Ghostface Killah

Latest Release

Essential Albums

  • Supreme Clientele
    Supreme Clientele
    Supreme Clientele

    Ghostface Killah was chasing his life in 1997. He was 27 and sick with diabetes, and—thinking he had cancer—he went to the African nation of Benin with fellow Wu-Tang Clan member RZA, lived in a mud hut, was treated by a bush doctor, and came back with many of the staggering lyrics that decorate 2000’s Supreme Clientele. He sounds glad to be alive; he sounds totally freaked. In a time when everybody who ever delivered sandwiches for Wu-Tang seemed to be getting a solo deal, here Tony Starks, as he calls himself (he also calls himself the Black Boy George on “Stroke of Death”), makes everything stick. Even when you don’t know quite what he’s getting at, his abstract, detail-crammed narratives, often tinged with biographical asides, make for a vivid set of stories. Producer RZA was wrestling with quality control. He’d just masterminded double album Wu-Tang Forever in 1997 and then sent out key members for solo projects, pairing them up with other producers. Ghostface Killah, however, he couldn’t bring himself to hand off, and RZA ended up producing more than half the songs here and revising the work of others. He offers an especially strong mix of his grime and besmirched classic soul. “Nutmeg” chops up a strings-and-flutes sample; “One” is a methodical track that repeats its monosyllabic titular number at the end of each line, screwing the lid down on Ghost’s anarchic verbiage. There are disses (on a skit and the song “Ghost Dini”) that got under 50 Cent’s skin, and appearances from strategic guest stars—including Raekwon, GZA, and Redman. Meanwhile, Ghostface Killah does anything for impact, with writing that feels like a Donald Goines paperback, Ip Man fan fiction, and several awkward pages of a coming-of-age memoir torn out of his notebook, all of it cut up and glued together for maximum emotional wallop.

  • Ironman (25th Anniversary Edition)
    Ironman (25th Anniversary Edition)
    Ironman (25th Anniversary Edition)

    In the long list of Wu-Tang solo projects, Ironman sits near the top. The wordplay was vivid, the atmosphere tense, the performances—both from Ghost and featured players Raekwon and Cappadonna—somehow both casual and menacingly precise. Raekwon’s Only Built 4 Cuban Linx…—“guest starring” Ghost, as the album cover put it—had raised the bar for narrative rap only a year earlier (a year after Nas’ Illmatic, no less), but Ironman was different. The stories were there (“260,” “Motherless Child”), but there was also a sense of heart that set him apart (“All That I Got Is You”), not to mention a surreal streak that made even his more boneheaded raps feel like poetry. You want to know how hard he is? He pees out the window on the freeway—that’s how hard (“Daytona 500”). This was the vanguard of New York street rap in the mid-’90s: a little noir, a little Blaxploitation, a little pulp fiction, and a little bracing realism. You got the sense that crime made them rich. You also got the sense that it put them in a permanent moral bind. But neither were as important to the music as the sheer sensation of being in the dark hallways and cramped apartments where these things took place. Like its successor, Supreme Clientele, the essence of Ironman is its atmosphere, which—like RZA’s production—is as threatening and tactile as it is dreamy and obscure, like fading graffiti on a crumbling city wall. (Raekwon is expectedly great, too, but anyone following the arc and mythology of the Wu-Tang Clan will pay special attention to Cappadonna, who rarely sounded better.) Ghostface later said he wasn’t in the right frame of mind to be making an album at all, let alone one supposed to introduce the breadth of his creativity to the world: He was depressed, struggling with a recent diagnosis of diabetes, and watching one of his best friends ship off to prison for 25 years for a crime it turns out he didn’t commit. Ironman might not describe the intensity of what he was going through—but you can definitely hear him going through it.

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About Ghostface Killah

Staten Island’s Ghostface Killah joined the Wu-Tang Clan at the behest of group maestro RZA, appearing on its 1993 debut, Enter The Wu-Tang: 36 Chambers, and immediately marking himself as one of rap’s most vivid storytellers. As the Wu-Tang phenomenon grew, Ghostface became a standout feature on Wu-Tang tracks, making vibrant, idiosyncratic appearances on “Ice Cream” and “Criminology” for Raekwon’s landmark epic Only Built 4 Cuban Linx. Ghostface signed with Epic Records in 1996 and released his debut solo album, Ironman, followed by 2000’s Supreme Clientele, a monument of abstract lyricism. Those projects set a disparate tone for his boundless creativity: He’s just as likely to deliver a fantastic tale over an MF Doom beat on “Underwater” (from 2006’s Fishscale) as he is to explore romance on 2009’s Ghostdini: Wizard of Poetry in Emerald City. Ghostface is still one of rap’s most inimitable figures, frequently collaborating with his Wu brethren and other artists across genres and generations.

HOMETOWN
Staten Island, NY, United States
BORN
May 9, 1970
GENRE
Hip-Hop/Rap

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