Last Updated on July 10, 2023
S01 E16
Wu-Tang: An American Saga is a series shown on Disney+ (here in the UK) and is a dramatisation of the early days of the Wu-Tang clan. In this episode of the Beat Motel Podcast Andrew walks us through the first two seasons of this hip-hop historical dramatisation.
How close is Wu-Tang: An American Saga to the truth, and does that really matter at all? Would someone who isn’t into hip-hop get anything from watching this series? Does this dramatisation glorify negative stereotypes? Find out by listening to this episode now.
Wu-Tang: An American Saga Transcription written by an actual human being
Hey, cool kids, you’re back with Beat Motel; it’s a solo show with me, Andrew, this week because Sam is off in Iceland hunting for Vikings. So, for this episode, we’re gonna do something that’s slightly different. I will talk about Wu-Tang: An American Saga, specifically seasons one and two, mainly because I only found out season 3 was available around ten minutes ago. So, I’m not gonna cover that.
So, I discovered Wu-Tang: An American Saga completely by accident, and I’ll explain that in a moment, but, to give you a bit of background, I’ve been into hip-hop for a long time; the first album I ever bought was Raising Hell by Run DMC, but I’m not really an expert. I got good friends who can give me the details and explain the crossovers between Wu-Tang and Grave Diggers and A Tribe Called Quest, and they know the history and the folklore, and I’m not that person.
I came to Wu-Tang accidentally in a roundabout way when I was about 17 or 18 when the first Grave Diggers album came out, a friend gave it to me, and it blew my tiny mind sitting in a village in Suffolk. Then, I didn’t really explore much more. The next album came out, which I also loved, but I had no idea there was a connection between Grave Diggers and Wu-Tang. But, in a very, very roundabout way, I eventually came around to the Wu-Tang Clan. I think Gravel Pit coming out was quite a big thing, but shamefully, it took me until only a couple of years ago to listen to 36 Chambers by Wu-Tang.
So, if you’re listening to this expecting a deep dive on the Wu-Tang Clang, I’m afraid you’re not gonna get it. This is very much about the Hulu series Wu-Tang: An American Saga. So, how did I find that? Well, a friend gave me—I shouldn’t admit this if anyone gives a shit—but a friend lent me his Disney+ login as a member of family, or I can’t remember how, and I was just casually flicking through and saw the words Wu-Tang pop up.
Anyone who hasn’t listened to this before, I’m in the UK, so Wu-Tang: An American Saga was on Hulu in the States. In the UK, it’s available by Disney, which is just so strange, I was telling some of my hip-hop friends about Wu-Tang: An American Saga, and they were saying, “Oh, how did you watch that?” and I was like, Disney, and they were like what has happened to the world, why is Wu-Tang on Disney? But they are.
So, I will watch any music documentaries. I went to fire it up and realized it was not a documentary. It’s based on RZA’s book or one of his books, and he is credited as a writer, and almost all of the Wu-Tang Clan members are credited as executive producers. So, they’ve very much been involved. Now, this gave me some concern at first because we’re looking here at a significantly expensive, well-produced, very high-concept in places rockumentary, rap-umentary? Not sure what word to use here.
Sometimes, if the artists are strictly involved or very much a part of the creative process, I think it can be quite a negative thing.
To give you an idea, there’s a story possibly about the reason the Queen biopic Bohemian Rhapsody took so long to come out, and that reason is Queen was involved with it. So, there’s a rumour that originally, Sacha Baron Cohen was gonna play Freddy Mercury and that would’ve been a thing to behold.
He eventually noped out of the production and wouldn’t say why but a rumour started going around that it was because, as they were going through the scripting and working out the tension and pace of Bohemian Rhapsody, the members of Queen got to the bit where they had to talk about Freddy Mercury’s death, I mean it’s unavoidable, so Sacha baron Cohen was like ok so Freddie is gonna die at the end of the film, and they asked studios no, that battle happened quite early, and the rest of the film will be about all the brilliant things that Queen has done since Freddie Mercury had died and Sacha Baron Cohen was kind of “I’m not so sure about that”. The other rumour was that he wanted to play Freddie Mercury as long as the character was portrayed as realistically as possible with regard to drugs, sex, and all that stuff, and the members of Queen were very much not keen on that.
This is all rumour, could or could not be true, but it means that when I started watching Wu-Tang: An American Saga, I’m just going to start saying the Wu-Tang thing. I was thinking, “Well, I hope this isn’t either A) sanitized, B) apologetic or smoothing over some of the more negative aspects of the Wu-Tang story, or C) a hagiography. I didn’t want to watch this if it was gonna be some sort of glorious “Hey, aren’t we great?” type thing. I’ve seen that angle before, and it’s just shit!
