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In the pantheon of rap’s great storytellers, New York is well represented. The city that birthed hip hop has its fair share of master raconteurs – Slick Rick, Big L and Nas – though perhaps none more braggadocious than Dennis Cole, aka the Ghostface Killah (feel free to extend the final “a” on that last one, it’s how Big Baby Jesus would have wanted it).
Emerging from the slums of Shaolin (or, more prosaically, Staten Island) as part of the Wu Tang Clan in the early 1990s, Cole’s career has proven to be one of the most consistent and, arguably, successful of that whole clan. For more than 20 years now the New York veteran has been painting vivid lyrical pictures, his dark and captivating tales underpinning much of his 11 solo and five collaborative albums.
On that “now you see me, now you don’t” shit from the start, aside from being the Ghostface Killah, Cole also cast himself as Tony Starks. This subtle flip on the billionaire industrialist behind Marvel Comics’ own Iron Man would become his primary alias and inform the title of his 1996 debut, Ironman. The album laid down the twin pillars of Cole’s longevity: rhyming informed by a deeply cinematic style set against music drenched in classic 1970s soul. The result is a sound that has lent itself perfectly to the verbal movies he has spent most of the past two decades immersing us in.
But don’t take my word for it. Mainstream outlets like Q Magazine, NPR and Pitchfork have all proclaimed Cole to be one of rap’s finest storytellers, “his fiction painterly” according to NPR’s Frannie Kelley. Starks himself has repeatedly hammered home this message himself, telling AllHipHop in 2007 that “my stories is like movies man, that’s how I like it. For people to see my vision.” Or, as recently said to Flatt magazine: “I write movies is what I do… movies that play in your head through my songs and they live forever.”
Considering the filmic roots of Wu Tang’s debut, drenched as it was in the kung fu flicks the crew revelled in, it’s perhaps unsurprising that Ghost would end up a cinematic MC. But he took it to new levels. His own debut drew on samples from movies like The Education of Sonny Carson and Carlito’s Way, stories about street life and gangs, but also about redemption: themes that pervade Cole’s own stories.
Like a good director or actor, Cole found a niche within which he has come to excel, one filled with tales of crime, sex and drugs. Alongside these themes are more lighthearted elements about imagined lives or the reality of the streets he and the clan emerged from. A good case in point is his love for Clark’s Wallabee shoes, perhaps the single most recurring motif in all of his oeuvre. Wallies are like a recurring prop in Cole’s stories, so much so he took to calling himself The Wally Champ.
If, as Chuck D posited to SPIN Magazine in 1988, “rap is black America’s TV station” then Ghostface’s work should be thought of as one of rap’s many film channels. It’s often said that at the mainstream level, rap’s early potential for education and change has been co-opted in favour of aspirational, industry-friendly and seemingly empty talk. Yet the music, now in its fourth decade, has never been more vibrant and varied, and the likes of Cole provide a much needed break from the stark duality of the vacuous mainstream and too-raw-to-market underground that divides so many.
Cole took some time to get into his storyteller groove, though there were early signs that he was among the Wu’s most immersive lyricists. The year before his debut he co-starred on Raekwon’s first album, Only Built 4 Cuban Linx…. “Guillotine (Swordz)” is one of the young Cole’s best turns: his verse opens with a timeless, cryptic diss – “Yo, you fourteen carat gold slum computer wizard” – before weaving in mentions of animals doped up on midgets, German lager and the superiority of poetry over bum album deals.
A year on from this, the Wu Tang dropped their second album Wu Tang Forever. Album cut “Impossible” includes, according to Cole himself, the best verse he ever wrote for the clan. The tale of a close friend who dies in his arm, it helped define Ghost’s ability to be poignant, poetic and realistic, like the movies he sampled for his own work. From its opening lines – “Call an ambulance, Jamie been shot, word to Kimmy / Don’t go Son, nigga you my motherfuckin heart” – it is without question one of the most emotionally-affecting rap verses ever, without ever descending into sentimentailty.
