This article originally appeared in the January 1995 issue of SPIN.
“Damn, nigga, look at you.” As if his eyes weren’t red enough already, Method Man, the six-foot-three-inch gravel-voiced sadist of the Wu-Tang Clan, just put some bugged-out contacts in. Crimson horror-flick eyes glower under a Phat Farm headband as the 22-year-old sits with some buddies at a video shoot, explaining his first single, “Bring the Pain.” “I’m tellin’ ’em, if it’s really real, you can’t just tell me it’s real,” he says. “You got to let me feel it. You got to bring to pain.”
Scary talk coming from an MC whose extravagant snaps took the dozens to sick new heights on last year’s explosive Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers). Of the nine MCs in that Staten Island crew, the bearded, burr-headed Method Man is probably the most recognizable—at least to the girls catcalling out tenement windows and lining up outside the trailer for his autograph. In keeping with the Wu-Tang’s patented strategy of divide-and-conquer-the-record-industry, the deep, Brando-ish rasp on Enter‘s “Method Man” is going solo on Tical (RAL/Def Jam), a record whose title owes not a little to a certain voguish herb. Thought that’s not the sole meaning of the “the method.” “Methods,” pronounces the Man, who many are calling the next hard-core messiah, “that’s also like the many different personas or ways I have of carrying out my actions.
“Put it this way: The whole rap world is like a big kung fu movie,” he posits. “And when two live kung fu people come together, they out for blood.” The Wu-Tang style may be blunted, but it sure as hell is unbowed.
