At some point, there was new album coming from random Wu-affiliate almost every month. This was the time before streaming, online mixtapes or even well-developed piracy, so if you wanted the records you had to buy them. Naturally the quality was not always that good and there was definitely certain Wu-fatigue at the end of the century. For example, the video below features "the youngest" member of wu tang name generator Shyheim. That song in question was probably as good as it gets, but generally no one really remembers him or any other of those loosely affiliated wu tang name generator-wannabes.

Which is why he decided to create his own. The first Only Built 4 Cuban Linx saw Raekwon, heavily supported by Ghostface Killah, write and star in a gripping drama swathed in the myth of the American gangster. Young men at the time, they never sounded all that youthful, their voices rippling with ruin, as if they had already seen too much. Released 14 years later, Only Built 4 Cuban Linx ... Pt II sees the duo cast as grizzled street veterans, older and wiser but no less willing to drop their enemies on their heads. Remedy’s grandparents are Holocaust survivors, though his great uncle and other family members were murdered, all of which has influenced his Jewish upbringing.

[laughs] Word, but wejust felt like we was our own division that wasn’t really at the level thatDef Jam was at that time. "Yo, feeling y’all music.Yo, come to Queens. You know, it was just like I say, we was young,like Ghost say, young, dumb, full-of-cum ass n----s.

And you know I was saying is like, the same thing, like, we gonna make something happen with it. We ain’t gonna just, you know what I mean, get some wind, just fall back down again. Because that’s how we were, we you know, a couple of times you may throw a lick in the street and then you up. And the next thing you know, couple of months you down.

I did three verses that day, and RZA, he was like, "Yo,you did what you had to do," and we just left that song like that. But evenwhen we was making Cuban Linx, I didn’t never take it like it was a soloproject ’cause every project that we was making at that time it was always aWu-Tang album to us. It just was his chamber, his chamber, his chamber.

Def Jam is like a first classticket. [laughs]Just being there, Mobb [Deep], all of us, we just felt like misfits. You knowthe shit that be coming on TV with "Santa Claus Is Coming to Town," and allthe misfit presents is like, nobody don’t want them?

We wanna be the passengers, and you gonna drive." And that’s how it was. It was just, like I said, that was going on around our lives at the time. We looked at it like we done did everything, we done tried everything, we done, in the streets, doing this, and just doing everything to win, you know, anything we felt like was gonna really help us, that’s what it was about. But this particular project right here was the gusto. We already knew that this shit had to be a classic. It wasn’t hoping to be a classic, it wasn’t hoping to be dope, you know, it was supposed to be.