, Cali, and all that, they were getting more love at the in-stores. They had displays up for them and shit. All we had were them little stickers that we were giving out to niggas.
“We knew that it would be a grind but it was a whole lot better than what we were doing before that. I hated hustling. That shit was a pain in the ass in itself. You didn’t just have to worry about getting locked up, you had to worry about getting shot by a jealous-ass nigga that just want your spot or getting stuck up by niggas that don’t think you carrying.
“Motherfuckers make you shoot them. I’m serious! Motherfuckers will make you kill them because of the simple fact that they pressure on you in the ’hood. It’s like, ‘We ain’t eating? Ain’t nobody fucking eating.’ It’s just bad. Hip-hop saved a lot of niggas man.
“Everybody from the block just started working at the Statue of Liberty. One dude got in and brought everybody from the ’hood in that bitch. [We did] concessions and sold food. They wouldn’t let us touch the registers. The girls would touch the registers. They knew that if they let them dudes touch the registers, the fucking inmates would run the asylum. We talking like five years of my life up there. I was a working nigga!”
http://www.complex.com/music/2011/10/method-man-25-essential-songs/
Method Man is a great rapper who gets a bad rap. Despite being one of the most prominent East Coast emcees of the '90s and the first breakout star of theWu-Tang Clan, he's often accused of being an underachiever who complains too much. "Eff a rap critic," he once proclaimed on wax. "He talk about it while I live it."
Yet, the fact remains: Tical had an incredible run during the '90s. One of the main architects behind Wu-Tang's classic debut, Enter The Wu-Tang: 36 Chambers, he was one of the few rappers who worked with both 2Pac and The Notorious B.I.G. Meth even collaborated with Mary J. Blige to make the greatest hip-hop love song of all time, "All I Need (Remix)." Needless to say, the man's catalog ain't nuthing ta fuck wit.
With Johnny Blaze headlining the Smokers Club Tour it seemed a perfect time to jump on the horn and chop it up about how some of his classic songs came together. Altough he's often had the reputation for being crabby during interviews, he showed Complex much love.
Method Man came across as a thoughtful, mature O.G. with lots to get off his chest and a treasure trove of Shaolin secrets to share—from meeting Pac for the first time while high on shrooms, to how the flooding of RZA's basement impacted the making of his solo debut,to who actually wrote the majority of Ol' Dirty Bastard's first album. So get your mind right, and prepare to learn the Method behind the madness.
As told to Insanul Ahmed
Wu-Tang Clan “Method Man” (1993)
Producer: The RZA
Album: Enter The Wu-Tang: 36 Chambers
Label: Loud
Method Man: “RZA and me were in his house one day and he was making beats. That’s when he made the ‘Wu-Tang Clan Ain't Nuthing ta F' Wit’ beat and he made the ‘Method Man’ beat. I happened to be there first, so I got to jump on it first. I had wrote this rhyme after I heard the Michael Jackson song [“Come Together”]—it was a remake of The Beatles song—it just fit perfect with the whole beat and everything, so we just put that shit down.
“I didn’t have an extensive record collection but I always grew up around music so I have an extensive memory of records. Even if I didn’t know the words to the song, I had my own version of the words. I said ‘Move it on your left! Ah!’ I was supposed to say ‘Set it up on your left! Ah!’ But that’s what it sounded like in my memory.
“When I did ‘Method Man,’ the way I got the hook part was half of it was Michael Jackson’s remake of the Beatles joint, and the beginning was a mixture of Hall & Oates, ‘Method of Modern Love,’ and the ‘Man’ part came from ‘Music Man’ by Masta Ace.
“That was just me making the record in my head. I was sampling it in my fucking head and saying it like it would be sampled. The ‘Hey, you! Get off my cloud!’ That’s Bootsy Collins. It just fit because we were talking about getting high.
“[The torture skit] ] was some block shit that we used to do because when dudes was snapping, a lot of personal shit would come out and dudes would get angry behind that shit. You’d be amazed at some of the mother jokes that come up. When you do it [like the Chef and I did it], you saying the most outlandish shit in the world knowing damn well nobody gon’ really do shit like that to you. But it’s funny at the same time, just some of the shit niggas think of.
