By Sam Chennault
The wind whips through San Francisco’s dirty alleys and slashes a cold, nearly horizontal rain at the feet of Theodore Unit members Trife Da God and Du Lilz. It’s a typically dreary, early spring evening in downtown San Francisco, and the three of us are smoking cigarettes beneath the awning of the Hotel Milano, an upscale joint just one block away from Mezzanine, the club where Trife and Lilz will perform with Ghostface Killah later tonight.
Though they’ll hit the stage in a little less than an hour, the MCs seem nonplussed. It’s one of those nights, and few words are exchanged until Ghost comes down from his suite nearly a half hour later. But even his appearance is a non-starter. The rain is coming down strong, and though we’re fewer than 100 yards from the club’s back entrance, nobody wants to get wet. So we slip back into the lobby and wait for what must be one of the shortest cab rides ever.
Before the taxi arrives, Ghost spots two girls standing in the hotel’s otherwise empty bar. He struts over to them, and after a few words are exchanged the blonde one asks, “Are you going to the Ghostface Killah show tonight?”
“I am Ghostface Killah!” the MC explains — equally amused and frustrated — before walking away.
Ghostface’s most recent album, Fishscale, will be released in a matter of days, and the tour’s exhaustion is cut with a palatable sense of anxiety about the album’s commercial prospects. Mike Caruso, Ghostface’s manager, mentions to me that they’re “always (anxious) before an album drops, but especially with this one.”
Later, when Ghost and I are backstage, slumped into a large leather sofa, the Wu-Tang MC asks me what I think of Fishscale.
“The first time I heard it, it sounded strange,” I admit. But it’s a good strange. It doesn’t sound like anything that’s come out in the past five years, at least nothing on a major label. The production is grimy and abstract, full of crackling soul samples and crescendos of noise and bass, taking the soul loop aesthetic that RZA developed in the mid-’90s to its logical conclusion. The production is probably closest to Ghostface’s debut, 1996’s classic Ironman, though it also seems like a continuum of his two most recent releases Supreme Clientele and The Pretty Toney Album. Lyrically, the album focuses on a series of coke game vignettes, and almost every song is a narrative, though much of the focus is on creating moods, evoking tones and developing characters rather than advancing overarching plots.
But themes do emerge. The inhabitants of songs such as “Big Girl” and “R.A.G.U.” are driven by their obsessions and addictions, with lives poisoned by betrayals and lies. Fishscale is an album that plays out in the darkness of shadows; a modern street noir — part Slick Rick, part Dashiell Hammett and part Iceberg Slim. It’s cinematic, with lyrics that are filled with imagery both hyper-realistic and, as on the oceanic epic “Underwater,” surreal and metaphorical. It’s singular and spectacular, weird and seemingly wired into multiple minds and eras.
“[It’s] like a picture that I write in rhymes,” Ghost explains. “And it’s not something I can do onstage. It’s too much breath . . . and live settings don’t work for it, you have to pay attention. My songs are like movies.”
Ghost attributes his increased focus on Fishscale not only to it being the first album that’s he’s recorded in New York since his debut, but also to a leg injury that kept him confined to his bedroom. But unlike those of other strictly “lyrical” MCs, Ghostface’s raps don’t sound as if they’re created in a cerebral vacuum — with microscopically detailed rhymes awkwardly squished into plodding and dull beats. Rather, his rhymes are more at one with the production, complementary and explanatory.
“I just listened to the beat, and played off the woman’s voice,” Ghost relates about the gorgeous ballad “Beauty Jackson.” “When I hear the music, a picture just automatically comes in my mind. I try to keep that image and have the song stay true to that.”
After I’m finished relaying my thoughts about the album, Ghostface leans in, smiles and asks, “But overall, it sounds all right to you?”
“Yeah, best album of the year,” I reply.
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