piersmw

Hi, big fan of all your work and I have a great deal of respect for your outlook on life (I try to live to build up the twelve jewels myself), only question I can think of off the top of my head is, given that you've produced a lot of hip-hop, does the beat need to go with the lyrics? As in one of the two books you wrote you mentioned having hundreds (perhaps thousands, I don't recall) of beats that you've made that are just lying around waiting to possibly get used. I'm making rather a mess of the phrasing of this question, but essentially I'm curious about the production process of whether the lyrics come before the beat, or the beat comes before the lyrics, or the lyrics are written and then you find a beat you've already made but not yet used. Thank you.

Thank you very much for responding, and in such detail. I think that's what makes hip-hop the poetry of the music world, that sometimes pure gold can come out of a coincidence, but other times it's premeditated. I hope so too that the sound and soul of the Wu-Tang continues for generations to come - some people need a voice, other people are fine with just hearing the voices that resonate with them, and Wu-Tang is something special there.