DJ Mathematics On Ownership and Bringing The Wu-Tang Clan Together On Wax
SAO PAULO, BRAZIL - APRIL 02: DJ Mathematics of Wu Tang Clan performs live on stage at Espaco Unimed ... More on April 2, 2023 in Sao Paulo, Brazil.(Photo by)
Defying expectations, DJ Mathematics gathers all nine living members of the Wu-Tang Clan for the release of Black Samson, The Bastard Swordsman, a boom-bap-infused collectible album crafted to stand the test of time rather than chase algorithmic trends.
Last month, I got the chance to build with DJ Mathematics about everything surrounding this unique release. What can be concluded is how legacy, creativity, and ownership can still move like strategy in hip-hop.
'I put a lot of blood, sweat and tears, my passion and money into doing this myself. You know? So I had to figure out a way—how will I make money off of my art?'
Although Black Samson features all nine living members of the Wu-Tang Clan and his produced by legendary group's official DJ, it is not a Wu-Tang album, according to Mathematics. Instead, it is an independent project by DJ Mathematics, with its own distinct vision and authorship. However, given the sound, lineup, and legacy associated with the Wu-Tang Clan, fans will understandably interpret Black Samson as part of the broader Wu-Tang universe.
Unlike many who merely talk 'ownership,' DJ Mathematics is an active practitioner. Rather than chasing algorithms or seeking placements on streaming platforms, he is taking an on hands approach by pressing his own vinyl with top-notch packaging and ultimately developing a self-sustaining ecosystem. By taking control of his artistic vision and distribution, DJ Mathematics is pursuing a unique path that challenges the conventional forms of the music industry.
Each 'Black Samson' vinyl is wrapped in its own one-of-one cover.
During this year's Record Store Day, in collaboration with 36 Chambers, Ruffnation, Virgin Music Group, and Marcoverse, Mathematics dropped Black Samson as a vinyl-only audiophile-grade double LP. It wasn't your typical crate filling delight either. There were only 5,000 copies up for grabs with each one wrapped in its own exclusive jacket, no two covers alike. The artwork made by artist Steven Perkins, was reimagined and remixed by Marcoverse's Mixprint technology.
'It was actually drawn by an artist," said DJ Mathematics. "His name is Steven Perkins. He actually drew all the pieces, all the variants. They got some technology where they took all his artwork and then start mixing it all up and shuffling it. And that's how you get all the unique and different covers.'
Black Samson is a straight-up boom-bap piece of glory exuding a grimy, cinematic, unapologetic vibe encapsulating a specific hip-hop vibe.
You have West Coast staple Kurupt, alongside Ralph McDaniels. Yes, the Ralph McDaniels, setting it off like its Video Music Box in 1994 performing that nostalgic Wu-Tang skit element on the intro track 'Sucker Free City.'
NEW YORK, NEW YORK - APRIL 25: (Rear L-R) Elgin Turer " Masta Killa", Dennis Coles "Ghostaface ... More Killa" Robert Diggs "RZA" Inspectah Deck, Corey Woods " Raekwon", (front L-R) Lamont Hawkins" U-God", Young Dirty Bastard, and DJ Mathematics attend Tribeca TV: "Wu-Tang Clan: Of Mics And Men" at Beacon Theatre on April 25, 2019 in New York City. (Photo by John Lamparski/WireImage)
The track 'Mandingo' features Raekwon, Inspectah Deck, Method Man and Cappadonna building with bars like it is 1997 all over again. And then there's 'Roar of the Lion,' a multi generational cut weaving RZA, U-God and Kool G Rap, the golden era legend and pioneer of mafioso rap, a style that Raekwon would later master. Smoothness is introduced with 'Claudine,' a movement featuring Method Man, Ghostface Killah and singer Nicole Bus. Black Samson goes on to complete the cipher with the presence of some new blood including Benny the Butcher, 38 Spesh and RJ Payne. Though each is a seasoned MC in their own right, these brothers have become standout voices in the real rap resurgence over the past decade.
