The story of Wu-Tang Clan

Cousins, kung fu and Staten Island

The Wu-Tang Clan story begins with three cousins. Robert Diggs was born in Brownsville, Brooklyn, on the fifth of July 1969, and his mother named him after the Kennedy brothers. His cousins were Gary Grice, born in 1966, and Russell Jones, born in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, in November 1968. The three shared two obsessions, rap and martial arts films. As teenagers they formed a crew called Force of the Imperial Master, later renamed All in Together Now, and they travelled across the city to challenge other rappers to battles. Their underground buzz caught the ear of the rapper Biz Markie, but no major label came calling.[1] [2] [3] [4]

By 1991 two of the cousins had solo deals. Gary, rapping as the Genius, put out an album called Words from the Genius on Cold Chillin' Records. Robert, calling himself Prince Rakeem, released a single called Ooh I Love You Rakeem on Tommy Boy. Neither record sold, and both men were dropped. Robert later said Tommy Boy chose to back the group House of Pain instead of him, and it stung. Gary spent those lean days working as a bicycle messenger. They were bitter, but they took the failure as a lesson. The Genius became GZA, Prince Rakeem became RZA, and cousin Russell, who had called himself the Specialist, became Ol' Dirty Bastard.[1] [2] [3] [4]

RZA nearly lost everything before it began. Around 1990 he moved to Steubenville, Ohio, to live with his mother, and he drifted into petty crime and drug dealing. After a shooting there he was charged with attempted murder and faced up to eight years in prison. A jury found him not guilty. RZA later said his face was stuck in a smile for three days, and that he walked away from that life for good. He called it his second chance. Back in New York, he threw himself into a plan that would use everything he loved, from soul records and kung fu films to comic books and chess.[1] [2]

Most of the future Clan grew up in Staten Island housing projects. RZA and Dennis Coles, the future Ghostface Killah, lived in the Stapleton Houses and were roommates for a time. Clifford Smith, later Method Man, Corey Woods, later Raekwon, Jason Hunter, later Inspectah Deck, and Lamont Hawkins, later U-God, came up in Park Hill, a tough project the locals called Killa Hill. Many of them followed the Five Percent Nation, an offshoot of the Nation of Islam, and its number lore would run through their lyrics. They rechristened their borough Shaolin, after the kung fu films they watched together in RZA's house.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7]

These were hard lives. Raekwon's father was an addict he met only once, and he watched his mother being beaten by the men around her. As a young man he was caught in a crossfire and shot four times, which he later called an eye opener. U-God was raised by his mother alone and dealt drugs through his teens. Inspectah Deck lost his father when he was six. Ghostface helped care for two younger brothers who had muscular dystrophy. Crack had flooded Park Hill in the 1980s, and so had guns. When RZA later sold the idea of a group, he was offering his friends a way out.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Protect Ya Neck and a new kind of deal

The name came from a film. In 1992 RZA and Ol' Dirty Bastard went to a grindhouse cinema on Manhattan's 42nd Street and saw Shaolin and Wu Tang, a 1983 Hong Kong film about rival martial arts schools directed by and starring Gordon Liu. RZA decided that Wu-Tang sword style was the best there was, and that a tongue could be a sword too. So they would be the Wu-Tang Clan. RZA set up a company called Wu-Tang Productions, and every member picked a new name. Ghostface Killah took his from a villain in The Mystery of Chess Boxing, and Method Man took his from a 1979 martial arts film.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Then RZA called a meeting in a basement and used a bus as a metaphor. He told the others he wanted them all on board as passengers, with himself as the driver, and nobody could ask where they were going. Give me five years, he promised, and I will take us to number one. Nine men signed on: RZA, GZA, Ol' Dirty Bastard, Method Man, Raekwon, Ghostface Killah, Inspectah Deck, U-God and, soon after, Masta Killa, a Brooklyn man mentored by GZA who had never held a microphone before. RZA's own Wu-Tang Manual later described his rule in those days as a dictatorship.[1] [2] [3]

