The album Method Man said he “wasn’t true” to himself on
It’s impossible for any rapper to get to the top without having a few regrets left on record. Not every bar that someone spits is meant to last the test of time, but it’s sometimes easier to chalk it up to a sign of the times for some spottier moments in someone’s catalogue. Forgiving being inauthentic is a whole different thing, though, and Method Man thought that he wasn’t exactly himself going into the recording Tical 0: The Prequel.
When looking at every member of the Wu-Tang Clan, they at least had respectable numbers coming out of their dissolution. It just seemed like everyone wanted to do their own thing, and for a while, it looked like Method Man at least had a solid track record of putting decent numbers on every record.
After all, he was the guy who had an entire song on Enter the Wu-Tang devoted to him, so going into his solo career, he at least had a few whiffs of that old magic on the first Tical record. While there are moments that are pretty predictable given where he was at the time, getting artists like Raekwon and RZA on production duties and features was like a security blanket for everyone still bumping songs like ‘C.R.E.A.M.’
Then again, no one wants to live in the shadow of their own group, and since everyone was still clamouring for the next Wu-Tang record, Method Man needed something to separate him from his old crew at least a little bit. He needed a change of pace, but there was one fatal flaw in The Prequel, and that flaw’s name is P Diddy.
While working with the mastermind behind Bad Boy Records didn’t seem as bad an idea at the time, it was still a bit strange seeing Method Man try it. Since we were in the midst of the bling era of hip-hop, seeing Method Man try his hand at being one of the hip-hop superstars is one of the more shameless attempts at the genre that any older hip-hop artist ever made.
Even though RZA does return to put some beats together and a token appearance by Ghostface Killah, a lot of The Prequel features Method Man trying to sell a better 2000s-era version of himself, complete with Scott Storch production that doesn’t work at all. No matter how big names are behind the record, you know something has gone awry when Missy Elliot appears on a track, and it somehow sounds boring.
It’s not Method Man thought that it was one of the best records he ever put out, either, telling Complex, “I wasn’t true to myself [on The Prequel] for the simple fact that, look at who I was working with…I’m not trying to take nothing way from Puff, he’s the biggest artist on Bad Boy. But Puff with Meth don’t mesh. We don’t party the same way.”
That last sentence might hit like a ton of bricks now, but given where both men were in the 2000s, it’s understandable why they broke things off for 4:21…The Day After two years later. While Tical 0: The Prequel is far from the worst hip-hop record or anything, one can only do so much when the core idea for a record is terrible.