Friday, Jul 25, 2008
RZA's music "inspired by" Jim Jarmusch's "Ghost Dog" lags behind the inspired cuts of the actual film.
Apr 25, 2000 | Jim Jarmusch's "Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai" isn't a gangster movie that happens to have a hip-hop score (composed by RZA, major-domo of the Wu-Tang Clan). It's a hip-hop movie that happens to star nonrappers, with a script that steals back every genre convention rap stole from crime dramas in the first place. In a Jersey City, N.J., so run-down it makes "Donnie Brasco" look like a Hype Williams music video, a black contract killer wages a one-man gang war against wheezy Italian mob guys who can barely make the rent on their social club. Forrest Whitaker's lone-wolf assassin boosts luxury cars and kills with soldering-iron precision. He's like a martial-arts-schooled Incredible Hulk imbued with Dr. Bruce Banner's brains. You know from the jump that he'll prevail because he reads Japanese philosophy, while his enemies (or most of them, anyway) will die because they have no code.
Like a lot of the best hip-hop in the late '90s -- Chef Raekwon's mind-blowing black-Godfather fantasia "Only Built 4 Cuban Linx," which RZA produced, comes to mind -- "Ghost Dog" wears its gangsta-genre formulas with maybe too little shame. But it juices what would otherwise have been pure pastiche with the deadpan humor of Jay-Z doing his impression of Al Pacino in "Carlito's Way." And because Jarmusch treats hip-hop, and its saturation of American life, as both foregone conclusion and gag-machine grist (e.g. the Italian mobster shuffling to Public Enemy's "Cold Lampin' With Flavor"), the movie's a wiser, funnier cultural-collision study than the silly-ass improv workshop James Toback convenes in "Black and White."
"Ghost Dog" is RZA's first foray into full-length film scoring, although he's had songs in movies like "Bulworth," and produced the three emblematic Wu-Tang cuts on the soundtrack to "Fresh" (1994). Aside from the occasional murmur of temple bells, a nod to the kung-fu-movie roots Jarmusch's film shares with the Wu's self-mythology, the music in the film is basic RZA: dreamy but tightly wound, like Raymond Chandler firing off instant-messaging bursts, and uncommonly visual, like the whole Mobb Deep catalog rendered in 3-D. An intermittent but crucial presence in the movie, the music's good enough to suggest that if RZA makes a second career out of this, he might someday be the first best original song Oscar winner to use his acceptance speech to thank Allah, Steve Rifkind and the guy who delivers his weed.
The problem is, the "Ghost Dog" soundtrack CD -- officially titled "Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, The Album" -- is one of those "music from and inspired by the film" deals, and its relationship to the music that actually appeared in the movie is purely tangential. Apparently RZA realized that the Wu-Tang brand isn't the market mover it once was -- even Ghostface Killah's off-the-wall/off-the-hook "Supreme Clientele" is selling sluggishly -- and that his core audience wouldn't have ponied up for a whole CD of samurai-beat instrumentals. For the album, he's extended a few of the score's cues to song length, composed a bunch of new tracks and brought in his own dawgs (stalwarts like Kool G. Rap, Wu-Tang vets like Masta Killah and a whole me-too-Tang Clan of Wu-nabees from his Razor Sharp label) on vocals.
It's a little disappointing. Neil Young's rustic-ambient soundtrack to Jarmusch's "Dead Man" doubled as Young's best late-'90s record, all fuzzy guitars impersonating wind and crackling underbrush. It would have been cool to hear RZA stretch out along those lines. As is, the "Ghost Dog" album is a kinda-OK sampler of post-peak Wu product, juxtaposing vintage RZA curveballs (Suga Beng Beng's haunted sing-scat over beats by the ounce on "Don't Test/Wu Stallion"; a gospel sample on Masta Killah and Superb's "The Man" that's like a Staten Island take on Moby's "Play") with mediocre tough-guy material (Black Knights' "Zip Code," Royal Fam's "Walk the Dogs").
Method Man (who leads off the Wu Tang reunion cut "Fast Shadow") can do no wrong as far as I'm concerned, and it's neat how Whitaker sounds just like Tony Soprano when he reads the samurai-code excerpts in between tracks, and how RZA insists on pronouncing the "w" in the word "swords" (subliminal Wu-logo branding?), and how "Strange Eyes" lifts its blues riff from another RZA song (Ol' Dirty Bastard's "All in Together Now") -- just like a real blues song would! But the closest thing to great movie music here is "Walking Through the Darkness," sung by regular Wu hook-crooner Tekitha, and it feels soundtracky only because its rippling melody loops the killer intro from Bobby Womack's 1972 "Across 110th Street" theme (itself a semisteal from Charles Wright and the Watts 103rd Street Rhythm Band's 1968 single "Till You Get Enough," and the template for everything from the Rolling Stones' "Gimme Shelter" to the opening credits of Quentin Tarantino's "Jackie Brown"). And it's still awfully ironic that a movie about a hit man who wastes wiseguys, but not words, has been immortalized on CD by a bunch of rappers with nothing to say.
Get Salon in your mailbox!