The first single was Protect Ya Neck, a raw posse cut with eight rappers and no chorus. RZA paid for it by charging each member one hundred dollars for the right to a verse. They cut it at Firehouse Studio in Manhattan, and the studio's owner later recalled that the session cost about three hundred dollars, paid in quarters. U-God was in prison for drug and gun charges at the time and managed only a short bridge. The group pressed the record on their own Wu-Tang label, with a Staten Island house listed as headquarters, and released it in December 1992 backed with a song called After the Laughter Comes Tears.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Then they had to get it played. That winter some of the crew slipped into the studios of WKCR, Columbia University's radio station, and pushed the record on the hosts Stretch Armstrong and Bobbito Garcia. Bobbito remembered they were not being polite about it. He listened, loved it, and passed it to Stretch, who played it again and again. Listeners called in, and soon the club DJ Kid Capri was spinning it too. Ghostface remembered sitting at home with Raekwon, waiting for it to come on the radio, and Raekwon jumping to the ceiling when it did.[1]

Record labels came sniffing, but RZA had terms nobody had heard before. Steve Rifkind of the young label Loud Records got the whole Clan for about sixty thousand dollars. In exchange, each member was free to sign a solo deal with any other label and take the Wu-Tang name with him. RZA wanted his men spread across the industry, so that every major label would profit from Wu-Tang. He even steered Method Man and Ol' Dirty Bastard away from both joining Def Jam, because two key pieces going the same way wasted an opportunity. Within a few years, Clan members were recording for five of the six major labels.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Enter the Wu-Tang

Enter the Wu-Tang, subtitled 36 Chambers, was recorded between late 1992 and early 1993 at Firehouse Studio. The budget was tiny and the room was cramped, with up to eight rappers in it at once. RZA made them battle for places on each song. One of those contests, Method Man against Raekwon, was left off the album and later turned up on Method Man's solo debut. RZA built the beats from old soul records and dialogue from kung fu films, and the cheap gear gave everything a dusty, menacing sound. He said he was also trying to outdo the deep bass on Dr. Dre's album The Chronic.[1] [2]

The famous cover shows only six members, their faces hidden by stocking masks. It was shot by the photographer Daniel Hastings in the Angel Orensanz Center, then an abandoned synagogue on the Lower East Side. U-God was in jail for a parole violation that day, and Method Man had been arrested for marijuana possession earlier the same day. The title blended the films Enter the Dragon and The 36th Chamber of Shaolin with a bit of number lore. Nine members, four chambers in each heart, thirty six chambers in all. Even that explanation is only one theory. The album came out on the ninth of November 1993.[1] [2]

It did not explode straight away. The album entered the charts at number forty one, selling about thirty thousand copies in its first week, and it was released on the very same day as A Tribe Called Quest's third album. But the singles spread through the streets. C.R.E.A.M., with verses from Raekwon and Inspectah Deck about growing up poor and a hook sung by Method Man, reached number sixty on the Hot 100, the highest a Wu-Tang song has ever charted. The videos barely played on MTV but were huge on the request channel The Box. By 1995 the album was platinum.[1] [2]

Its influence was enormous. At a time when West Coast G-funk ruled the charts, 36 Chambers helped put New York back at the center of rap, and it opened doors for Nas, the Notorious B.I.G., Mobb Deep and Jay-Z. RZA's way of chopping and speeding up soul samples would later shape producers like Kanye West and Just Blaze, and West openly said so. Rolling Stone later ranked the album among the greatest ever made, and in 2022 the Library of Congress chose it for the National Recording Registry, which preserves American recordings of lasting cultural importance.[1] [2] [3]

The solo invasion

Next came the plan RZA called infiltration. Method Man went first, signing with Def Jam, and his album Tical arrived in November 1994, entering the charts at number four and selling more than a million copies. A remix of his song All I Need, recast as a duet with Mary J. Blige, won the Grammy for best rap performance by a duo or group in February 1996. RZA produced almost everything in this period from a basement studio in Staten Island. He also found time to join the horror rap group Gravediggaz with Prince Paul, performing as the RZArector.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Ol' Dirty Bastard followed on Elektra in March 1995 with Return to the 36 Chambers, driven by the singles Brooklyn Zoo and Shimmy Shimmy Ya. The same year he appeared on the remix of Mariah Carey's Fantasy. He also became a tabloid figure. While MTV was filming him for a profile, he rode in a limousine with two of his children to a welfare office to collect food stamps while his album sat in the top ten. He still qualified on paper because he had not yet filed that year's taxes. His caseworker cut him off after the segment aired.[1] [2]

In August 1995 Raekwon released Only Built 4 Cuban Linx on Loud. Ghostface Killah rapped on most of the tracks and got near equal billing, and Raekwon described it as a film with himself as the star, Ghostface as the guest star and RZA as the director. Critics called it a classic, and it revived mafioso rap, a style of crime storytelling that Nas, Jay-Z and Biggie would soon borrow. It also introduced Cappadonna, a Staten Island rapper who had mentored U-God and would one day join the group. In November GZA released Liquid Swords on Geffen, stitched together with dialogue from the film Shogun Assassin.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