The album also features deep cuts like 'Cleopatra Jones' with Raekwon and Masta Killa, and 'Executioners from Shaolin' with Inspectah Deck, GZA, and Cappadonna. There's even a vinyl-only bonus track, 'Charleston Blue, Legend Of A Fighter' featuring Crooked I, Cappadonna, and Nicole Bus, while Kameron Corvet conducts the gliding outro on 'Troubled Man."
SAO PAULO, BRAZIL - APRIL 2: Wu-Tang Clan logo on stage at Espaco Unimed on April 2, 2023 in Sao ... More Paulo, Brazil.(Photo by)
Mathematics is the only person outside of the Clan themselves that can gather all nine members for an album, despite the method. He is not just Wu-Tang's official DJ, he 's family, an architect and the bridge. Long before the album credits, Mathematics etched his legacy in ink. He is the mastermind behind the iconic Wu-Tang 'W,' a logo that he designed for RZA that started as a symbol for the clan and evolved into a global emblem of hip-hop culture.
His fingerprints are all over the Wu-Tang Clan catalogue. From producing tracks like Cappadonna's solo debut 'Oh Donna' on The Pillage, to the 'Wu Banga 101' banger on Supreme Clientele, to gritty joints like 'Do You Really' and 'Cobra Clutch,' DJ Mathematics is without a doubt a lab-first builder of the Wu-Tang sound.
'For a lot of them, I was their brother first and foremost, even before DJ," said Mathematics. "People put DJ in front of my name, but it was never DJ Mathematics. It was always Mathematics or Allah Mathematics.'
The Black Samson release is a business model in itself that considers art as asset, scarcity as a driver, and storytelling as the differentiator.
But make no mistake, Mathematics is not unfamiliar with the act of adapting. He's watched the industry move from cassettes to CDs to mp3 files to straight up streaming. "You get left behind if you don't evolve," he said. Early on, he resisted Serato and held tight to his crates. Now, he embraces technology but solely on a strategic basis. The video for 'Mandingo' is fully AI-generated. Not out of laziness, but out of necessity. Coordinating a video shoot with Wu members scattered across the globe was a challenge for Mathematics. So he certainly turned to AI, but never allowed that artificial mind to dictate his creative seed.
'For somebody else to come and grab ownership, I'm not cool with that,' he told me. 'Especially when you put in your heart, your time, money, your heart into everything. For somebody to come along and put value on what you do and say, I value it at this and I'll take it for that. It's like, nah.'
With 2025 tour dates lined up and a live show now elevated with a band, dancers, actors, and full set curation, along with the Wu, Mathematics is building a multimedia experience rooted in a key foundational hip-hop ethic: the ability to show and prove. This goes beyond nostalgia. It's about a hip-hop class act packaging authenticity in a way that translates into merch, licensing, collectibles and lasting reverberation.
'I grew in my music because I felt sampling—and I got nothing against sampling, sampling is dope, and I would still sample to this day if I wanted to,' said Mathematics. 'But creatively, we chopped it up and we made things out of it. We did what we did. But then some beats, I felt like, okay, I just looped it and put drums on it. Is that really creativity? Did I really do that?'
'If I did that with AI, then I would feel the same way. It's like, nah, I still gotta make my music. I gotta be creatively hands-on musically. I gotta make the sounds in my head, I have to bring [them] out. I can't allow a machine to dictate that for me.'
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
New York Times
an hour ago
- New York Times
What's Bold, Bald and Coming to a Stadium Near You?
