Only Built 4 Cuban Linx... - Music and Lyrics

Music and Lyrics

A lushly impenetrable jungle of sonic allusions transforms the nightmare of the crack era into a dream of cream skimmed and warmed for the bathtub—a dream with its own internal logic, moral weight, and commitment to beauty. It's an illusion, as any project denizen caught in the crossfire knows. But materially and metaphorically, Wu-Tang's power to create this illusion provides a way out of the hell underneath—especially, but not exclusively, for them.

Only Built 4 Cuban Linx... is often commemorated for its introduction to a distinctive slang individual to Raekwon and Ghostface; heavy use of the Supreme Alphabet and Supreme Mathematics, as often used by the Wu-Tang Clan, blended with terms picked up on the inner-city streets of New York, as well as several songs based around detailed, loosely-connected stories. In an article for XXL, RZA later illustrated "The theme of the album is two guys that had enough of the negative life and was ready to move on, but had one more sting to pull off. They're tired of doing what they doing, but they're trying to make this last quarter million. That's a lot of money in the streets. We gonna retire and see our grandbabies and get our lives together."

In keeping with this loose storyline, the album opens with the introduction track "Striving For Perfection," in which Raekwon and "co-star" Ghostface converse about visions and goals. On the proceeding track "Knuckleheadz," Raekwon and Ghostface divide money in the song's intro, and then engage in a heist, with U-God's character being killed off at the end of his verse. The reason for this elimination is because U-God was sentenced to serve several months in prison, which prevented subsequent participation on Cuban Linx. U-God, however, recruited his lyric mentor and childhood friend Cappadonna to take his place later in the album.

Only Built 4 Cuban Linx... features dialogue-driven interludes in the beginning of several tracks with Raekwon and Ghostface Killah conversing about money, life, crime, and hip hop, among other things. The introduction to "Glaciers of Ice," for instance, involves Ghostface addressing his plans and methods of dyeing Wallabee-styled Clarks. In a 2005 interview, Ghostface Killah explained "We was in the car one day, driving around with the DAT machine with a microphone and we just started talking shit about how we're gonna do it this summer with the Clarks. The dyeing was something I was doing already. I'm an inventor. Niggas can't fuck with me when it comes to style. Only nigga that is right there with me is probably Slick Rick. Other than that, I'm boss."

The album ends with the song "North Star," which serves as a "closing credits" type of song. In regards to this track and Popa Wu's inclusion, RZA later remarked "The idea is Rae did everything he had to do. Everything is over now. The job is over. Mission is over, it's a perfect closing to the album. Popa Wu was a very smart mentor in the younger days to me and ODB. Everybody had dibs and dabs of knowledge of self, I brought him in to be a mentor to these men like, 'I love them and you the only person I know that have the intelligence to keep them in sync with knowledge.' It's very poisonous unless they got proper guidance. He was the smartest man I'd ever met at a certain time in my life." Raekwon further commented "North Star" was a track I really, really wanted on my album. It was a track that I felt a vibe of it was motion picture-like."