Ghostface Killah's Ironman arrived in October 1996 on Epic, soaked in seventies soul, and debuted at number two. Meanwhile the brand grew beyond music. The Clan's executive producer Oliver Grant, known as Power, launched Wu Wear, with stores in New York, Los Angeles, Atlanta and Norfolk, Virginia, and a line sold in department stores including Macy's. He said he earned ten million dollars in 1998. Not everyone loved it. Method Man later complained that once Wu Wear moved into shoes and trousers the quality was poor, and said he never wore any of it.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Wu-Tang Forever and the wild years

The Clan reunited for a double album, recorded partly while the members shared a rented house in the Hollywood Hills. Wu-Tang Forever came out on the third of June 1997 and debuted at number one, selling six hundred and twelve thousand copies in its first week. The lead single, Triumph, ran nearly six minutes with no chorus, just verses from every member plus Cappadonna, and Ol' Dirty Bastard on the intro. Radio told RZA to cut it, and he refused. Inspectah Deck's opening verse is still counted among the greatest in rap. Its video, directed by Brett Ratner, cost around eight hundred thousand dollars.[1] [2] [3]

That same month the group went to war with New York's biggest hip-hop station, Hot 97. Inspectah Deck later said the station expected them to headline its Summer Jam concert for free, with the threat that their records would stop getting played. At the show, a scheduling row boiled over and Ghostface Killah led the crowd in a profane chant against the station. The members believed Hot 97 then kept their music off the air for about a decade. They also joined Rage Against the Machine for a headline tour that summer, but after the Clan failed to turn up for one show they were dropped and replaced by the Roots.[1] [2] [3]

At the Grammys on the twenty fifth of February 1998, Wu-Tang Forever lost best rap album to Puff Daddy. As Shawn Colvin began her speech for song of the year, Ol' Dirty Bastard walked onstage and took the microphone. He explained that he had bought an expensive outfit expecting to win, declared that Wu-Tang was for the children, and said Puffy was good but Wu-Tang was the best. Only the day before, he had seen a car crash from his Brooklyn studio window and helped a crowd lift a wrecked car off a four year old girl, who was badly burned. He visited her in hospital under a false name.[1] [2]

Shootings, arrests and a flood of records

For Ol' Dirty Bastard, the late nineties became a spiral. In 1998 he pleaded guilty to attempted assault on his wife, Icelene Jones, and was ordered to pay back child support. That July two armed men robbed him at a Brooklyn apartment and shot him in the back and arm. He walked out of hospital against medical advice. He was arrested for shoplifting shoes in Virginia while carrying hundreds of dollars in cash, and later for crack possession. In early 1999 police in Los Angeles arrested him for wearing a bulletproof vest, which was illegal for a convicted felon, and a court sent him to rehab.[1] [2] [3]

Other members had their own troubles. Ghostface Killah was arrested on a gun charge in 1997, and in 1999 he was sentenced to six months after pleading guilty to attempted robbery. Around the time of Wu-Tang Forever, U-God's two year old son was used as a human shield by a drug dealer during a shootout. The child was hit, flatlined twice, and survived with permanent damage to his kidneys and hands. U-God poured it into the song A Better Tomorrow. Meanwhile, a flood in RZA's basement destroyed more than a hundred beats, including every instrumental made for Inspectah Deck's first solo album.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Between 1998 and 2000 the Wu released a flood of music. There were second albums from the five members who already had one, debuts from Inspectah Deck, U-God and RZA in his Bobby Digital guise, Cappadonna's The Pillage, the Killa Bees compilations and records by a long list of affiliates. Seven Clan solo albums appeared in just seven months. Some, like Ghostface Killah's Supreme Clientele, were acclaimed. But critics came to blame the sheer volume for the group's slide in popularity. RZA also began a second career in film, scoring Jim Jarmusch's Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai in 1999.[1] [2] [3]

The W, Iron Flag and losing Dirty

In October 2000 Ol' Dirty Bastard ran away from a court ordered drug treatment center in Pasadena while he was being taken to court. A no bail warrant went out. For about a month he was a fugitive, and yet he still met RZA in the studio and even walked onstage, drinking from a bottle, at the release party for the new Wu-Tang album at the Hammerstein Ballroom in New York. In late November a crowd gathered around him outside a McDonald's in South Philadelphia as he signed autographs, and police arrested him there. In 2001 he was sentenced to two to four years.[1] [2] [3]

