An apophany: A “process of repetitively and monotonously experiencing abnormal meanings in the entire surrounding experiential field”. That’s according to Wikipedia. It is also Christopher Sloce’s monthly culture column. 

“Wu-Tang Forever” may have been the most dangerous phrase ever said by any Wu-Tang Clan member. The Clan, designed essentially as nine governor-warlords of hip-hop, predicted they would never go away. Those three words, emblazoned on their second album, helped the Clan cross the Halys River. Wu-Tang is forever, yes. Should anything be, though?

We’ve all seen the pictures of Raekwon, dressed disconcertingly like a tech CEO meeting with Alex Karp, dressed like himself. It was apparently his second visit, the original coming in 2010. The Palantir social media intern, careful not to fall out of his guard tower, tweeted out “Never forget your OGs”.

Because I imagine most of us have seen these pictures, I don’t need to spend a lot of time talking about Palantir. A lot of left wing writers are good at working themselves up into rhetorical suds with visions of robot apocalypse and then sudden rises into revolutionary optimism; like Kafka’s leopards, the need to vent the worst case scenario only to backflip into something that sounds like Sister Sledge’s “Taking It To the Streets” has been incorporated into the ritual. The situation is in chaos, everything is perfect, Palantir has no good uses because surveillance for the population—already at dystopian enough a point that I don’t think you need to supply the Age of the Fall of Man to readers to get them to understand shit is bad—is as much about who is under surveillance as who will be excluded from the all-seeing eyes of Palantir.

I will admit, it’s very hard for me to be disappointed by 90s rappers getting into shenanigans like this. The pull of musical personalities is rarely put to good ends. As also pointed out online, it is very likely there’s some “He don’t have internet” elements to the whole endeavor. I doubt Alex Karp is quoting Oswald Mosley to Raekwon but using the investor c-suite tech flim flam that has become the Latin Mass of Silicon Valley political dominance.

At risk of enjambing typically psychoanalytic language into political economy, nobody who gets a pile of capital is told to just let it sit in a savings account, to live comfortably but not extravagantly. They’re told to invest that money so that capital can grow, constituting a sort of “drive”. It’s like a hydra; each pile of investment sprouts heads. I have a lot of empathy for artists who saw the Reagan 80s and crack wanting a better life. That’s part of what makes Raekwon’s Only Built 4 Cuban Linx one of the greatest rap albums ever made: that need to do something besides sell coke is beautifully communicated in its intros and in the subtext. That drive for comfort is also what leads to you visiting Palantir.

But let’s talk about the real important thing here: I think Wu-Tang Clan is pretty much the greatest rap group ever made if you count solo albums as also being “Wu-Tang” albums, which they always were. There’s a dizzying number of good to incredible albums just in the first solo runs alone, and then when you consider Ghostface Killah’s mid-career run as well as Only Built 4 Cuban Linx 2, they have a pretty tight resume on volume alone. Past OB4CL2, though, Wu mostly exists at this point as a brand that embodies a certain approach to 90s hardcore rap itself.

Wu also holds a level of cross-over appeal a group like De La Soul or A Tribe Called Quest hasn’t been able to really replicate. All groups mentioned here are very “hip-hop”, but Wu-Tang has been open about influences from what we could safely call “nerd culture”: kung-fu movies, horror, and superheroes. It gives nerds a bridge to cross to feel like they understand street shit. Plenty of rappers have used “nerd culture” as something that imbues street tales with a mythic energy; it is not something rappers do to get annoying fans, who flatten music about survival under some very specific economic pressures into being a referential, taco-truck approved experience. When you see something like, say, the mid-teens rush of Marvel covers that feature the Avengers or whoever spread out like the Clan on the front of Enter the 36 Chambers, you’re seeing homage that also recontextualizes what you’re paying homage to. (The Marvelous; or the Death of Cinema podcast has a lot to say about the way 90s rap gives a “street wise” edge to those Spiderman cartoon movies that are probably better than most superhero movies that I still don’t want to watch).

Wu, of all hip hop groups, has probably the most intense distance between how radically raw their best work is versus the cynical uses of Wu-Tang. The problem is the artistic atrophy that comes for a lot of great, radical artists (radical in terms of form, this is not a “Secret Marxism of Supreme Clientele” column) when they are making work that refers to their best work. “Wu-Tang Forever” is as much a declaration of anxiety as a slogan you shout as you conquer the world. If Wu-Tang is forever and Wu-Tang refers to a legacy of work created by guys who were in their early 20s, then artistic daring becomes a risk. OB4CL2 is great, but it ossified the Wu in many ways. They must always be referring to their more daring work in their less daring work. This comes without a consideration: is the less daring work less daring because it has to refer to the past? Not if it’s just a representation of those three words: Wu-Tang Forever. Then it becomes like putting George Washington on a coin.

There has to be a level of artistic buy-in to even get to the point that “Wu-Tang Forever” becomes a handshake, and it’s to Wu’s credit they’ve pulled it off, despite dicier periods of artistic relevance. But now, the audience are the die-hards, the fans who are willing to check out an Inspectah Deck album in 2026. But there are also the more casual fans. Not everybody can be the kind of person who downloaded the GZA/DJ Muggs tape Grandmasters in high school, or the kind of person who bought Ghostface Killah’s 12 Ways to Die on vinyl then never got it out of his college mailing room. In order for Wu-Tang to be forever, it has to be more than music. The story since after that album titled as such has been chasing the preconditions to make the title true. They launched a clothing line and a video game. Ghostface Killah was a hip, funny movie cameo in the late 2000s. Method Man even had a sitcom. They would be altogether more unlikable if the best of their music was just fine, but the best of their music is among the best hiphop ever made. But the question that doesn’t seem to be asked is what do people who use Wu-Tang as a sort of talisman to impart their unique qualities, that rawness and cultural savvy and virtuosity and rugged depiction of street life, want out of them?

Everything is awash in slop. The world is ruled by people who want to make the world in their paranoid, hateful image. Palantir is just one of those rulers, a company that wants to see everything and thus control it. In the chase of their own eternal power, Wu lost the plot, trying to defy something another great rap group said. Even the sun goes down and heroes eventually die. It’s better that way.

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