“That’s just something we can call our own. It started on the block. We would have movie night—this is when VCRs got big [and TVs were] really heavy—and we would get a bunch of dudes together with three dime bags of weed and we’d all smoke it and watch a movie on VHS. After the movie was over, dudes would still be high, so dudes start geeking and snapping on each other. That’s where all that shit came from.
“We were just saying it off the top. We was just going in there, just whatever stuck. The same way with the rhymes. You go up in there and you spitting shit and if it didn’t work, you had to go. Every now and then, you had that shit that just gelled so well ya had to keep it.
“[Getting a solo song] just happened. In the same breath, GZA had his solo joint on there too. I don’t know why RZA did ‘Method Man’ first. I guess it was a sign of the times and what people were actually listening to. Leaders [Of The New School] and a few other groups [with] that frantic style where it was just all over the place were popular at that time. I guess RZA being who he was and being so in tune with what the flavor was, he was like, ‘Yeah. We gonna put this ‘Method Man’ joint on because this is something nobody has ever heard before.’
“I remember watching the ‘Method Man’ video on TV. I was eating white rice with ketchup on it. No food in the house. I think it was Thanksgiving too. I was feeling bad like, ‘Damn, this shit is not popping. This fucking rap shit is weak.’”
Wu-Tang Clan “Protect Ya Neck” (1993)
Producer: Prince Rakeem (The RZA)
Album: Enter The Wu-Tang: 36 Chambers
Label: Loud
Method Man: “RZA came to us and said, ‘I’m doing this record. I wanna do this record with all of ya.’ Wu-Tang was supposed to be just him, Ol’ Dirty, and GZA. All of us collectively, was just gon’ be on the posse cut. ‘Protect Ya Neck’ was supposed to be the posse cut. So, everybody that showed up with $100 got on the record.
“But it wasn’t just anybody, it was dudes that fucked with each other. Every Friday we’d be up in RZA’s house making joints. Dirt Dog and GZA came about later on. GZA was already established, so niggas wasn’t doing songs with GZA like that. It was just the Park Hill niggas: myself, Chef, U-God every now and then, Inspectah Deck. Streetlife was there back in the day too, he was on this shit named ‘6 Man Symphony.’
“We all paid our $100 to get on the joint to pay for the studio time. Niggas was hustling on the block at the time, so $100 was like sell 10 cracks and you in. That’s how that song came about.
“As far as the order went, I don’t know how that shit happened but it just happened. We all went in there one after the other after the other and it just fit. It wasn’t no ‘Go back in and put his verse here and move his verse there.’
“Instead of saying, ‘Make me cough,’ I wanted to be different so I said, ‘Make me [Cough].’ I just felt like saying it like that. It was myself, a MC named King Just, and a few others who used to use sound effects in our rhymes. It was a Park Hill thing.
“[As far as the sound effects on the beat], none of that shit was there at first. After the song was done and we heard it, I heard all that shit. You know why [RZA] did it? Because of curses and for edits. The kid’s a genius.
“If anything had RZA’s stamp on it, those sound effects over curse words did. That’s the whole reason why Prodigy got so much flack over using that shit. That’s something nobody ever did before. Next thing you know, you see them on everybody’s fucking record.”
Wu-Tang Clan “C.R.E.A.M.” (1993)
Producer: The RZA
Album: Enter The Wu-Tang: 36 Chambers
Label: Loud
Method Man: “‘C.R.E.A.M.’ was the one that really put us on the map if you wanna be technical. I wasn’t there when they recorded ‘C.R.E.A.M.’ I came in after the fact. RZA was like, ‘Put a hook on this song’ and I put a hook on it. That’s how it always went. I liked doing hooks.
“The hook for that was done by my man Raider Ruckus. We used to work at the Statue of Liberty and when we were coming home we used to come up with all these made-up words that were acronyms.
We had words like ‘BIBWAM’ which meant, ‘Bitches Is Busted Without A Man’ and all this other crazy shit. Raider Ruckus was so ill with the way he put the words together. We would call money ‘cream’ so he took each letter and made a word out of it and killed it the way he did it.