That album was The W, released on the twenty first of November 2000. It debuted at number five, went platinum and drew strong reviews, with the single Gravel Pit and guests including Isaac Hayes, Nas, Busta Rhymes and Snoop Dogg. Ol' Dirty Bastard appeared on just one song, Conditioner, and his vocals were recorded over prison telephones. The next album, Iron Flag, came out in December 2001 with a cover modeled on the famous flag raising at Iwo Jima. Dirty was absent entirely, and Cappadonna had been airbrushed off the cover. Loud Records was collapsing, and Sony shut it down in March 2002.[1] [2] [3]

Cappadonna's disappearance had messy causes. He had fallen out with RZA over royalties, and it had also come out that his manager was, or had been, a police informant, which led to the manager's firing. Tensions ran through the camp. In 2003 Method Man publicly attacked the group's managers, Power and RZA's older brother Mitchell Diggs, known as Divine, saying Divine had taken something major from him. In early 2004 U-God walked away, complaining that RZA had held back his solo career. The two fought it out in a heated phone call on live radio, and ended up making peace.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Ol' Dirty Bastard was paroled on the first of May 2003 and signed with Roc-A-Fella Records that same day. He had reportedly been diagnosed with schizophrenia around this time, and those close to him described deep paranoia. On the seventeenth of July 2004 the full Clan played together for the first time in years at the Rock the Bells festival in San Bernardino, California. It was Dirty's last show with them. In November he played club dates in Fort Collins and Vail, Colorado, then said he felt unwell and flew home to New York.[1] [2] [3] [4]

On the thirteenth of November 2004 Ol' Dirty Bastard collapsed at RZA's recording studio in New York after complaining of chest pains. He died that day, two days before his thirty sixth birthday. The medical examiner found a lethal mix of cocaine and the prescription painkiller tramadol, and ruled the overdose accidental. RZA later wrote that hours before the end, his cousin looked him in the eye and said he did not understand, and that RZA knew in that moment they had lost him. That evening, three hundred fans at a sold out club in Breckenridge, Colorado, were still waiting for him to appear.[1] [2] [3]

Films, rifts and 8 Diagrams

After Dirty's death the members scattered into other work. RZA had moved into film scoring with Ghost Dog, and in 2003 he scored Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill. He remembered sitting in a Manhattan cinema full of kids who clapped when his name came up in the credits. He went on to score the anime Afro Samurai and in 2012 directed his first feature, The Man with the Iron Fists. Method Man became a busy actor, with roles in the HBO series Oz and The Wire and the stoner comedy How High with his longtime partner Redman. Ghostface Killah's 2006 album Fishscale earned some of the best reviews of his career.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In 2007 the Clan returned with 8 Diagrams, named after the martial arts film The Eight Diagram Pole Fighter and released on Steve Rifkind's revived Loud label on the eleventh of December. It was the first group album since Ol' Dirty Bastard's death, and it used some of his earlier recordings. It also made Cappadonna an official member. RZA went orchestral and experimental. The first single, The Heart Gently Weeps, reworked the Beatles' While My Guitar Gently Weeps with George Harrison's son Dhani and John Frusciante of the Red Hot Chili Peppers on guitar, and Erykah Badu singing.[1] [2]

Not everyone was happy. Ghostface Killah was angry that RZA started the project while he was making his own album, The Big Doe Rehab, and that RZA first set the same release date for both, before pushing 8 Diagrams back a week. Raekwon and Ghostface said the album lacked the true Wu-Tang sound, and Inspectah Deck said Ghost's solo record sounded more like a Wu album than the group's own. Raekwon proposed a Clan album without RZA's production, to be called Shaolin versus Wu-Tang. It became his solo album in 2011. RZA revealed in 2019 that he had meant 8 Diagrams to be the group's last album.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Raekwon's big comeback came first. Only Built 4 Cuban Linx Part Two arrived in September 2009 after years of delays, with production from RZA, Dr. Dre, Pete Rock and J Dilla, and it debuted at number four. Then came plans for a twentieth anniversary Clan album, A Better Tomorrow, and a fresh feud. In April 2014 Raekwon told Rolling Stone he was on strike. He said RZA was out of touch with the music, that RZA's brother Divine was compromising the group, and that his own contract had to be right before he would record. RZA answered that you need every piece to form Voltron.[1] [2] [3]