You don’t want to start watching a biopic about a band or an artist and have them go from “Oh, yeah, I’m gonna write some tunes and WOW now I’m playing at Live-Aid.” or whatever. That would be a time travel biopic, I guess, for a lot of bands. But, you know what, the Wu-Tang thing: An American Saga, thankfully, is not what you get. I really didn’t know how to take the first few episodes. It starts with a drive-by shooting, and I’m not gonna give anything away because I want you to watch this if you want to; I’m not recommending it as such other than saying I thoroughly enjoyed it, and there’s a mathematical chance you might if we have similar tastes.
So, it starts with a drive-by shooting between two of the main characters. Immediately, the person with the gun wants to offload it and turns up at “Bobby” house. I’m gonna tell you that now because RZA, real name Bobby Diggs, played astonishingly by Ashton Sanders, gets a knock on his basement door; guy comes in, “I need to hide this gun”…. This is so bad. You can’t really do this with an Ipswitch accent. “Hello, Bobby, I need to hide this gun!” No, it’s something I’m not even gonna make an attempt on or make it sound like I’m from New York. Bobby goes, “Wow, that’s hot; what have you done?” basically, and for some reason, says, “Okay, ill hide your gun”. He’s sort of mucking about with record decks and samples and stuff while the lad with the gun comes in.
Immediately, I thought this was possibly gonna lean too hard into the “Hey, we’re gangsters” thing. Starting with a drive-by shooting is pretty rich, but the rest of the episode, and I gotta say, not a lot of the rest of the series glorifies violence. There’s nothing in here that makes you believe the people involved with the frequent violent acts in the first two seasons are doing it because they think it’s cool. This is one of the things that really struck me, especially the first two, three, maybe four episodes; it’s that there’s such a claustrophobic tension to them. It’s characters who are selling and moving crack; there’s no two ways about it; that is what they’re doing.
Bobby’s got a decent family. I can’t remember right now where his dad is, but his mom is brilliant; his older brother, in the early episodes, he’s a bit aggressive for reasons that get revealed. It’s quite difficult doing this without giving the whole story arc away, but they’re not portrayed as street hoodlums at all. They’re trying to get by, and that claustrophobic sense is that you very much get the idea that they are trapped in it. This is one of the very limited number of options. Now, where I live in Ipswitch can be called an up-and-coming area. It used to be in the top ten lists of the most deprived neighbourhoods, but wow, this is nothing compared to where these guys grew up.
It’s quite shocking that deprivation, the lack of investment in the area, I can absolutely see how in the documentary made by– oh my God, I forgot, the man from Public Enemy….D! In Chuck D’s recent documentary, the deprivation of black neighbourhoods is directly caused by political decisions, and if you were to watch the Chuck D documentary expresses in a very good way that I don’t have the ability to go into myself, but it’s all worth watching.
What seeing the Wu-Tang thing is, it’s very mostly like, seeing that on a day-to-day basis. I mean, so, first up, we’ve got the guns, then we’ve got crack being moved, and Bobby’s bigger brother, Devine, he’s trying to make an empire, and I also thought—I’m really sceptical about anything that pops up on Disney, even if it’s not made by Disney, and I thought well shit, they’re trying to do the Breaking Bad arc here. But, not starting off with a chat with cancer, they’re taking a different angle. Devine, RZA—Bobby’s older brother, is very much trying to build an empire. I was sceptical about that when I first saw it because Disney has a horrible, almost policy of looking at what has come before it, taking the popular elements out, and basically churning it out again. I thought, please don’t let this be Breaking Bad in New York. It’s not, but that tension and that claustrophobia that’s in breaking bad is very much present in the first few episodes.
Devine ends up going to prison, and that is when absolutely everything changes. It’s one of the things I really like about the way they’ve structured this story here. By the way, we’re onto like—Bobby going to prison is episode 5 or 6; it’s not quite far in. Very little music! I mean, you can see these guys are into music, especially Bobby; he’s constantly creating, and this conflict between the things he has to do on the street to survive and his passion for making music, and throughout the whole of the first season, his passion for music is very much seen by those around him, apart from his family. Those around him are an obstacle to succeed in, like a kid playing with a toy he’ll grow out of. Nobody is interested. He’s still kind of locking away.
One of the things I found really interesting is I don’t intimately know all the members of Wu-Tang Clan. I couldn’t tell you, before watching this, more than a few of their names. So, in this, when I watched it, I wasn’t in the state of mind of trying to pick out “Ok, that’s Method Man, that’s Raekwon, that’s Ghostface Killah”. I was just watching a bunch of people. I was almost surprised when I started to see them rapping.
Those characters were gonna be part of the Wu-Tang Clan. So, very surprising. I mean, I found it really stressful, actually, watching the first few episodes. The tension is so ratcheted up, and the violence is so acute. There are deaths! I mean, I don’t wanna say stupid deaths because it’s complex, but characters die for frustrating reasons. Much later on, there’s a scene with a police officer killing someone, and it is one of the most difficult, complex scenes I think I’ve ever had to watch. It’s very, very difficult. This is not a “Hooray, Wu-Tang!” thing at all, not in the slightest.
