The story behind GZA’s ‘Shadowboxin’’
Liquid Swords, GZA’s second solo album, is one of the best albums to ever emerge from the Wu-Tang Clan’s oeuvre, and it’s arguably one of history’s best hip-hop albums full stop. The record is an intricate, philosophical odyssey, and ‘Shadowboxin’’ is one of its standout songs.
Produced, obviously, by RZA, Liquid Swords arrived in late 1995, right in the middle of Wu-Tang’s greatest era. The track was released as a single, and it features dialogue samples lifted from the kung-fu movie Shaolin vs Lama, a key trope of RZA’s production. There’s also a sample of the Ann Peebles track ‘Trouble, Heartaches & Sadness.’
Despite featuring on GZA’s album, the main man on the song, aside from RZA and his distinct production, is Method Man, who raps verses one and two. GZA only does the second, although, as Meth once informed Complex, he had initially been slated to perform another one.
“It’s crazy,” said Meth, “because I had put those two verses on there. GZA was supposed to put two verses on there, too, but he only put one. I don’t know what happened. That’s RZA. Being in the studio, in the dungeon by himself, he’ll think the shit out like, ‘Fuck it. Let’s do it this way.’”
‘Shadowboxin’’ was a big song for Method Man, and he credits it with changing his style—which, up until this point, had been uptempo and fairly intense. “But ‘Shadowboxin’’ wasn’t that frantic shit,” he reflected. “Music always depends on what kind of vibe you’re in. It would just be me and RZA in the studio and I always listened to RZA. He was one of my biggest critics and my muse.”
So RZA and Method Man were the main men on ‘Shadowboxin’,’ but what of the man whose album it featured on? It turns out that GZA agrees that Meth was the leading rapper on the track, and he was humble enough during its creation to realise that it was his job “to fill in the space” that Meth left for him.
Speaking to Billboard about the track in 2015, GZA said, “RZA would just have a beat, and whoever is around, they try to get on it. And that’s how it went. He’ll have a beat playing and I’ll jump on it. Meth may start off ‘Shadowboxin’,’ and I’ll jump on it and he’ll follow it… I had to fill in the space, if the space wasn’t being filled.”
It takes a certain amount of modesty to accept playing second fiddle to another person on a track due to be featured on your own album, but GZA, in the spirit of the entire Wu-Tang project, was happy to do it. He has even admitted that ‘Shadowboxin’’ is more “like Meth’s track.”
“I think I was actually [just] the filler for that song anyways,” he told Wax Poetics in 2014, laughing as he did so. “It always seemed more like Meth’s track. I remember RZA telling me I needed to get on it, so he put me in between. It’s an incredible song though, and I love performing it. It’s just another emcee lyrical joint with crazy smooth cadences.”