By May 2014 Raekwon and RZA had made up, and Raekwon recorded his verses. A Better Tomorrow came out on the second of December 2014 through Warner Bros. The whole group had appeared on The Daily Show that August to premiere a single, and the album featured unreleased verses from Ol' Dirty Bastard. Reviews were mixed, and it debuted at number twenty nine, selling about twenty four thousand copies in its first week. Raekwon said recording without Dirty was hard, because they missed his energy. By then, a far stranger Wu-Tang project had already stolen the headlines.[1] [2]

The album only one person could own

In March 2014 the world learned of a secret Wu-Tang album called Once Upon a Time in Shaolin. It had been made over about six years, recorded mostly in Staten Island and produced in Marrakech by Cilvaringz, a Dutch Moroccan producer whom Ol' Dirty Bastard had pulled onto a stage in Amsterdam in 1997. It ran to thirty one tracks and featured the whole Clan, plus Redman, some FC Barcelona footballers, the actress Carice van Houten and Cher. Only one copy would ever exist. RZA compared it to owning the scepter of an Egyptian king.[1] [2] [3]

The idea was to treat music like fine art, as a protest against streaming and piracy. The master files were deleted. The single copy, on two CDs, sat in a hand carved nickel silver box with leather bound liner notes. In March 2015 it was held at JFK Airport for three hours while customs checked what it was. That month, about one hundred and fifty collectors and critics in Queens heard thirteen minutes, after being searched for recording devices. Method Man backed the one copy idea but called the ban on commercial release stupid, and said the music should be given to the people.[1] [2] [3]

The album was auctioned through Paddle8, and the buyer was kept secret for months. In December 2015 Bloomberg revealed him as Martin Shkreli, the pharmaceutical executive who had become notorious for raising the price of the drug Daraprim by about five thousand percent. He paid a reported two million dollars. RZA said the deal was agreed before the Daraprim scandal broke, and that the group gave a large part of the money to charity. Shkreli said he bought it to show off. About a week later he was arrested for securities fraud, and after Donald Trump won the 2016 election, he streamed excerpts online.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In 2017 Shkreli was convicted of defrauding investors. In March 2018 a federal court seized assets worth about seven point four million dollars, including a Picasso, an unreleased Lil Wayne album and Once Upon a Time in Shaolin. The government sold the album in 2021, and it passed to PleasrDAO, a collective of digital art collectors, reportedly for four million dollars. In June 2024 the public finally got a taste, with listening sessions at the Museum of Old and New Art in Tasmania. The Guardian's critic called it good music and truly great art. The deal still bars a commercial release until 2103.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The fight over the album was not finished. In June 2024 Shkreli streamed it to thousands of listeners on X, and PleasrDAO sued, saying he had kept copies and destroyed the album's value. A federal judge, Pamela Chen, ordered him to hand over every copy. In September 2025 she refused to dismiss the case, ruling that an album could count as a trade secret. In early 2026 Shkreli tried to drag RZA and Cilvaringz into the lawsuit, and the judge rejected the move on procedural grounds. As of 2026, the case goes on, and the album is still locked away.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Saga, legacy and the Final Chamber

In October 2017 the group released The Saga Continues, produced almost entirely by their longtime DJ Mathematics, the man who designed the famous W logo while sitting in an apartment in a Queens housing project. It was billed simply as Wu-Tang, because U-God did not take part, and it reached number fifteen. U-God had sued the group in 2016 over unpaid royalties. In 2018 he published a memoir, Raw, in which he revealed that his mother became pregnant with him after she was raped, and he wrote with rare honesty about crime, prison and life as the least celebrated member.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The group then set about telling its own story. The four part Showtime documentary Of Mics and Men, directed by Sacha Jenkins, premiered at Sundance in 2019. In it, Method Man revisited his old custodial job at the Statue of Liberty, and U-God relived his son's shooting on camera. That September Hulu launched Wu-Tang: An American Saga, a drama created by RZA and Alex Tse that ran for three seasons until 2023. In February 2023 the Hot 97 DJ Funkmaster Flex publicly apologized to RZA and the Clan for their old feud, and the members answered with love.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

