first, craner - getting these occasional expositions out of you, whether about wu tang or central asia or italian cinema, is one of the reasons I continue to knock around dissensus after all these years. so, you know, never stop.
I hear you on Triumph. it's long, it can drag in parts. and viewed through a historical lens it can hammer away at with you its canonicity, Important Moment in Rap air. but still. that 6 minutes of dense, inscrutable Wu flow sans hook or chorus could keynote not just a chart topping album but a defining pop cultural moment of the late 90s. that a Biggie polished by Diddy could become a mainstream star, sure, but that a bunch of wild ass street dudes with enormous talent and personalities barely corralled by the grand vision of a couple of wily, cerebral elder statesmen could rise to dominate the monoculture in its last pre-Internet spasm of existence? clearly 36 Chambers and the first wave of solo albums are their artistic peak but Forever was their ascension and Triumph is their Roman triumph (I've always wondered if that title was a knowing reference btw), roaring through Times Square spewing Shaolin inside baseball and shitty 90s CGI flames like Caesar parading the Via Sacra in conqueror's regalia. none of which has to do w/the song itself I guess, but: the whole thing is like Inspectah Deck's verse. on paper you don't see what all the fuss is about but in context it all makes sense.
and something like Black Shampoo, with the distance of years I do appreciate how something that just seemed terrible at the time can be celebrated for its utter and disturbing strangeness. I just don't want to have to ever listen to it again. (the Wu were hardly alone in being terrible at sex btw, NYCs 90s roughneck rap is pretty much uniformly terrible at sex. or, like Mobb Deep, basically asexual)
like you I have a soft spot for twilight era Wu affiliate LPs. like I was saying above about g-funk, that first wave of RZA disciples (4th Disciple, True Master etc) distilled a visionary's creative innovation into a formula, but it was a totally awesome formula and at that point still undiluted enough to work and there is some great stuff on the LPs you listed, even if they do all tend to get too deep into 5% theology for my taste.
the X-Files was my favorite show as a child, so 90s, of that time...British people probably don't remember this, but when the Beltway Sniper attacks happened I was a living in Philly (only about 3-4 hours away) and when it came out the guy was a black, disaffected NOI member certain elements of the media, iirc, dragged out a tenuous Sunz of Man or Killarmy connection...the only thing I'd really dispute in your exegesis of the 90s (as florid as it was) is that every decade is a cauldron of horrors if scratch deep enough beneath the surface...otoh the 90s was unique in its inward-focused but kind of black humor tinged rampant paranoia which is articulated in that latter Wu stuff in a way
