The Wu-Tang Clan album that inspired Red Hot Chili Pepper’s ‘Dani California’
The Wu-Tang Clan are one of the most influential hip-hop groups of all time, an inspiration to countless hip-hop artists to come after them. But such is their ingenuity that their impact has been felt well beyond the world of hip-hop.
The sound of the Red Hot Chili Peppers is not necessarily one that seems immediately obvious to connect to Wu-Tang. But, according to the band’s guitarist John Frusciante, one of their biggest hits was explicitly inspired by the legendary hip-hop collective.
‘Dani California,’ released as a single from the group’s 2006 Stadium Arcadium album, has a sort of classic rock feel on the surface, but dig a little bit deeper and the Wu-Tang inspiration is quite discernible. The song was specifically structured in a similar way to the tracks on Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers), Wu-Tang’s debut album from 1993.
“I’d been listening to the first Wu-Tang album, Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers), pretty much every day for the whole writing of the record,” Frusciante once explained in a commentary for Stadium Arcadium. “I was inspired especially by the rhythms that the MCs were using in their raps.”
Frusciante was especially interested in the unique sense of rhythm that the Wu-Tang rappers brought to their music. “They were inspiring to me in terms of my guitar playing,” he said, “and I was really inspired by the way that people like GZA and Method Man and Raekwon and all those guys — they don’t just go in a straight rhythm according to how the drums are.”
The rappers, Frusciante believed, “make up their own groove in the music.” This form of “rhythmic expression,” as he termed it, was what he wanted to achieve on Stadium Arcadium.
“One night I was just sitting here, doing my usual thing,” he recalled. “I was playing along, either bass or guitar, along with that record [36 Chambers] and then I thought to myself, ‘Why don’t have a song with that drum beat and I’ll just make up some chords right now to fit into that drum beat?’ So that was where those chords came from.”
The end result was the chord progression for ‘Dani Califonria,’ which proved to be a hit formula. The track became only the third top-ten single the Chili Peppers had ever released.
But while the song had been based on the Wu-Tang sound, it wasn’t especially obvious. Even Frusciante conceded its rock feel. “What ended up happening was not really that different from ‘Sweet Home Alabama’ or something,” he laughed. “Even though it was supposed to be this Wu-Tang thing.”