Aaron Steen

    The steady decline of the Wu-Tang Clan throughout the 2000s has, for many members of the collective, also meant the collapse of the career.  This is, in part, simply because hip-hop is now arguably the dominant mode of American pop music, and no longer has any use for the Wu-Tang's eclectic mash-up of martial arts cliches and impenetrable Staten Island street slang.  But it's also partly because putting together five verses of kung-fuisms for the newest Wu release is probably a hell of a lot easier than writing enough compelling material to constitute an entire album.  As solo artists, most of the Clan have simply faded away.
    Ghostface Killah is the opposite, as it's his solo albums, not his contributions to Wu releases, that define him as an artist.  For Ghost, who has too much to say, the process of recording a Wu album must be something akin to an attack of claustrophobia - when eight MCs, sometimes more, are each vying for 45 seconds of face time on a four-minute track, everyone's contribution is necessarily limited.  It's instructive to compare his verses on the Wu's debut Enter the 36 Chambers to his work on Raekwon's 1995 Only Built 4 Cuban Linx..., on which, for the first time in his short career, he gets some breathing room.  You can't take away any credit from Raekwon, but Ghost, giddy with all the space he's been given, lets his imagination run wild, and the album's effective depiction of New York street life owes much to the vivid scenes and characters related in his verses.  It's Ghost, after all, not Raekwon, who opens the album with the stirring "Striving for Perfection" monologue.  It's a speech about yearning to escape the drug-dealing lifestyle, but listening to Ghost talk about moving on to something bigger and better, one imagines him also straining against the bonds that come along with being one MC in a nine-member hip-hop collective.
    Loyal to his own intensely creative style, Ghost's own solo career has been impressively consistent.  The stretch of five albums that began with the platinum-selling Supreme Clientele in 2000 and continued all the way up to 2009's The Big Doe Rehab are all excellent, and the best of them all is 2007's Fishscale, a sprawling effort overflowing with Ghost's inimitable personality.  Fishscale serves as a good example of Ghost's plight as a talented and above all original rapper that has lost almost all of his commercial relevance.  The album's singles showcase Ghost at his enigmatic best, but it's his refusal, or perhaps his inability, to downsize that tremendous personality to fit the mold of a proper modern downloadable hip-hop single that prevented Fishscale from reaching platinum status.  Lead single "Back Like That," for instance, works well enough with its squeaky soul samples and Ne-Yo-sung hook, but Ghost doesn't seem to want to play the role that the song's jilted lover narrative requires of him: as Ne-Yo moans plaintively over a plinking piano in the intro, Ghost asks his woman to return the ring he has given her.  "Oh, it's stuck?" he asks.  "Then I'll take the whole finger then, man."  He's menacing when he should be pleading.
    It must be bewildering for Ghost to watch his sales figures decline even as he knows in his soul that he's making great music, and he basically admits as much on Fishscale's "The Champ": "How'd y'all niggas get past me?"  he wonders aloud.  "I been doing this since before Nas dropped the Nasty."  When his next album, The Big Doe Rehab, fared even worse than Fishscale, Ghost appeared in a video on Youtube looking defeated and confused, asking how more than 100,000 Myspace fans can translate to first week sales of just 30,000 albums.  "You're making me want to leave the game.  You're hurting the kid," he says earnestly.  According to Ghost's understanding of the artist-consumer relationship, which was last applicable in the year 2000, he has held up his end of the bargain: make great albums.  Listeners, by downloading his music or ignoring it altogether, aren't holding up theirs.
    Apollo Kids, then, works as a kind of antithesis to Fishscale and The Big Doe Rehab.  And really, after The Big Doe Rehab sold so poorly, it's hard to blame Ghost for trying to switch up his game.  Where Fishscale was long and meandering, Apollo Kids is, like the first Wu-Tang album, short and focused.   But a 12-track album like Apollo Kids forces Ghost to try to stuff all of his ideas into a box that's too small to hold them all.  At least, in theory, that's what he'd try to do - but after listening to this album, it seems more likely that he just didn't try.  Because where The Big Doe Rehab was big on concept and narrative, most of the songs on Apollo Kids seem to be about... nothing?  What are most of these songs about, anyway?
    There's nothing wrong with this kind of rap, per se; as The Game proves on his guest spot on "Drama," there's something to be said for an MC wandering aimlessly from rap cliche A ("My Gun") to rap cliche B ("I'm Good at Drug Dealing"), and then back again, all while keeping the listener entertained.  But punchline rap is something Ghostface Killah has never been particularly good at, and putting him on a slow head-bobber like "Drama," and expecting him to go toe-to-toe with The Game is just going to make him look bad.  Ghost is at his best when he's able to stretch out and make himself comfortable; from a technical perspective: rhythm, voice tone, etc., you might even say he's unremarkable, instead often relying on a narrative hook to draw the listener into the song.  But that requires more space than the single verse he's allotted here.  The Game is nowhere near the rapper that Ghost is, but, isolated on "Drama," Ghost is outclassed by his superior cadence and punchlines.
    It's clear that Ghost felt that toning down the concept and narrative that defined The Big Doe Rehab would lead to more sales, but to make that kind of pop-rap album successful, you've got to have bigger guests than the group Ghost has assembled here.  "Handcuffin' them Hoes" puts Ghost opposite Jim Jones, for chrissakes, apparently hoping lightning will strike, but suffice it to say that no one's going to be rushing out on release day, or even taking the time to add Apollo Kids to their torrent queues, to hear Ghost and Jim Jones sleepwalk their way through a three-minute exercise in misogynist invective.  The production, too, is puzzling: if the goal was to sell more records, why make "2getha Baby," which is almost dissonant with its endlessly descending horn line, the lead single?   
    Simply put, Apollo Kids is a confusing album, both because its brevity prevents Ghost from playing to his strengths, and because if it's a grasp at Billboard success, it's a very poorly executed one.  In this light, the album reflects Ghost's obvious confusion at his status in the rap game at this point in his career.  He's seen his sales decline steadily since Supreme Clientele, even as he knows he's continued to push his hip-hop closer and closer to perfection, and, given this, we should be grateful he's still making music at all. 
    And yet, Apollo Kids comes at the tail end of a flurry of activity for Ghost: 2009 saw him feature heavily on Raekwon's Only Built 4 Cuban Linx... sequel and release the heavily R&B Ghostdini: The Wizard of Poetry in Emerald City, and in 2010 he collaborated with Raekwon and Method Man on the Wu-Massacre album.  It's not hard to see Apollo Kids, then, as a prototype for future Ghostface Killah albums.  The solo records will pair him up with the biggest names he's still able to pull, and we'll still see his precocious side with stuff like Ghostdini and Wu-Massacre.  In other words, we'll probably never get another Fishscale, but I'm in favor of anything that keeps what is still one of the most creative minds in rap in the recording booth.