Liquid Swords & The Big Joker

MIDIMarcum
Jan 3
3 min read

When Wu-Tang Clan released Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers), they shot straight to the top of my list. I was 10 years old, fresh off my Ninja Turtles era, so a rap group built around kung-fu mythology felt custom-made for me. Each member had his own weapon and style—just like the Turtles. Then, after the success of the first album, they started rolling out solo projects.

Imagine if, after the first Ninja Turtles movie, you found out that each Turtle was getting their own film. Yeah—go ahead and sit with that hypothetical excitement for a moment. I was locked in.

RZA was producing beats that spoke directly to my soul. I almost had to learn how to live with goosebumps.

In 1995, GZA released Liquid Swords, and I went on a full-blown ’90s preteen adventure trying to get my hands on it. I was 12, and the album dropped right before Christmas—November. For a lot of my friends, that meant a copy under the tree. For me? Absolutely not.

My parents were strict about parental advisory stickers, and my dad was deep in his gospel-only era. There were layers—insulated layers—of “you ain’t getting this album.”

If you grew up in the ’90s, you know the pain of being at school and not being able to participate in the conversation because you didn’t have the album, the movie, or the episode of Martin. My FOMOmeter (Fear of Missing Out Meter) was permanently in the red.

In the immortal words of the prolific American poets TLC: “What about your friends?”

It was my friends who kept me in the game—dubbing tapes of the music I wasn’t allowed to own. Homemade mixtapes helped, but I needed the real thing. I wanted to sit on my front porch swing with my Sony Discman, headphones on, reading the album credits like fine literature.

Music is so accessible now that it’s hard to believe I went that long without owning Liquid Swords.

Fast forward to a summer trip to Detroit. I was at Northland Mall with my mom and grandmother. We were in a record store—possibly Sam Goody—and I asked my mom if I could finally get Liquid Swords.

She said no.

I’m sure there was disappointment. Definitely begging. I was 13 now—surely mature enough to handle adult content. I made all the classic arguments and proposed every desperate compromise a 13-year-old fanatic could think of.

To no avail.

There was probably an attitude forming, too. My mom is many wonderful things, but one thing she is not is “one of my little friends,” so I did my best to neutralize it before getting gathered up in public.

While this back-and-forth was happening, we weren’t paying attention to my grandmother. My Keith Sweat–level begging for Liquid Swords was the perfect distraction.

When we got back to the car, my grandmother handed me a bag.

It was LIQUID SWORDS.

Moral of the story: Life is a game of Spades, and Grandma always has the Big Joker.