Wu-Tang Clan’s impact can’t be measured by metrics. Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) remains one of the most essential hip-hop albums of all time, ditto for Wu-Tang Forever. Anyone even vaguely familiar with rap know these records, the group’s iconography. It’s all proof that hits don’t always go hand in hand cultural cache. Consequently, the group never really needed radio to be as legendary as they are. However, there is one person Ghostface Killah alleges is the reason they never dominated the airwaves: Diddy.
Recently, Ghost spoke on the Bootleg Kev podcast in promotion of his upcoming album Supreme Clientele 2. There, he reminisces on briefly touring with Rage Against The Machine in 1997, the year Wu-Tang Forever came out. Then, he recalls the optics leading to a thorniness between them and Hot 97. “We left that tour, and it was messed up because we had to make a decision,” Ghostface explains. “Like, come back to your people over here, or stay over here and get big with these guys… We left.”
Ghostface Killah Recalls Diddy Stopping Wu-Tang From Getting Radio Play
Afterwards, Hot 97 blacklisted the group. Naturally, the Wu didn’t go down without swinging, Ghostface starting a ‘f**k Hot 97’ chant at Summer Jam that year. This timeline aligns with Diddy really coming into his own after Biggie passed away. That Bad Boy, shiny suit era directly blocked Ghostface Killah and the group from getting real spins. However, it’s only recently that he learned Diddy had a direct hand in blocking them.
“RZA told me this like maybe a year ago, and said like, ‘Yo, Puff admitted to saying that he stopped our records up there.’ … So it was all Bad Boy. We dropped ‘Triumph,’ no radio play with that shit. So it came out that he told the truth, like, ‘Yo, I had to do it,’” Ghostface Killah recalls. “He had the power. I don’t know what he paid ’em, but he had the power. … Listen, we was a threat. We was coming, if ‘Triumph’ was promoted like it was supposed to be and we would have stayed on that radio right there, I think things to right now would have been a little bit different.”
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