In “Raw: My Journey Into the Wu-Tang,” U-God, born Lamont Hawkins, has found the right language and perspective with which to come to terms with his past.David Corio
Most fans of the Wu-Tang Clan have a favorite member. You can make astrong case for at least two-thirds of the nonet: GZA has theold-fashioned flow and the foreboding intellect; Method Man oozescunning and charisma; the late Ol’ Dirty Bastard was pure funk, like thehuman embodiment of a James Brown grunt; RZA conceptualized thegroup’s entire sound and ethos; and Ghostface Killah and Raekwon craftedtheir own, colorfully absurdist, tag-team spin on traditionalcrime-talk; a credible argument could even be made for the spry andmenacing Inspectah Deck.
The rapper U-God, though, who was born Lamont Hawkins, is an acquiredtaste: gruff, workmanlike, more of a bully than a poet. He’s not theoverlooked member of the group—that would be the inscrutable andunderrated Masta Killa. Rather, he is actively dismissed. Even hisnickname, “the four-bar killer,” speaks to his scant role in one ofhip-hop’s most acclaimed ensembles. (In 2016, Hawkins launched a lawsuitagainst the group for unpaid royalties.) But it’s precisely thestrangeness, and even fragility, of Hawkins’s proximity to the groupthat makes his memoir, “Raw: My Journey Into the Wu-Tang,” unexpectedlymoving.
Hawkins, who was born in 1970, spent his earliest years in Brooklynbefore moving to Staten Island, where he would meet his future Wu-Tangcompatriots. He was the only child of a hopeful and hard-working mother,who moved to Staten Island, then in the throes of “urban renewal,”because she was drawn to the idea of raising her son in an aspirational,working-class community. Hawkins never knew his father—eventually, hewould learn that his mother had become pregnant with him after she wasraped. One of his earliest memories, Hawkins writes, is of hearingMinnie Riperton’s “Loving You” playing on a radio when he was five yearsold; he followed the music outside, where he saw a woman standing on theroof of a neighboring building, threatening to jump. “I remember staringup at her till my neck was stiff,” he writes. “The sound of her hittingthe concrete steps would resonate with me forever.” It was the first ofmany times that he would see death up close. Nonchalance, even in theface of such horror, would become a hallmark of Hawkins’s style.Elsewhere in the book, he recalls seeing his uncle bashing someone overthe head with a brick; another time, a heroin-addicted babysitter nodsoff in the corner. Later on, in his teens, when he was stillcontemplating a more traditional career path, he studied to become anembalmer, since “certain things that’ll quease a motherf*cker out justdon’t bother me.”
Staten Island was not immune to the drug trade and its attendant turfwars, and, for the young Hawkins, the intimacy of the place made itimpossible to run away from his problems. On Staten Island, he explains,you had to stand your ground and “make your claim,” whereas, in theteeming streets of Brooklyn or Manhattan, you “could pop someone anddisappear like a fart in the wind.” Hawkins was still young when he metMethod Man—who would become his most loyal and compassionate friend inthe music business—and other future members of the Wu-Tang Clan; inmiddle school, he began hanging out with RZA, whom he saw as a bitof a nerd. (“To me nerds are cool,” he writes. “Nerds arenon-threatening.”) In Hawkins’s telling, the group emerged slowly andorganically, as friends, cousins, and friends-of-friends began rappingand dreaming together. They all became devoted to the Five-PercentNation, a movement for historical, spiritual, and almost mysticalself-determination, which splintered off from the Nation of Islam. Thefriends were united, too, by their love of martial-arts films—in themythology they crafted for themselves, Staten Island became “the slumsof Shaolin.”
Hawkins dealt drugs throughout his late teens; his polite and unassumingair served him well with the local cops, he writes. “They knew I wasjingling—just not the level I was jingling on.” Then, in 1992, acareless confrontation with a rival dealer landed him in prison, just asthe Wu-Tang Clan was working on its début album, “Enter the Wu-Tang (36Chambers),” which was released the following year. Hawkins got out intime to contribute a few verses, but he lacked sharpness and focus. “Thefirst time I grabbed the mic at a show after coming home, I got booed,”he remembers. “I wasn’t really ready. I had the heart to try, though.”He quickly accepted his role as the versatile, hard-working utilityplayer that every championship team needs. He also repeatedly violatedhis parole and ended up back behind bars during key moments of theClan’s initial rise. He kept working on his rhyme skills, appearing onsolo albums by other members of the Wu, and waiting for the time itwould be his turn. Behind the scenes, he dealt with tantrums andmediated other people’s beefs, and he did all the radio promotions andrandom magazine interviews that nobody else wanted to do. (One of theseinterviews was with me, for a skateboarding magazine that no longerexists.)
When the Wu-Tang Clan was ready to record its sophom*ore album, 1997’s“Wu-Tang Forever,” the group rented a home in the Hollywood Hills. Funwas had, and events occasionally turned raucous. Hawkins recounts apotential encounter with a teen-age Kim Kardashian that was spoiled byInspectah Deck (“He had no game”), and the time he almost punched out asmug Leonardo DiCaprio. But he mostly kept things mellow. One of myfavorite moments from the bygone TV series “MTV Cribs” (lately revivedon Snapchat) was filmed during this period: in a tour of Hawkins’smodest quarters—he got stuck with the smallest room in the Wu-Tanghouse—he showed off his collection of colorful, oversized “blowy shirts”and autographs, seeming very happy to be there. “Almost every morning onthe patio before going into the studio,” he recalls in “Raw,” “I wouldremind myself to really be present and be in the moment so I can reallyappreciate everything.”
Hawkins was still coping, at the time, with a horrific incident that hadhappened back home. While the Wu-Tang Clan was on tour, someone he knewused his son, who was just two years old, as a human shield during ashoot-out. Miraculously, the child survived, though he sufferedpermanent damage to his kidneys and hands. Hawkins says that, other thanMethod Man, the members of the group weren’t particularly supportive.“They rubbed their fame and their wealth in my face even more,” hewrites. Years before therapy seemed a viable option, he poured hisemotions into one of the best tracks on “Wu-Tang Forever,” “A BetterTomorrow.” “The strong must feed, someone die, someone bleed,” he rapson the track. “One flew astray, and it caught my little seed.”
Hawkins’s career has never reached the same heights as the rest of theClan’s—a reflection of his relative level of talent, mostly, but also ofcirc*mstances of timing and personality. In “Raw,” he displays anunusual degree of self-awareness about this fact. He describes howdifficult it can be to maintain his craft and his confidence, a raresort of candor in an art form typically premised on effortless cool. Butthe memoir’s most endearing moments involve the small victories thatcome with surviving into middle age and the momentary plateaus whereHawkins feels satisfied: the time in 1994, for instance, that he got toexperience the novelty, for a black man from Staten Island, of “wearinga silk robe and tasting sake” in Japan.
“Raw” feels cathartic, as Hawkins finds the language and perspective toreckon with his past. His moment in the spotlight may be over, but henow has something that few of his Wu-Tang brothers, still so admired bya younger generation, have: the distance to tell his own story. He hasoften been forgotten, and has sometimes been ridiculed, but he was partof one of the great hip-hop groups of all-time—perhaps the only memberwho is more man than myth.