That being said, there is actually quite a lot of humour in it! In a similar way to Breaking Bad, but again, I’ve moved on from making that comparison. There’s humour because it’s such a human-interest story; the people around Bobby and all the other characters. God, some of the challenges some of the people are living through in this are so cute, but there’s also so much love and so much humour—not dark humour, you know, it’s really not. If you watch the first Wu-Tang video, I think it was Protecting Neck—I apologize to any Wu-Tang fans who are now screaming if I’m wrong—you see that and it’s very aggressive. The aesthetic of it is now classic and often imitated; showing the street where they live, it’s very real and very gritty.
It’s fascinating when you watch Wu-Tang: The American Saga just how much love is behind all of it; a love for art, a love for each other, and famously, RZA got everyone involved to up their game by pitting them against each other in the studio. They had to watch each other perform.
“You get in there, and you do better! Then, you go in there,” and that, in much later episodes, is shown very nicely. I mean, it’s cool as shit, really; I enjoyed a lot of that. Now, one of the strangely lightly humorous bits in this, for me, is when Bobby’s mate— his cousin— gets a record deal. He releases the now infamous single We Love You Rakeem. “We love you, Rakeem!” it does not sound like that….And, it’s clearly showing in this that RZA, or Bobby as he was then, was very much taken down a path that he was not interested in.
The motivation for doing it is complex, you’ll have to watch to get behind that, but the unintentional humour of taking Bobby, who’s this incredibly good-looking, very charismatic, quite shy in a way, quite protective of himself, and him being dressed up in a top hat and tails to make the video for We Love You Rakeem, it’s so strange! He’s really protesting it, but he’s protesting it at the video shoot. Now, I’m gonna say that must be a bit of an artistic impression because I can’t imagine anyone, however cack their record deal is, would turn up for a shoot and not have any idea what the concept or aesthetic is. So, the idea of him at a shoot going, “What?! A top hat?! No, I don’t like that, sir; that’s not me.” It is, I think, unintentionally quite humorous, but it’s a fantastic episode, not least because you’ve got Bobby making an effort trying to escape from all the terrifying shit going on in his life and around him, and yet, he’s still got friends turning up to this shoot with guns.
Again, one of the unintentionally funny bits in that episode, which is called Labels…it’s episode 8. One of his friends turns up—he’s got a beef with one of his other friends—and he pulls a gun. One of the production staff walking past goes, “Really?! Where’d you get that from!?” and tries to take the gun off him. “Our props department did not authorize guns for this shoot!”. Yeah, it’s definitely losing something in the retelling, but it’s pretty cool.
One of the things I like about this episode actually is it’s almost a bit of light relief compared to what’s happening in previous episodes. They take a similar thing to Bohemian Rhapsody and Rocketman, where they kind of remade chunks of the video. As soon as I finished watching this episode, I went straight to YouTube and looked up Ooh We Love You Rakeem to watch the video and holy shit, someone put in a lot of work to get that very close to the original there.
In fact, the whole of Wu-Tang: An American Saga has quite a lot of pleasing geek moments where there’s a lot of effort being made to show how genuine and how well-researched—I mean, it’s partly written by RZA, the whole show is, right down to which kind of sampler and keyboards Bobby is using in his basement. There’s another unintentionally funny bit where Bobby is trying to nick a sampler. Samplers now are your phone, or you can get a sampler called a MicroGranny that’s about the size of a pack of fags. Samplers used to be huge, I think the size of a till in an old shop, a massive big area, and he’s trying to shoplift one. Clearly, it’s not gonna fit in his bad, and I’ll let you watch it to see how that plays out.
So, anyway, after—I’m not giving anything away—but after the whole Ooh We Love You Rakeem thing doesn’t pan out—I mean, I’m not giving anything away there because clearly Bobby is still not called Rakeem—after that falls to pieces, we’re quickly back to the high tension and violence of his existence because a rumour goes out that he got a big advance. I’m not just gonna go through this episode by episode, I promise you, but I just wanted to tell you about that bit because it’s a really nice example of the juxtaposition between the success and the absolute crushing back down to earth that really symbolizes the whole first season.
So, things get weird, basically, and we start to see, as we go into season 2, we start to see Wu-Tang, as you might recognize them start to come together. I’m really pleased that this wasn’t brushed out and wasn’t rushed past because it goes into a lot of detail. The bit I always wanna see as a musician—I wanna say as a struggling musician that’s mostly struggling to play—is right, how do they actually up their game? How did they get noticed? How did the band come together? I wanna know the mechanical things of it, and season 2 of Wu-Tang: An American Saga is just that: payback, payback, payback.
