I still wanted to see the family come back to life. And when that didn't transpire from the music, it kinda made me feel like I was bein' taken advantage of. I thought, when people heard '8 Diagrams,' they'd be like, 'Oh, Wu-Tang is a wrap now - they've lost it.' And I know that we didn't lose it.
Wu-Tang was going through it. They didn't come from great homes or families. They really came from hard beginnings so it just made me reflect on my own situation. If Wu-Tang was able to make it, why can't I?
To me, Wu-Tang is beyond Wu-Tang Clan... It's just like, hip-hop is beyond Grandmaster Flash, but Grandmaster Flash was one of the first guys to hit those turntables like that. The same thing with Wu-Tang. You'll see the difference in hip-hop from the moment we came in to before we came in. We changed it. We changed the whole structure.
I thought that Wu-Tang was the best sword style - the best sword-style of martial arts. And the tongue is like a sword. And so I say that we have the best lyrics, so, therefore, we are the Wu-Tang Clan.
When I started to get older and I thought, "Well, you know now I'm kinda ready to settle down. And I really want to give to children now." Because I feel like I've done everything that I wanted to do in my entire life.
Everybody nowadays rhymes, but out of the people that really, really do it well, it's still a small community of artists. We all tend to be in the same circles - people like my Wu-Tang brothers, or Black Thought from The Roots.
Unhappy? I was lucky. So, so lucky. And I couldn’t see it.” His eyes met hers. “I love you,” he said. “And you make me happier than I ever thought I could be. And now that I know what it’s like to be someone else—to lose myself—I want my life back. My family. You. All of it.” His eyes darkened. “I want it back.
I grew up listening to a lot of Snoop Dogg and the Wu-Tang Clan. Actually, I was a huge Wu-Tang fan.
I could never be a control freak. If Wu-Tang is a dictatorship, how does every Wu-Tang member have their own contract, their own career, and have put out more albums without me than they've done with me?
Most of the time, I'm making music. There'll be moments of my life where I feel like I gotta to take a break and come back to the music. It's hard to explain, but you need to get a break from it and then come back to it. It's like you gotta lose something to appreciate it.
I am a Wu-Tang member and Method Man, he been a Def Squad member way before I was a Wu member. I was like a Wu member but I wasn't official.
People are frustrated. This is the most generous country in the world when it comes to immigration. There are a million people a year who legally immigrate to the United States, and people feel like we're being taken advantage of. We feel like despite our generosity, we're being taken advantage of.
I've taken all the mirrors out of my house because when I'm playing onstage, I feel like I'm still in high school. I feel like that kid that wanted to play in his first band, and then I look in a mirror, and it's like, 'Uh-oh!' It ain't pretty.
When Wu-Tang came, Wu-Tang was for that era, right there. When Dre had it in the West Coast, it was for that time. Biggie and them, it was for that time.
Education is the tool. Even if we haven't directly instructed a session, I think Wu-Tang has been an instructor of education to anyone who has been a fan, anyone who has supported our movement, whether its been from buying a Wu-Tang CD or coming to see a show.
As Erykah Badu, it has nothing to do with me, the way I look, my hair wrap, my style, it's about you and what you feel for my music. If I can make you feel like the way that people who influenced me made me feel, that's completion.
My music already has this oldish kind of quality to it, like you don't necessarily know what era it was recorded in, so it all kind of felt surreal and weird. Night after night when I played live, I was really trying to figure it out in real time, and I still don't know what effect I'm going for or what effect I actually achieve. Looking back, I feel like it would be arrogant of me not to appreciate the fact that I've been able to do whatever I want and still have an audience come see me.