“Something like that had never been done before as far as a hook or even a way of speaking. This is just showing and proving that we paid attention in class when we was kids. You can’t do shit like that unless you got a brain in your fucking head! You got to have some level of intelligence to do something like that.
“The best acronym for a word that I heard was ‘P.R.O.J.E.C.T.S.’ by Killah Priest. He said ‘People Relying On Just Enough Cash To Survive.’ And he’s the one that came up with ‘Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth,’ the acronym for B.I.B.L.E. This ain’t no fluke shit man.
“There’s a reason you got millions upon millions of fucking kids running around with Wu-Tang tattoos. You don’t just put something on your body permanently unless it’s official. At that time, when you’re coming out brand new and representing where you come from, everybody from that area wants you to win because they win. That’s what it was like for us.
“We were the only dudes from Staten Island doing it so everybody from Staten Island wanted us to win. Not just dudes from Staten Island, but dudes from Brooklyn too because they had peoples in the group too. Then it was just grimy niggas who loved to see real shit, saying, ‘We riding with them Wu-Tang niggas. Fuck all that shiny suit shit!’ That ain’t no take on Puff, a lot of niggas was wearing suits and shit man, but that ain’t us.”
Wu-Tang Clan “Wu-Tang Clan Ain’t Nuthing ta Fuck Wit” (1993)
Producer: The RZA, Method Man
Album: Enter The Wu-Tang: 36 Chambers
Label: Loud
Method Man: “That was one of the records when RZA was making the beat for ‘Method Man.’ He made two beats that day: ‘Wu-Tang Clan Ain’t Nuthing ta Fuck Wit’—and everybody knows that’s from ‘Underdog’ because I remember he had the CD and it had all the children’s songs on it. He just sat there and chopped that shit. He ain’t do too much to it really.
“RZA may dispute this, but I remember it vividly: I told him to use the Biz Markie beat part. I told him to put that beat underneath that shit. Those two beats were made that same day and I rhymed on both of them.
“I forgot what the rhyme was that was on the original ‘Wu-Tang Clan Ain’t Nuthing ta Fuck Wit’ beat, but that was a solo joint that I did too. He turned it into ‘Wu-Tang Clan Ain’t Nuthing ta Fuck Wit.’ It was either that one or ‘The Ice Cream Man Is Coming.’ I was getting it in that day.
“At that point in time in my career, that’s all I wanted to do. It wasn’t like bang out as many as we can at this time. It was like, ‘Yo, what time we going to the studio? I’ll be there. I got a $1.50 in my fucking pocket! I’m hopping the fucking turnstile and I’ll get there.’
“[After all the songs started coming out] things didn’t change overnight. It was still a grind. We saw the pitfalls. There was a lot of shit going on. We had to whip some ass on the way up. That’s real shit. And we were getting treated like second-class fucking citizens.
“I love Tha Alkaholiks, but when we went out on the road with them, since they had a video getting burn on MTV, Cali, and all that, they were getting more love at the in-stores. They had displays up for them and shit. All we had were them little stickers that we were giving out to niggas.
“We knew that it would be a grind but it was a whole lot better than what we were doing before that. I hated hustling. That shit was a pain in the ass in itself. You didn’t just have to worry about getting locked up, you had to worry about getting shot by a jealous-ass nigga that just want your spot or getting stuck up by niggas that don’t think you carrying.
“Motherfuckers make you shoot them. I’m serious! Motherfuckers will make you kill them because of the simple fact that they pressure on you in the ’hood. It’s like, ‘We ain’t eating? Ain’t nobody fucking eating.’ It’s just bad. Hip-hop saved a lot of niggas man.
“Everybody from the block just started working at the Statue of Liberty. One dude got in and brought everybody from the ’hood in that bitch. [We did] concessions and sold food. They wouldn’t let us touch the registers. The girls would touch the registers. They knew that if they let them dudes touch the registers, the fucking inmates would run the asylum. We talking like five years of my life up there. I was a working nigga!”
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