Gza's Liquid Swords

Wu-Tang's the GZA breaks down one of my favorite albums of all time for Wax Poetics.

"It's the story of a shogun told through different narratives and scenarios. It's not a theme, but more like a thread throughout the album."

""Killah Hills"—This is another one of my favorites. It's a very special song as far as the album's concerned because it's long as hell and has no hook. It's up-tempo and is straight through. My cousin Life who did the hook on "Cold World" also did some singing on this too. This song has a lot of depth in terms of sound 'cause we used to layer weird shit over it.

For example, myself and Killah Priest were in the city one day with a portable ADAT recorder I just bought. We were just walking around, going to stores, buying water, juice, whatever, and just recording the random stuff, you know, just picking up sounds and shit. I think we recorded the Hells Angels riding by [us] too. RZA was in a restaurant talking to some guy, and we were banging forks on the tables, and we just recoded all those sounds too [laughs]. So we incorporated all that into the production.

As a song, it's a street story, but not told in a regular street way. I'm talking about slanging on the block, but not just your average street dealer. These were more sophisticated cats. Some of it came from a documentary I saw on the infamous Pablo Escobar. He was sending judges intimate photos of their wives and things like that. I think this is [probably] my first real Mafioso track. It's like a dense, short film."