Ghostface Killah Ironman

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.