In February 2024 the Wu-Tang Clan became the first hip-hop act to hold a Las Vegas residency, at the Theater at Virgin Hotels. A year later, on Record Store Day in April 2025, they released Black Samson, the Bastard Swordsman, a joint album with Mathematics inspired by blaxploitation films and old karate movies. It was the first release since 2014 to feature every member, and at first it came only as five thousand double vinyl copies. Then, on the twenty fourth of February 2025, they announced a farewell tour called Wu-Tang Forever: The Final Chamber.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The tour opened in Baltimore on the sixth of June 2025, with Run the Jewels as the support act. All nine surviving members took part, along with Ol' Dirty Bastard's son, Young Dirty Bastard, standing in for his father. The North American run ended on the eighteenth of July in Philadelphia, which RZA calls the most important city for the Clan after New York, with Lauryn Hill and LL Cool J joining them onstage. A city councilman thanked them for ending the tour where Dirty had once been arrested at a McDonald's. As of 2026, the farewell has carried on with further dates in Australia, Europe and North America.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

The honors have kept coming. In 2023 the New York City Council made the fifteenth of November, Ol' Dirty Bastard's birthday, Ol' Dirty Bastard Day, and in July 2026 a stretch of Putnam Avenue in Bedford Stuyvesant was co-named ODB Jones Way, on the block where his grandmother still lives. In April 2026 the Wu-Tang Clan were voted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on their first nomination, alongside Oasis, Phil Collins and Iron Maiden. As of September 2026, the induction ceremony is set for the fourteenth of November in Los Angeles. More than thirty years on, the Clan is still standing.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

The people around Wu-Tang Clan

RZA and Ol' Dirty Bastard. First cousins who shared a love of kung fu films and late night talk about the stars and the creation of man. Together they saw Shaolin and Wu Tang in 1992 and named the group after it. RZA produced Dirty's debut and bought him spy equipment when his paranoia grew. Dirty died at RZA's studio in 2004, and RZA wrote that hours earlier he knew he had lost him.[1] [2] [3] [4]

RZA and GZA. Cousins and the group's two founding pillars. GZA, the oldest member, was the first to land a record deal, and both were dropped by their labels in 1991 before reinventing themselves together. Method Man once said that when the Clan formed like Voltron, GZA was the head. RZA produced GZA's Liquid Swords entirely, one of the most admired albums in the Wu catalog.[1] [2] [3]

Raekwon and Ghostface Killah. Junior high school friends who became the Clan's great double act. Ghostface rapped on most of Raekwon's Only Built 4 Cuban Linx, and Raekwon returned the favor on Ironman and beyond. They wrote parts of Cuban Linx together in Barbados and Miami. Both sided against RZA's sound on 8 Diagrams. A televised feud between them in An American Saga was pure fiction.[1] [2] [3] [4]

RZA and Raekwon. Raekwon was the Clan's slang master and one of its biggest stars, and his clashes with RZA shaped the later albums. After 8 Diagrams he pushed for a group album without RZA's production. In 2014 he declared himself on strike from A Better Tomorrow, calling RZA out of touch and blaming RZA's brother Divine. RZA said you need every piece to form Voltron, and within weeks the two made peace.[1] [2] [3] [4]

RZA and U-God. U-God was drawn to RZA's mind from their school days, but felt RZA held back his solo career. In 2004 he left the group and released a DVD airing his grievances, before a heated call on live radio ended in reconciliation. In 2016 he sued the group over unpaid royalties and sat out The Saga Continues. He was back for the farewell tour.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

Method Man and Redman. The Clan's most famous outside partnership. Method Man and the New Jersey rapper Redman made the platinum album Blackout in 1999 on the Hard Knock Life tour, starred together in the film How High, and had a short lived Fox sitcom, Method and Red. Redman also guested on The W and Once Upon a Time in Shaolin, and on the 2017 single People Say.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Method Man and Mary J. Blige. In 1995 Method Man remade his song All I Need as a duet with Mary J. Blige, retitled I'll Be There for You, You're All I Need to Get By. It reached the top five of the Hot 100 and won them a Grammy in 1996. Decades later the two were reunited on screen as actors in Power Book II: Ghost, the spin-off of the drama Power.[1]

Wu-Tang Clan and Steve Rifkind. The founder of Loud Records signed the Clan for about sixty thousand dollars and accepted RZA's radical condition that every member could sign solo deals elsewhere. Loud released the first four albums before Sony shut it in 2002. Rifkind later won back rights to the Loud name and released 8 Diagrams through his SRC label in 2007.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Wu-Tang Clan and Martin Shkreli. The pharmaceutical executive infamous for the Daraprim price hike bought the only copy of Once Upon a Time in Shaolin in 2015. Ghostface Killah called him a rude name to TMZ, while RZA was more measured and said the group gave much of the money to charity. Shkreli forfeited the album after his fraud conviction, and later fought its new owners and RZA in court.[1] [2] [3] [4]

