The advice RZA wishes he could have given himself before ‘Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers)’
As debut albums go, Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) was about as successful as it gets. Masterminded by the RZA and released in November 1993, it made the Wu-Tang Clan hip-hop legends right then and there.
36 Chambers was hugely influential and helped to establish a distinct hardcore sound for East Coast hip-hop for years to come. The grit and vivid storytelling of 36 Chambers was a key driver of the East Coast Renaissance, in which dominance of hip-hop was wrestled back to New York following a spell of West Coast superiority. It laid the groundwork for fellow New Yorkers Nas, the Notorious B.I.G., and Jay-Z to step onto.
Despite sounding as lo-fi and dirty as it did, 36 Chambers proved to be a commercial success, too. It climbed to number 41 on the US Billboard 200 chart, which, given its hard edge and the fact hip-hop was not yet as popular with the mainstream as it is today, was hugely impressive. Its popularity has only grown in the years and decades since its release, first being certified platinum in 1995 and later receiving its quadruple platinum cert in late 2025.
36 Chambers is regarded as one of the best and most important hip-hop albums in history, a fact recognised by the Library of Congress. In 2022 the album was added to the National Recording Registry for preservation, on the grounds of its cultural, historic and aesthetic significance.
In addition to its musical success, 36 Chambers also set a new template that hip-hop collectives could later aspire to. The popularity of the album meant that the individual members were in a strong position to negotiate solo contracts for themselves. While the album came out on Wu-Tang Records, Loud Records, RCA Records, and Bertelsmann Music Group, each member was nonetheless free to find their own deals. It meant the Wu-Tang empire was able to spread far and wide.
All of which is to say, 36 Chambers did extremely well. Overseen by the RZA, who brought the Wu-Tang Clan together in the first place and produced almost all the beats himself, with the odd bit of help here and there, 36 Chambers was a triumph. But that doesn’t mean the RZA hasn’t reflected on how his attitude while all of this was going on wasn’t quite right.
Speaking to Rolling Stone in 2019, RZA seemed to imply that, when he was a younger man in the ’90s, when his group was blowing up, he hadn’t truly understood the long-term significance of what they were doing. If he could, then, he’d go back to encourage his younger self to note the “true value of what I was creating and the long-term ideology of business versus the short-term money advantage.”
The Wu-Tang Clan made “millions of dollars and got millions of dollars in advances,” spawning several companies that grew and folded along the way. But those episodes were all part of a wider process in which the Wu-Tang Clan would develop across the decades. RZA would have pointed that out to his younger self.
While he conceded that the “prime of the Wu-Tang Clan was from 1993 to 1998,” he argued that their long-term success was more important. When it was all happening, the group couldn’t see the wood from the trees and were preoccupied with their immediate success and failures. But there was a longer game in play that they couldn’t yet see.