Disciples Of the 36 Chambers

SANCTUARY RECORDS

BACK IN JULY, the Wu-Tang Clan assembled for the Rock the Bells festival in San Bernardino, CA. The performance was recorded and divided into two "chapters": the live CD and the DVD. While the CD is mandatory for every Wu library, it is the DVD that truly shines. And it isn't the special features, the interviews or even the bonus videos that make this disc a treasure-it's the concert footage itself.

To those uninitiated, a Wu-Tang show is hiphop at its peak. There are nine different styles in the cypher: Raekwon, Inspectah Deck, Ghostface, U-God, Meth, Rza, Gza, ODB and the Masta Killa. The strength of each of these personalities alone can move a crowd. But when all these energies are gathered on one stage?

Disciples is a peek at the dynamics of this team. Through interesting camerawork, the viewer is there, in that moment. The Wu is hungry, pumping their hardest tracks. Ghost is dancing, Rza smiling, Ol' Dirty singing off-key. Cutting to different angles, focusing on the reactions of the various MCs to any given song, one might forget it's on a tv. And this is the goal of any director trying to expose the spirit of a live event, so easily can something natural and vivid become cold on a screen. Disciples defies this by following the lead of the principal character: the music. How the music affects the group that is sweating it out on stage as well as the audience that is turned alive on every intro to a new track.

There are 34 songs performed from the four Wu studio albums as well as the members' solo projects. The DVD can be viewed in two ways: as a concert, with or without bits of interview between the songs. Though the interviews are interesting, they're still casual backstage small talk, and the few clips of girls gone wild and fans in the parking lot trying to battle like the big boys aren't necessary. Also, the attempt to reference and edit in bits of a music video into the live show is ineffective. View Disciples in this way once, and you'll skip directly to the performance itself the next time. The accompanying music videos are "Old Man" from Masta Killa and "Chi Kung" from Rza.

The release of this DVD seems to hint that the time is right for another Wu album. Yet with the recent death of ODB, this seems unlikely, at least for a while.