Outside the O2 Arena in London on Monday evening, the hip-hop superstar Pitbull tore into a bowl of chicken katsu curry. A few feet away, Pitbull fumbled with an iPhone charger. A lone Pitbull checked his watch, and a conga line of Pitbulls rode up an escalator. Two Pitbulls were holding hands. Four more split a bottle of rosé. The actual Pitbull — Armando Christian Pérez, a Miami native who steered a boisterous strain of club-rap to the top of the charts in the early 2010s — was backstage, preparing for the first of two performances at the 20,000-capacity arena. Waves of young fans have gotten in the habit of impersonating the artist at each date of his 'Party After Dark' tour, paying special attention to his most famous, most hairless, feature. 'I'm pretty sure every party shop in London is sold out of bald caps,' said Jay McGillan, 19. Mr. McGillan said he had visited seven stores and struck out, so he improvised by drawing a portrait of Pitbull's sparkling pate directly onto the fabric of his white button-up shirt. He joined a line of fans streaming into the arena, one of them wearing a T-shirt that read: 'Good girls go to church … Bad girls go to Pitbull.' It's boom times for the concert uniform, a relatively recent phenomenon in which fans coordinate on social media to wear sequins to see Taylor Swift and cowboy boots for Beyoncé. (Jimmy Buffett's Parrotheads were way ahead of the curve.) But Pitbull mania is an outlier in terms of its outrageousness, its lack of obvious sex appeal and its uniformity. To wander among the Pitbulls feels like Halloween night, if Halloween had only one costume option and it was Pitbull.. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
New York Times
an hour ago
- New York Times
Brandee Younger Has a New Secret Weapon: Alice Coltrane's Harp
Brandee Younger has noticed her audience changing lately. The harpist, composer and bandleader, whose elegant, groove-anchored sound has made her a standout presence in and around jazz in recent years, had grown accustomed to seeing a certain type of listener at her shows. 'It's, like, a Portland, 40s man,' she said with a smile during an interview last month at her East Harlem apartment, referencing demographic data on her fan base — not atypical for a contemporary jazz artist — furnished by her label. During recent tours, though, she started to notice an influx of 'young girls that are, like, so excited.' It's been an encouraging sight for Younger, 41, who said that growing up as 'this little Black girl playing harp' and devoting herself to classical studies while also keeping close tabs on hip-hop and R&B, she struggled to find role models. 'I want to grab their hands,' she said of these new converts. 'I want to nurture these 20-year-old girls, because I wish I had that — something like that — when I was 20.' Younger's latest batch of music, out Friday, feels like a nurturing, affirming message too. 'Gadabout Season,' her third album for Impulse!, offers the best encapsulation yet of the tasteful, subtly radical sonic hybrid that she has been honing since she picked up the harp at age 11. It's a persuasive argument for the vast, trans-idiomatic potential of her instrument. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
Seth MacFarlane on Channeling Frank Sinatra for ‘Lush Life' & Who Will Be His ‘First Call' If He Uncovers a Lost Sinatra Duet
Thanks to a decadeslong love of Frank Sinatra and a relationship with his family that started when Frank Sinatra Jr. guest-starred on Family Guy, Seth MacFarlane was entrusted with a gold mine of never-released material arranged for the late crooner that has become his just-released ninth studio album, Lush Life: The Lost Sinatra Arrangements. 'If you're an aficionado of this kind of music, it's like being a Lennon-McCartney fan and finding something that was written in like 1969 that was just never played,' MacFarlane tells Billboard's Pop Shop Podcast of Frank's daughter, Tina Sinatra, approaching him with the opportunity to dig into 1,200 archival boxes of unrecorded sheet music arranged specifically for her dad. 