Like, Sharl sings, ‘We got high, high, high,’ and it’s about being high on love, not just drugs. My verse is about the rise and fall of love. Says RZA: “I was like, ‘My homegirl? Oh, guaranteed.’” Spiteri passed him a track, Hi, “to twist and reinvent”, but RZA says “it had this vibe already, and I was in a lyrical phase, so instead I added vocal roughness this time. But Meth was like the Wu’s celebrity figure.” The two camps have remained friendly over the intervening two decades, enough so that when RZA was interviewed for an as-yet-unreleased Texas documentary in May 2019 and Spiteri suggested they collaborate again, wheels sped into motion. “I was really only into art: create, let the world enjoy it, then create some more. “Back then, I was more introverted, the studio was my zone – I didn’t shower very often,” he grins. RZA didn’t fly over for the Brits performance, however. The collaboration, called Say What You Want (All Day Every Day), reached the Top 5 in 1998, 15 months after the original release. Watch the video for Hi by Texas and Wu-Tang Clan, starring Kadeem Ramsay Our management called and were like, ‘What the fuck went on last night? Apparently there were people all over the studio and yous were all high.’ And I was like, ‘We were making a record!’” Though we had to find a different studio to finish the track the next day, as this wee engineer banned us from Quad. Then Meth started rhyming over it, with these lines about pirates and bottles of rum, because that was his perception of the UK back in those days. Your ear was going, ‘Huh?’ But your body was going, ‘Woah!’ It was like a physical reaction. “The key sounded ‘off’,” says Spiteri, “but ‘off’ in such a good way. It was a string stab from an obscure 70s cut by easy listening balladeer Engelbert Humperdinck that got the ball rolling. That’s when we finally cracked the code.” “Back in those days, the sweet spot for me was always between four and seven in the morning. The bands spent the night in the studio, the room thick with smoke, RZA hunched over his Ensoniq ASR10 sampler, rifling through a sack of Zip drives containing hours of samples, searching for the perfect element. It was a cramped scene at Quad, Texas sharing the studio with nine of the Wu’s 10-man line-up (Ol’ Dirty Bastard, originally slated to rap on the track, was in police custody) and Wu proteges Sunz of Man. There’s a hunger, a determination that comes with being from those places, a drive we shared.” “And we knew Staten Island, where the Wu are from. “RZA had been to Glasgow when they’d played Barrowlands,” says Spiteri. “Shar’s vocal was like a sample I didn’t have to dig for, that’d work well with my dark, grainy production.” He invited Texas to New York. “I was always digging for vocals to play with,” he says, on a Zoom shared with Spiteri. It was a moonshot pitch, but RZA loved the track. There's a determination that comes with being from those places, a drive we shared “We thought the sweet sound of my voice, against the roughness and directness of the Wu Tang Clan’s sound, could really work.” RZA had been to Glasgow, and we knew Staten Island where the Wu are from. Texas’s manager had recently crossed paths with some of the Wu and bonded over a shared passion for luxury Mercedes SUVs, inspiring Spiteri to courier Wu supremo Robert “RZA” Diggs a copy of Say What You Want. Only days before, Spiteri and her bandmates had been working on the track in New York’s Quad Studios (where, in 1994, Tupac Shakur was shot by muggers). These are the 25 greatest hip-hop groups of all time.Įligibility: Groups of 3+ members with at least two albums were eligible.Ĭriteria: Points were awarded based on cultural impact, originality, quality, and consistency.Texas and Method Man perform at the 1998 Brit awards These are the groups that live on in hip-hop lore. We cherish OutKast and The Roots because they somehow pinched our hard-wiring and resonated with our humanity. and Public Enemy because they changed the landscape of hip-hop with their activism. And groups like Beastie Boys and Cypress Hill showed that hip-hop has the power to bridge cultural gaps. De La Soul proved that three really is the magic number. The Wu-Tang Clan set the bar high for large crews. The best rap groups come in various shades and sizes. It also helps if the sum of the group is greater than its individual parts. What makes a great rap group? Is it chemistry? Personalities? The body of work? All the essential ingredients have to be in place, of course.
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