RZA and Cilvaringz. Ol' Dirty Bastard pulled the young Dutch Moroccan rapper onstage in Amsterdam in 1997, and RZA later signed him, making him the first non-American Wu affiliate. Starting in 2008, with RZA as patron, Cilvaringz produced Once Upon a Time in Shaolin and came up with the idea of treating it as a single work of fine art.[1] [2] [3]

Wu-Tang Clan and Funkmaster Flex and Hot 97. In 1997 the Clan fell out with New York's leading hip-hop station over its Summer Jam concert, and Ghostface led a crowd in a chant against it. The members believed their records were then kept off the air for years, hurting sales and touring. In February 2023 Funkmaster Flex posted a photo with RZA and apologized to the whole Clan.[1] [2]

RZA and Sophia Chang and Shi Yan Ming. Sophia Chang met RZA while doing A and R at Jive Records, later managed him, GZA and Ol' Dirty Bastard, and ran his Razor Sharp label. She introduced RZA to her partner Shi Yan Ming, a Shaolin monk who had defected to America in 1992, and the monk went on to train members of the Clan in Shaolin kung fu.[1] [2] [3]

Rare facts about Wu-Tang Clan

• Protect Ya Neck, the first Wu-Tang single, cost about three hundred dollars of studio time, reportedly paid in quarters. The owner of Firehouse Studio in Manhattan recalled the fee. RZA raised money for the pressing by charging each rapper one hundred dollars for a verse.[1] [2]
• Loud Records signed the entire Wu-Tang Clan for about sixty thousand dollars. In return, RZA won the right for every member to sign a solo deal with any other label, a structure almost unheard of in the music business at the time.[1]
• The blues singer Syl Johnson said Wu-Tang money built his house. The Clan paid to sample his song Different Strokes on the first album. In a 2010 interview Johnson said he was sitting in the house the Wu-Tang money had built.[1]
• RZA's younger brother said Ghostface Killah kept the early crew fed by shoplifting canned food. According to 9th Prince, Ghostface would fill the pockets of an oversized coat with four or five cans and walk out of the local store.[1]
• The Wu-Tang logo was designed by the group's DJ, Mathematics, in a Queens housing project. Mathematics had been DJing for GZA since 1990, back when GZA was still called the Genius. He sketched the W while sitting in an apartment in the 40 Projects in South Jamaica, Queens.[1] [2]
• RZA was named after the Kennedy brothers. His mother admired Robert and John Fitzgerald Kennedy so much that she named him Robert Fitzgerald Diggs. He has called it an honorable name.[1]
• The Enter the Wu-Tang cover was shot inside an abandoned synagogue in Manhattan. Photographer Daniel Hastings shot the masked members in the Angel Orensanz Center, lit with strobes, tungsten lights and candles, in front of a giant foam rendering of the W logo.[1]
• C.R.E.A.M. was originally titled Lifestyles of the Mega-Rich. The song kept its piano loop from the Charmels' 1967 soul song As Long As I've Got You and went on to become the highest charting Wu-Tang single ever.[1]
• Enter the Wu-Tang came out on the same day as A Tribe Called Quest's third album. Both landed on the ninth of November 1993, one of the busiest days in rap history, with the jazzy Tribe sound on one side and the Clan's grime on the other.[1]
• RZA wrote the piano part for Da Mystery of Chessboxin' after watching a Thelonious Monk documentary. The film was Straight, No Chaser. RZA counted Monk and Bill Evans among his biggest piano influences.[1]
• The Prodigy borrowed the opening of Da Mystery of Chessboxin' for their hit Breathe. It was an early example of dance and rock acts sampling the Clan, turning RZA's own sampling habit back on him.[1]
• Method Man once did custodial work at the Statue of Liberty. He revisited the old job for the documentary Of Mics and Men. U-God said he worked right beside him there.[1]
• Method Man owns around thirty thousand comic books. His collection reportedly includes The Incredible Hulk issue one hundred and eighty one, which has the first full appearance of Wolverine.[1]
• GZA was found to have one of the largest vocabularies in hip-hop, despite leaving school in tenth grade. An analysis of rap lyrics ranked him near the top for unique words. He later lectured at MIT and worked with Columbia University on teaching science through rap.[1]
