I love the Wu Tang Clan. Not so much the ganster vignettes or relentless profanity, but the sheer mythology.

Each man must create his own system or else he is a slave to another mans

So said William Blake. And that is what RZA and his band of merry men have done. From the grit of Staten Island they raised Shaolin and built a hermetic world from the shards of martial arts movies, street slang, soul samples and Eastern philosophy. Like all invented worlds, sometimes the heady suspension of disbelief made possible by this pop cultural stew is strained by a lack of quality control, especially in the later output, but 36 Chambers and Wu Tang Forever, along with stone cold classics from the likes of Method Man (my all time fave) and GZA tower above the commercial hip-hop of the time.

Doctor Dee, a musician scheduled to appear in the second book in my London sequence, was directly inspired by the Wu, especially RZA and to some extent GZA. As the streets of London morph and skew across the planet, so the music of the Killa Bees resonates with the urban flood.

He awoke, felt the cold air on his skin. The cell, hard and small, was his world. Once, concrete had been his emancipator, a gateway to the stars. Now it was a prison. Day after day spent in this small space. Sometimes they would come, sometimes he spent the whole day alone with the bed, the toilet, the walls plastered with maps. He didn’t know what time it was, what day it was. He didn’t know how old he was. On the bad days, which were becoming more frequent, the dread more continuous, he had started to forget his own name. He muttered it under his breath, a spell for survival, as he sat up and stretched. Man he felt old, like he’d already been buried. The maps had been rotated again, images of London old and new pinned to the walls and embedded in his mind. He closed his eyes, tried to remember the wind on his face, his hands on the wheel, the endless road opening up before him. Heard the key in the lock and rolled back onto the bed, pulling the blanket over his face, started to beg before it even started. Retreated into a dream of the city, back when it was predictable, back when you could count on it. Then he screamed.

A new blog, created using the Hugo site generator and hosted on Amazon S3.