'And you hear it, and it's like, 'My God.' More from Billboard Seth MacFarlane Salutes Frank Sinatra on His New Album 'Lush Life: The Lost Sinatra Arrangements' Taylor Swift No Longer Needs to Re-Record Debut Album & 'Reputation,' But Have Fans Come to Expect 'Taylor's Version'? Janet Jackson & Jennifer Lopez Aren't Leaving Las Vegas Anytime Soon After 2025 AMAs 'You know, the songs that we have are the songs that we have from his discography; obviously he's gone, the arrangers are gone, so there's nothing new. And then all of a sudden, it's like, 'Oh, you know what? There's one more cookie at the bottom of the bag.'' Listen to MacFarlane's full interview in the new Pop Shop Podcast episode below: Below, find highlights from our conversation with MacFarlane, and listen to the full chat in the podcast above. In many cases, no one has ever heard of them, because they just didn't exist. There's a song called 'Who's in Your Arms Tonight' — you could travel to the ends of the earth before we did this, and you would not find a single person who knows that song, because it just was never recorded, and everyone involved with this writing is long gone. … We asked the oldest guys in the band — I mean, our bassist played for Frank Sinatra for years in the last part of his life, and he had no idea what this was. So about a third of the songs on the album are songs in which both the song and the arrangement are just completely unknown. Particularly in the case of [Sinatra arranger] Nelson Riddle, you could instantly hear his signature trademarks, like those flutes. And that was what was so interesting. There was no question who wrote this, but it was new. It was familiar stylistically, but it was new, in the same way you watch a Wes Anderson movie that's brand-new, you're instantly going to know it's him. You're going to see his visual touchstones, but the movie's brand-new. That's kind of how it was. It was so clearly Nelson Riddle, but we were hearing the first new Nelson Riddle chart that anyone has heard in decades. So it was a pretty profound moment. It would have been nice if we had found some, you know, Rosemary Clooney or Peggy Lee duet. I mean, Liz would have been my first call. For this kind of music, there's just no one better on the planet, but so far, we have not found any duets. We haven't dug through these boxes in such detail that there couldn't be one — there may be. There are 1,200 boxes. We couldn't play everything on that day because an orchestra is expensive. … But there's so much in that archive that it is possible, and, yeah, if we find something, then we'll give Liz a call. There are a couple [songs] that we recorded that we cut from this album, just because we had, I don't know, some edict to get it down to 12 songs or less. All I know is we were told initially, I think they wanted it to be like six songs. I'm, like, 'Guys, that's not an album.' I don't know, there's all this, like, marketing data that they go by, and really, nobody knows sh–, because if they did, everything would be a monster hit. [Laughs] So I do remember us pushing back and saying, 'Let's do an album's worth of songs for this thing.' So it's a dozen songs, which, for a Sinatra album, was in the ballpark. And there were a couple songs that we did record that were not included that would be on the next one. … There are probably two albums' worth of real, honest-to-God songs that can be released. Is three days a residency? [Laughs] I once spent a week in Vegas, and I was like, 'I'm forgetting who I am. I'm an insane person. The walls are moving.' That's a lot of Vegas. __________ Also on this week's Billboard Pop Shop Podcast, Taylor Swift's former No. 1 album reputation, released in 2017, jumps from No. 78 to No. 5 on the Billboard 200 following an outpouring of fan support of the project after Swift announced she had acquired her Big Machine Records-era music catalog. Plus, SEVENTEEN and Miley Cyrus' latest releases debut in the top five, while the top slots on both the Billboard 200 and Billboard Hot 100 are static, with Morgan Wallen's 'I'm the Problem' and Alex Warren's 'Ordinary' staying put. We also hit the biggest pop headlines of the week, including Sabrina Carpenter's new 'Manchild' single and video, Darren Criss and Nicole Scherzinger winning at the Tony Awards, David Byrne joining Olivia Rodrigo onstage at Governors Ball, and Mariah Carey returning with her new Eric B. & Rakim-sampling single 'Type Dangerous.' The Billboard is your one-stop shop for all things pop on Billboard's weekly charts. You can always count on a lively discussion about the latest pop news, fun chart stats and stories, new music, and guest interviews with music stars and folks from the world of pop. Casual pop fans and chart junkies can hear Billboard's executive digital director, West Coast, Katie Atkinson and Billboard's managing director, charts and data operations, Keith Caulfield every week on the podcast, which can be streamed on or or your favorite podcast provider. ( on Best of Billboard Drake's Historic Chart Week: How He Matched The Beatles' 57-Year-Old Record How Elton John Keeps Up His Hot 100 Hot Streak With Dua Lipa Duet 'Cold Heart' Pink's 'All I Know So Far' Has Us Looking Back at the History of Live Music on the Charts