• GZA recorded a song for NASA's Juno mission to Jupiter in 2016. The track, called The Spark, was made for NASA's Destination Jupiter project, part of his long running interest in physics and space.[1]
• In April 1998 Ol' Dirty Bastard changed his name to Big Baby Jesus. It was one of many aliases. Others included Dirt McGirt, Osirus and Ason Unique, and his very first rap name was the Wizard of Do It Land.[1] [2]
• Ol' Dirty Bastard said his ancestry included the Shinnecock people of Long Island. He hinted at it on the song Reunited and discussed it on The Howard Stern Show in 1998. A biographer later wrote that his great great grandfather was a Shinnecock chief.[1] [2]
• Ol' Dirty Bastard's vocals on The W were recorded over prison telephones. He was locked up in California for violating probation, so his part on Conditioner, alongside Snoop Dogg, was captured down a phone line.[1]
• Ol' Dirty Bastard skipped the Triumph video, and a stand-in played him. Director Brett Ratner said Dirty left the set because he had no verse on the song. The video, with killer bees swarming New York, cost about eight hundred thousand dollars.[1]
• The first pressing of Wu-Tang Forever let you explore a virtual Wu mansion on your computer. The enhanced CD allowed fans to walk around the Wu Mansion and find extra content, a novelty in 1997.[1]
• During the making of Wu-Tang Forever, U-God got the smallest bedroom in the Clan's Hollywood Hills house. He showed off the modest room on MTV Cribs. In his memoir he also admitted he once studied to become an embalmer.[1]
• In 1999 all nine members became characters in a PlayStation fighting game. Wu-Tang: Shaolin Style came out on Halloween 1999, and a special edition shipped with a controller shaped like the Wu logo.[1] [2]
• A 1999 Nike Dunk made in Wu-Tang colors has resold for as much as seven thousand five hundred dollars. Nike made the shoe in tiny quantities, which turned it into one of the most sought after sneakers among collectors.[1]
• Cilvaringz, producer of the one-copy album, was discovered when Ol' Dirty Bastard pulled him onstage in Amsterdam. At a 1997 show at the Melkweg, Dirty spotted him struggling to reach the stage during a freestyle session and handed him the microphone.[1]
• Cher appears twice on Once Upon a Time in Shaolin, and her voice closes the record. Early reports credited a singer named Bonnie Jo Mason, thought to be an alias for Cher. The Game of Thrones actress Carice van Houten also appears.[1] [2]
• When prosecutors seized the one-copy album from Shkreli, they also took a Picasso. The seized assets, worth about seven point four million dollars, also included an unreleased Lil Wayne album, Tha Carter V.[1]
• Once Upon a Time in Shaolin was detained at JFK Airport for three hours in 2015. Border officials held the silver box while they worked out what exactly it contained.[1]
• In 2020 RZA wrote a new jingle for ice cream trucks. Good Humor asked him to replace Turkey in the Straw, a tune long tied to racist minstrel shows. His composition was released in August 2020.[1]
• RZA stopped eating fish in 1997 because, he said, he felt the death in it. He had been a pescatarian and became vegan that year. He has since campaigned for animal welfare with PETA.[1]
• On Chappelle's Show, the Wu-Tang Clan were drafted as one hundred percent Asian. In the famous Racial Draft sketch, members of the Clan played themselves being claimed by the Asian delegation.[1] [2]
• A sign language interpreter went viral in 2013 for her performance at a Wu-Tang show. Holly Maniatty signed the Clan's set at Bonnaroo so vividly that Method Man came down from the stage to hug her.[1]
• Ghostface Killah's song Slept on Tony with Dirt is heard in the 2008 film Iron Man. He also filmed a cameo for the film, but it was cut and survives only among the DVD's deleted scenes.[1]
• The Iron Flag album cover restages the famous 1945 flag raising at Iwo Jima. The original version also showed Cappadonna, who was airbrushed out before release.[1]
• RZA revealed that he nearly made a Staten Island rapper named Scotty Wotty an official member. Scotty Wotty is shouted out on several Wu releases and later appeared on U-God's album Dopium.[1] [2]
• The Clan's 2024 Las Vegas shows made them the first hip-hop act ever to hold a residency there. The run at the Theater at Virgin Hotels began on Super Bowl weekend in February 2024, after what RZA called five years of preparation.[1]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.