Series 2 gives you all the details, and none of it is slow, none of it is boring at all, and it is all crucial to the story. But some of the detail is just unbelievably good! There’s an episode—and I’m gonna post the video on the website Shownotes for this—there’s an episode that has quite a big chunk where RZA is walking the viewer through how he creates a track. It’s a big chunk of the episode—I’m just gonna post a little bit of it—it’s a big chunk of the episode, down to how he finds the original samples, how he views in his mind the structure, and how he hears the parts of records he’s gonna take out and sample.
This is also one of the brilliant bits in this series, where it gets quite high concept. It gets quite surreal, you know. This is not a series which is just people living in challenging neighbourhoods, being gritty and swearing and shooting and doing drugs. There is that stuff, but there are so many brilliant moments which are quite surreal. For example, a character early on gets killed and the way they portray the loss of opportunity with one person’s death is phenomenally good, moving, kind of entertaining, and just great, but it’s not in a It’s A Wonderful Life, that old film kind of way. It’s done with some fairly psychedelic effects and quite wild visuals. That does pop up a few times throughout the first two seasons.
So, we get to the sampling thing, we get to the band coming together, and then the usual, hey, things are going well…WOAH! things going very, very badly, then the tension starts building up. It’s quite masterful, actually. Even if you don’t give a shit about hip-hop or Wu-Tang, this would still stand out, almost as a historical document. The way some of it is shot, I don’t know how they did it, is actually incredible. They spent a lot of money, I assume. But, I’m gonna wrap this up because otherwise, I’m just gonna keep talking and talking and talking. I just wanted to give you a rundown of why I think this is worth watching, and I think it’s worth watching if you don’t care about hip-hop. It’s a good human-interest story. But, if you are into hip-hop and especially if you’re into Wu-Tang, this is very rewarding for fans.
The detail and the questions that are answered in this, like how did that come about? Why was that video made that way? How come that person isn’t on the first album but on the second? All of that is answered; it is so cool.
All the actors in this are absolutely brilliant, but I want to give particular props to Ashton Sanders, who plays RZA or Bobby. He got his whole Constance and his whole broodiness and his whole expression and passion, and it is so good! Absolutely wonderful all the actors in this are. Particularly, I think the actor who met the challenge in the biggest way is the guy who plays ODB. I apologize; I’m gonna have to look at a screen to see who that is. T.J Atoms? Could be wrong…Well, shit don’t come to me for accurate data whatever you do, but the actor who plays him, what a challenge playing ODB! Even the way you talk has to be so affected. He’s absolutely one of my favourite characters in the whole thing, and he’s played just so wonderfully, so so well.
So, there you go. There’s my wrap-up for Wu-Tang: An American Saga. Look up clips, the trailers are pretty decent on YouTube. Just give it a go, but if you do start at the beginning as you should, just be aware that you’re gonna have to just put in the hours, which is a bit like Breaking Bad again. Shit, stop making parallels again, Andrew.
You’re gonna have to put in the hours. It’s all good, and it’s all entertaining, and it’s all worth watching, but it does take a little while to become noticeably a Wu-Tang thing, to be noticeably a music documentary series—not a documentary—a music rap-documentary, dramatization, yeah… it takes a while to become noticeably Wu-Tang, but you need the early ones just to get the importance of everything that comes alter.
Season 3 I’m really looking forward to watching because at the end of Season 2 is the record deal, the good record deal and its success, but you don’t see it. You see a few conversations of “Wow! A lot of copies of this record have sold!” that’s more or less it, and then at the end, there’s another down trip. So, season 3 I’m really looking forward to it because crafting the buildup story, the origin story of any musician, is an easier challenge than showing the success of the story. I watched Rocketman for the first time a few nights ago, the Elton John story, which I thought was really good, but with that one, again, they gloss over the early days. There’s a little bit of “Oh, should we write some songs? Hello, my name is Bernard…He’s not Bernard Cribbids, is it? My name is that bloke who wrote Birds for Elton John, and all of a sudden, he’s massive and coked out of his mind and all that jazz.”
So, it’ll be interesting to see where we go with this because season 3 has to start with massive success, and that means that the story has to go in a direction that hasn’t even been touched before. The challenge of success doesn’t really feature much in the first two seasons.
There you go, Wu-Tang: An American Saga. Go watch it! Let us know what you think of this episode. We quite liked the idea of doing these kind of breakdowns which are very subjective rather than the objectivity of, for example, a black metal episode that Sam did a little while ago. Just let us know what you think, rate us. We’re starting to build up some listeners now, get in touch. Oh, we’re on socials now. Just look for Beat Motel on Instagram, Facebook, or YouTube. Cool stuff! Okay, thanks a lot! I am going to go and drink a cup of coffee. Why am I telling you this? I have no idea.
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