Method Man - Intellectual

Meth’s raps are raw, as in hardcore, real, etc.
Meth is having raw, as in unprotected, sex with some chick. This continues the “Super Sperm” thought from the previous line.

I guess ODB isn’t the only Wu-Tang member who likes it raw…

This is mostly directed towards the street hustlers who could end up dead if they let their guard down. Keep one eye open because sleep is the cousin of death.

Rolling dice was a common game and form of gambling for youth in the boroughs of New York. Projects and public housing were the places to be when you needed easy money.

“Sess” and “method” are both slang for weed. Method Man is quite fond of smoking weed, as he has made clear in just about every song he has ever rapped on.

Since Method is also his name, this line can be heard in two ways:

“I smell sess, pass the method”
“I smell sess, pass to Method”

Talking about not forgetting the 40 oz. Beer

In his book on the technical art of rapping, There’s A God On The Mic: The True 50 Greatest MCs, Kool Moe Dee credits Meth, alongside Biggie Smalls, as the 90s artists who “made flow the single most important aspect of an emcee’s game.”

Kool Moe Dee must have loved “The What”!

A great reference to Shock G, who’s alter ego is called Humpty Hump.
He also had a famous song with his group Digital Underground called The Humpty Dance, from 1990.

Some fancy alliteration by Method Man.

Freak a flow and flow fancy free

A double entendre here. Huff and puff originate from The Three Little Pigs but also carries a marijuana subtext. Method man plays the Big Bad Wolf. He’s high and about to wreck shit.

RZA had a 5-year master plan to make the Wu superstars.
In The Wu-Tang Manual he says that according to the plan, Method Man was the first member they would help establish a solo career. This is the reason he got a solo appearence on their debut album (although GZA had one too) and he was the first to drop a debut solo album with Tical.

Metaphor for the fat cloud of weeds moke he is projecting out of his mouth, which looks similar to the visible cloud of air you see when you breathe out on a cold winter day.

Meth, alongside Inspectah Deck, was one of the first few of the Wu Tang members to utilise an abundance of multisyllabic rhymes. This line’s rhyme scheme correlates with another from his verse on “Wu Tang Clan Ain’t Nuthing ta Fuck Wit”:

Rather do than die, check my flavor, coming from the RZA
Which is short for The Razor, who make me reminisce true
Like déjà vu! I’m rubber, niggas is like glue

Masta Killa appears only once on 36 Chambers and wasn’t added as an official member until after this song was recorded.

A twist on the Captain Sky song “Super Sporm”.

http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/watch?v=b0lQg4iWuHE

Also, it might be an allusion to “Rapper’s Delight” by Sugar Hill Gang:

He can’t satisfy you with his little worm
But I can bust you out with my super sperm

Another double entendre:

His raps are so raw that no one can burn him on the mic.
Sexually, even if he doesn’t use protection (hits it “raw”), he’ll never catch an STD (get burned).

Several ways to see this:

Meth’s style is so explosive that he’s like a bomb about to blow as soon as you light the fuse.
He’s about to blow some trees and needs you to give him a light.
Method Man wasn’t very known at the time (this being the Wu-Tang’s first album and the first solo appearence by him), but now he’s about to blow up, meaning become famous.

This skit only appears on the album version, and looking at its content, it’s easy to see why. On its other releases, such as when it was originally released as a b-side to “Clan in Da Front” and in the music video, the skit is omitted and instead starts with GZA’s intro.

RZA speaks on the origination of the skit in a 2017 Power 106 Los Angeles interview:

Bleach is a harmful, corrosive and deadly chemical. Meth uses a simile to show how he fades motherfuckers the same way bleach fades clothes.

To catch a fade also means to get punched, so Meth is knocking motherfuckers out in the industry.

White Owls are cheap cigars that, when the tobacco is removed, make good blunt wraps. Meth was a slang term for weed at the time, and “skins” is a euphemism for rolling papers. Method Man invites everybody to procure these items.

Developing his description of the dog, Meth remixes a line from George Clinton’s “Atomic Dog”:

Bow-wow-wow-yippie-yo-yippie-yeah

A reference to the popular Bill Cosby cartoon Fat Albert and The Cosby Kids. “Hey, hey, hey!” was Fat Albert’s introductory catchphrase.

