Hip-hop is no longer solely youth culture; it’s just culture, with cross-generational scenes full of artists intent on capturing their era’s zeitgeist. But Raekwon The Chef’s latest solo album, The Emperor’s New Clothes, was unquestionably tailored for the 35-and-up hip-hop heads who descended upon Madison Square Garden to see the Wu-Tang Clan’s possible final hometown show last week. There are no stunt features or out-of-touch Gen Z reaches here, just a 17-track dose of raw, New York City hip-hop.
As I noted in my show review, Raekwon was one of the strongest pieces on the Wu’s chessboard during their MSG farewell concert, sustaining his energy throughout the show and cutting clearly through the crowd with his husky baritone — his performance bode well for the album he namechecked multiple times that night. He was also fresh in more than one way, spending the first half of the show wearing a red Gucci apron, which was so stylish it should end up in a hip-hop fashion exhibit one day. The piece, alongside his Wu classics, symbolized his status as one of hip-hop’s original luxury drug rap connoisseurs. Before Rick Ross, Roc Marciano, Clipse, and a slew of other artists beloved for Scorcesesque valorization of the drug trade, Rae and Ghost were United.
Rae knows exactly what his place in rap history is on The Emperor’s New Clothes, his eighth solo project, and first in eight years, following up 2017’s The Wild. His previous LP was his first to feature no Wu members, and showed him (mostly) honing in on what made him great. The same is true here.
He’s a master swordsman, in recent years belying the energetic mic presence of his early work with a slower, more deliberate cadence that sounds like the audio embodiment of the “can’t speed him up, can’t slow him down” observation bestowed on NBA MVP Shai Gilgeous-Alexander. On “Bear Hill,” “The Guy That Plans It,” and “Da Heavies,” the three songs on the album where he appears solo, the production is disparate, but his presence feels the same.
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He has a knack for painting street landscapes in his rhymes, with a tinge of the flowery vocabulary shared by a generation of older East Coast scribes enraptured by films like Dolemite and Super Fly. “The Guy That Plans It” is classic Raekwon, an abbreviated, vivid crime caper of a street tussle (though I wish he didn’t need to say “queer” to fill in his “-eer” rhyme scheme).
His mic persona is unmistakably New York City; he’s one of the few who can sell a phrase as fragmented and vague as “a certain walk with a special bop” from “Open Doors.”
And throughout the project, the bars are delivered with a technical precision that could see him holding his own in a cipher of any age. Elsewhere on “Open Doors” he rhymes, “They call me Louis Gas Pipe, I’m like the mafia’s worst kid/Bentley bicycles, ten pistols, a slick bid;” it’s impossible not to want to know more about Mr. Gas Pipe in the land of “Shattered dreams, lonely pharaohs/Who ridе across the Verrazano Narrows.” Hollywood should stop rebooting the same movies and pick a verse from this album to expand into a script.
The album has a slew of features but unlike on junctures of his next-to-last solo FILA, which had oblong collaborations with ASAP Rocky and French Montana, the Emperor’s New Clothes features fit the festivities. Several of Rae’s Wu comrades are on the album. Inspectah Deck is technically precise, but sounds a step slow over the sinister beat on “Pomogranite.” Ghostface Killah is solid on his three appearances, most notably “600 School,” where he, Raekwon and Method Man commandeer a Swizz Beats beat and show off the chemistry that made Wu-Massacre a memorable project from the Clan’s later years. It’s the kind of moment that reminds one of Junior Soprano talking to his nephew Tony about an old school crew of hitmen on the classic mob drama: “They may be old, my little nephew, but those dogs can still hunt.”
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Nas impresses on “The Omerta,” with a verse that ponders religion but has some questionable conclusions on the nature of the Dutch’s relationship with the Lenape people. The verse’s last third might spark some side-eyes, but the Mass Appeal co-founder (the company distributed this album) sounds hungry. Raekwon delivered with his own inspired verse demonstrating that he knew the stakes of matching their previous track record. Benny the Butcher, Conway the Machine, and Westside Gunn also feature on energetic standout “Wild Corscians.”
It’s Westside Gunn’s presence that exemplifies the one thing keeping The Emperor’s New Clothes from reaching its full potential: the production. In 2022, Gunn expressed an interest in executive producing a Rae and Ghost album, and hip-hop heads have been clamoring for what that would sound like. On Rae’s new album, only frequent collaborator Frank G shows up on the project with multiple production credits. It feels like a more streamlined beat selection process could have been the best move, and few would have been better than Gunn, who’s credited with helping inject indie rap with golden era-quality sonics.
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While only “Debra Night Wine,” a shaky interpolation of The Syncophonic Orchestra’s “Quasimodo’s Marriage” (sampled by Just Blaze for Beanie Sigel’s “What Your Life Like Pt. 2”), is an outright misstep on the album, and there are some impressive beats, few of them stick after the initial listening. The beats do enough to keep your head nodding, but Rae’s lyrical effort deserved some face-scrunching chops and soul loops you can’t get out of your head.
Still, it’s a strong effort from a rap OG who embodies the 52-year-old Malice’s recent assertion on aging in rap: “Either you got the talent or you don’t. You could be old, you could be young. If you ain’t got it, then you don’t have it.” At this point, the spectre of 40-plus year-old rappers isn’t a new or distinct phenomenon. It’s no longer a trackless frontier, but a bustling environment with defined thoroughfares. Any east coast artist looking to age gracefully can follow Rae’s path.