For most of the 2000s Ghost landed on Def Jam where he alternated between his soul cinema style and attempts at what some have viewed as efforts for commercial relevance. 2004’s The Pretty Toney Album, for which he dropped the Killer/Killah from his name, included one of Cole’s best songs from that decade, “Run” featuring Jadakiss. His verse is a masterclass in vivid rap storytelling. It details his escape from police, down staircases, speeding away in a car, as he mentally processes the situation before ending on a Scarface reference with “Fuck a case, I’m not comin’ home with no fifty six / Die with the heart of Scarface and take fifty licks / Before I let these crackers throw me in shit.”
Another standout turn in that decade is his verse on the Wu’s otherwise sub-par fifth album, 8 Diagrams. On “The Heart Gently Weeps” RZA flips a Beatles standard as Cole recounts an encounter with the family member of someone he killed through bad dope. Setting the scene in a value supermarket, he tells us about getting stupidly ambushed by the vengeful nephew. He slips in and out of rhyming half way through the verse to deliver raggedly sung lines – including the grimly hilarious “That bitch is crazyyyyy / And uh, she brought her babyyyyy” – and punchlines the verse with “next thing you read in the paper, a man who came to kill gets knocked out.”
It was at the beginning of the 2010s, though, having emerged from his deal with Def Jam, that Cole really embraced his role as master storyteller. It begun in earnest with 2013’s Twelve Reasons to Die, a concept album orchestrated by another virtuoso of the cinematic, producer and multi-instrumentalist Adrian Younge. The tale of an Italian gangster betrayed, murdered and brought back to life as a vengeful black superhero, Twelve Reasons to Die brought out the best in Cole’s ability to paint mental images directly inside the listener’s brain. Speaking to NPR around the time of release, Younge said that Cole was a “theatrical and cinematic” rapper and thus perfect for the project. Eventually the album would spawn a comic book series and stage show.
A year later Cole repeated the formula on 36 Seasons, this time backed by The Revelations, a Brooklyn-based band, and with comic artist Matthew Rosenberg once again providing the storyline via a comic book. Instead of being murdered Ghost was exiled for nine years – or 36 seasons – from Staten Island only to return and find his life and home in disarray, a situation he sets about fixing over the album’s 13 tracks alongside cast members Kool G Rap and AZ.
On both albums Cole really engages with rap’s storytelling potential. Twelve Reasons To Die and 36 Seasons could have easily become movies instead of comics. Characters are fleshed out, locations are set, decors are constructed and the action unfurls at a steady pace, building to its rightful conclusion. These are rap movies with Cole as the leading character and the producers as the director, much like RZA directed the Wu’s debut.
With the ink barely dry on the 36 Seasons comics and the last licks of the album still echoing, this month sees the release of Sour Soul, Cole’s collaboration with Toronto’s Badbadnotgood. While the album doesn’t have a concept or narrative underpinning it like the previous two, it’s soaked in the same live, sample-less musical backing and vivid lyrical tales. A follow-up to Twelve Reasons To Die is also due later this year.
At this point, the cynical might claim that Cole has either run out of ideas or is simply playing it safe by repeating a format, yet this kind of criticism of his latest work misses the point. Cole has become the master of a specific genre within rap’s storytelling kaleidoscope. And while some might see this as limiting, just as they might with a director or actor working within one set genre or style, in fact he is proving beyond doubt that his work can remain skilful and potent within the bounds he’s set.
At 45, Cole is well past rap’s standard retirement age and still going strong, so why should he shy away from the exact skillset that has been key to his longevity? Speaking to FACT during the Twelve Reasons To Die tour, he touched on this predicament. “You got fuckin’ Elton John and them niggas still recording but you gonna stop recording because that’s what you think you’re supposed to do when you get to a certain age? No, when you got a certain love for something, you love that thing.” Later on in the conversation he let it know that ultimately, he wasn’t done. “Don’t close it on me yet, I’m not finished, I still got a story to tell.”
