3. RaekwonOnly Built 4 Cuban Linx
It was a more intense injection of it. That was the second solo album, before the second Wu Tang album, and you can still hear that hunger in RZA’s production. It’s even more intense and claustrophobic. I didn’t buy this album until six years after I discovered the Wu Tang, and it threw me again, I was obsessed with it. I used to have it on in the car all the time and I would stop it and go back to a little bit, then stop it and go back to another little bit, thinking about how I could replicate that, because it was so good.
This was well after I came up with Sleaford Mods, just before I met Andrew. It was still so mind blowing. There was a theme to it, they always used to bang on about how it was a concept but I never got that.
‘Guillotine’ was my favourite one off it, and also ‘Incarcerated Scarfaces’. The first one has this Keystone Cop kind of beat. It’s bizarre, there’s almost an Irish thing to that. It was east coast, you’ve got a lot of Irish immigrants there, so it must have spread through the culture.
I used samples for the first four albums, or tried to, but I don’t do it any more. It was just so tired to me, I’d rather leave sampling to those classic albums than flog a dead horse, you know. I was aware of the fact that it was an uphill battle trying to get clearance for stuff, but after three or four albums I was also getting bored of it, trying to find a loop off a great track. It didn’t matter how obscure it was or how obscure the approach was, it just bored me and I needed something more home grown.