A reference to the song “Chim Chim Cher-ee” from the movie Mary Poppins.

http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/watch?v=te_Nv3lMUnA

Meth throws a little double entendre at us:

The song is great – the jam.
A few lines back, Meth made it clear that he’s not butter. Here, he lets us know that he’s the jam.

The Wu-Tang’s popularity level has grown to become nation wide.

This might be an allusion to Poetry in Motion, an ad campaign developed in 1992 by the Transit Authority in NYC that basically plastered subways and buses with quotes from different poets.

“Yeah, torture, motherfucker, what? Torture, nigga, what? What? I’ll fuckin’, I’ll fuckin’ tie you to a fuckin’ bedpost With your ass cheeks spread out and shit, right? Put a hanger on a fuckin’ stove and let that shit sit there for like a half hour, take it off and stick it in your ass slow like “tsss” Yeah, I’ll fuckin’, yeah, I’ll fuckin’ lay your nuts on a fuckin’ dresser, just your nuts layin’ on a fuckin’ dresser, and bang them shits with a spiked fuckin’ bat (Blaow) Ooh wassup? I’ll fuckin’, I’ll fuckin’, pull your fuckin’ tongue out your fuckin’ Mouth and stab the shit with a rusty screwdriver, blaow I’ll fuckin’, I’ll fuckin’, I’ll fuckin’ hang you by your fuckin’ dick off the fuckin’ twelfth stor-story building out this motherfucker I’ll fuckin’, I’ll fuckin’, sew your asshole closed, and keep feedin’ you, and feedin’ you, and feedin’ you, and feedin’ you”

👍 270

Torture was a game the Wu-Tang emcees would play where they tried to one-up one another by describing how they would torture their opponent in the most painful way possible. Here we have Method Man and Raekwon playing Torture.

Many of these methods have re-entered hip-hop history through references by other artists, like Eminem, for example.

Dave Chappelle even did a classic ‘'Chappelle’s Show’‘ skit about it where Wu-Tang Clan subjects Chappelle’s character Tron Carter to these tortures:

A reference to Dr. Seuss' children’s book Green Eggs and Ham, in which there is a character known as “Sam-I-Am”.

This could be referencing Method Man’s 5% beliefs, as 5%ers are prohibited from eating ham and pork in general. It could also mean he doesn’t have Dr. Seuss (or lame) rhymes.

Flam: A drumbeat consisting of two almost simultaneous strokes of which the first is a very rapid grace note.

When Meth arrives at a jam, he gets a beat to rap on ASAP.

The “slums of Shaolin”, and most of the other times the Wu mention “Shaolin Land”, refers to the slums of Staten Island where Wu-Tang originated.

Wu-Tang refers to their home borough as Shaolin in reference to the movie Shaolin & Wu-Tang, which is also where the Clan got its name from.

The movie is sampled several times on 36 Chambers.

Wu-Tang reps Staten Island, aka Shaolin, and everyone on Staten Island reps Wu-Tang.

This line was later used by Wu-Tang affiliate Shyheim the Rugged Child as a chorus for his 1996 song “Shaolin Style”.

A reference to the Looney Tunes character Tweety Bird reacting to Sylvester the cat.

http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=38aDWDUjlOY#t=22

Method Man’s referencing to one of the first Inspectah Deck’s demo song “This Ain’t Your Average Flow”, produced and mixed by RZA.

There’s no existing copy of the record yet Wu members have mentioned it a few times. For example U-God wrote in his book, Raw: My Journey into the Wu-Tang, that in the early stage of the Wu-Tang Clan, they recorded their first song “I Get Down for my Crown”, Inspectah Deck started to recording his own material with RZA:

Once we got a taste of hood success, RZA kept recording more joints. Deck put down a solo joint called “This Ain’t Your Average Flow.” That joint was crazy good, and it became a hood anthem.

Meth says:

I had wrote this rhyme after I heard the Michael Jackson song [“Come Together”]—it was a remake of The Beatles song—it just fit perfect with the whole beat and everything, so we just put that shit down.

The Beatles (allegedly) ripped their song off from Chuck Berry’s “You Can’t Catch Me”, making the genealogy of this goofy hook pretty complex.

Method Man’s “shorty” is his girlfriend, later wife, Tamika, who appears seated on his lap in the music video.

A little bit of wordplay on “Patty cake, patty cake, baker’s man”.

One of Method Man’s old nicknames is The Panty Raider. It is also the name of an underground track he released before he joined the Wu-Tang Clan.

Meth identiefies himself with dogs, which was common with a select few rappers throughout the 90’s. Snoop Dogg, DMX and Redman for example. Johnny Blaze would later do a whole track with the some of the rappers mentioned about the dogg life:

Method Man (Ft. Mr. Porter, Redman & Snoop Dogg) - We Some Dogs — Genius

Hook: Mr. Porter] / If I'm a dog, then we some dogs / We all gunna chase cats, tell them dog / Girl don't waste that swallow it all / We just some dogs, we just some dogs / If I'm

Meth says:

That was just me making the record in my head. I was sampling it in my fucking head and saying it like it would be sampled. The ‘Hey, you! Get off my cloud!’ That’s Bootsy Collins. It just fit because we were talking about getting high.

http://youtu.be/6_uGfAKZ0D4?t=2m11s

Bootsy himself got the line from the The Rolling Stones song “Get Off My Cloud”.

This song gets the listener acquainted with the very essence of Method Man. Before listening you don’t know him well enough to be on his cloud, or to get high with him.

You also don’t understand the way he raps, so you shouldn’t attempt to copy it. He is the one and only, imitations being an issue that other rappers understand.

Before the line, Meth takes a sizable hit of marijuana and starts coughing. Nonetheless, the watery-eyed Meth still manages to end the song with a traditional ‘keep it real’ and ‘peace’.

Many rap groups were formed during the golden age of hip hop. Numerous rap crews were not as bright and innovative as Wu-Tang Clan, Public Enemy, N.W.A. or Run-DMC.

Meth is saying that he can see the groups with the weak production, uninteresting flow and unfilled lyrics. The crews are conspicuous and their drab future is foreseeable.

Saran is a popular brand of plastic wrap. The lyric is a pun on “wrapping”.

Wu-Tang refers to their home borough, Staten Island, as “Shaolin land” in reference to the Gordon Liu movie Shaolin and Wu Tang, which Wu-Tang also is named after.

Shaolin was the foundation of Wu-Tang. Shaolin is your mind and Wu-Tang is your body. You could be Wu-Tang, and Shaolin is where you come from. That’s why I named Staten Island Shaolin. We are Wu-Tang and we come from Shaolin
- The Wu-Tang Manual

An allusion to the catchphrase of David Alan Grier’s In Living Color character, Calhoun Tubbs.

A reference to the lolipop “Tootsie Roll Pops” and its catchphrase “How many licks does it take to get to the Tootsie Roll center of a Tootsie Pop?”.

How many words will it take Meth to get to the “tootsie roll center”, i.e. the sweet part, of his next break; his next verse, or, as often as Meth kills it, his next line, even.

The Wu-Tang Clan has a lot of talent and a lot of members – they run deep! Before this song was released, Wu-Tang started out with 40 affiliates, and after the success of Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers), the crew expanded to 250 members. That is how deep the whole clan is.

To get a clue of how deep Wu-Tang is, go listen to RZA’s shout-outs at the end of “Wu-Tang Clan Ain’t Nuthing ta Fuck Wit”.

The Wu-Tang is way deeper than just these nine.

Meth’s rhymes are so dope it’s soothing, like lotion on skin.

This is possibly an allusion to a line spoken by serial killer Buffalo Bill to his victim in the movie Silence of the Lambs:

It rubs the lotion on its skin, or else it gets the hose again

Bill is threatening his victim, Catherine, with the torture of being hosed by cold water unless she applies lotion to her body. Bill ‘skins’ his victims, and the lotion keeps the skin malleable and hydrated to facilitate its removal.

The “M-E-T-H-O-D” part of the chorus is derived from Hall & Oates' song “Method of Modern Love”, while the “Man” comes from “Music Man” by Masta Ace.