The multimedia posse has arrived."Wu-Tang Forever," the long-awaited new album by the rap-music nonet Wu-Tang Clan, shot into the charts last week at the No. 1 spot, having sold more than 300,000 copies since its June 3 debut.
At nearly two hours, the double-CD set is a sprawling chronicle of the desperate war and uneasy peace that constitutes the Clan's view of modern urban life. As their coarse language erupts out of a series of insistent rhythm tracks, only the occasional swell of strings or an odd classical keyboard flourish arises to sweeten the relentlessly gritty texture.
If "Wu-Tang Forever" is not especially revolutionary in its message, it can be seen as a triumph of scope in its extended length and in its number of narrative voices.
That scope has been expanded even further by the group's use of futuristic technology. One of the album's two compact discs is an enhanced CD that has been designed to yield yet another view of Wu-Tang Clan's universe.
Costing no more than a conventional audio disc and playable in the CD-ROM drive of both Windows-based and Macintosh personal computers, the ECD provides entry to the Wu Mansion, a three-level structure with rooms representing each of the clan's members.
The top two floors of the mansion, easily navigable with QuickTime VR, are more notable for the sharp objects on the walls than the blunt comments of their inhabitants or the information furnished in each room.
The surroundings are rendered in a cartoon-like style that pays equal homage to the set designer of Star Trek and the weapons master of a Bruce Lee chopsocky flick -- Wu-Fu, as it were.
In addition to the exotic swords and axes that dominate the decor, each room has a television console that displays some biographical background on each rapper and a brief video clip.
So, in this comic-book cosmos, Masta Killa reveals that he has the strength of a ninja and the artist politely known as Dirty mutters the phrase "Give me a kiss." A smattering of hidden hot buttons serve up additional digital tidbits.
Only after the eight rooms on the upper floors have been explored are visitors to the basement able to control the audio-video playback console of the RZA, the album's producer.
Segments of previous Wu-Tang videos can be screened from the console, and with password-enabled access, six short ECD-only videos also can be viewed.
In the first of these "shout outs," the RZA proclaims: "You don't got to go to summer school. Just plug in this CD into your CD-ROM or into your sound system and let the sound and lights take you away, and get all the education you need right here." In another, transcribed here in its entirety, Dirty remarks, "I ain't got too much to say."
To learn the necessary passwords that unlock the videos, ECD owners are urged to go to the Clan's Web site and fill out a questionnaire from its label, Loud Records. The form does not have to be completed fully to produce a password, which is delivered later via e-mail.
Based on a weekend experiment, it took about 12 hours for the information to show up. Those seeking more immediate gratification can pick up all of the passwords from some of the Clan-fan Web sites.
As of Monday, more than 40,000 registrants had applied to the Web site for passwords, according to Gabriel Levy, manager of interactive music for BMG Entertainment North America, the album's distributor.
Levy, who also served as executive producer of the ECD portion of the Clan album, said, "We see it less as standalone multimedia content than as a bridge from the offline world to the online world."
To encourage this activity, the ECD offers installation software, including a Web browser, for America Online, plus 50 free hours of connection time to the service.
The Clan's Web site, though, is still very much a work in progress. Only one of the nine onsite biographies had been activated as of late last week and the FAQ area was empty.
MIGHTIER PENN
Carrying none of the commercial clout of Aerosmith or Wu-Tang Clan, Michael Penn's third and best album runs the risk of disappearing down a long and winding retail road, which would be a shame since Resigned is the best Beatles-inspired recording to be released since the very un-"Real Love." With Penn often singing at his most Lennonesque, the 40-minute disc is filled with memorable melodies and peppered with "Revolver"-era song quotes and production touches. Although the album is an enhanced CD, the multimedia content offers little more than a few video clips and a complete set of lyrics (which also are on the Web site). Studio-session credits would have been more welcome. The backward guitars on "Try" are easy to pick out, but is that really a mellotron at the end "Out of My Hands"? With all due respect to Wu-Tang, Penn demonstrates that "Strawberry Fields" is the music that may last forever.
NEW AND LINKWORTHY
State of the Art is a navigable 3-D gallery that showcases works by three German artists. More curator-style annotation is needed for the art, but the virtual environment is a model for easy online wandering. Be sure to make it to the "art cube" at the end of an upstairs corridors, where visitors can float in the middle of an Escher-like space with no clear up or down. The site was developed for Intel Corp. by Superscape, a London-based software firm.
Most remarkably, neither the ECD, its liner notes nor the Web site contain the album's prodigious and profane lyrics, which already are appearing on fan sites. This may be intended to protect tender parental sensibilities, since passages with offending language have been removed from the audio excerpts that play on the Web site.
The immediate sales success of "Wu-Tang Forever" marks the second time that an enhanced CD has entered the Billboard charts in the No. 1 position.
Aerosmith first performed the feat in early April after the launch of its "Nine Lives" recording. The disk's primary multimedia feature allows non-musicians to play along with each song from the computer keyboard.
Brett Atwood, interactive editor for Billboard Magazine, said enhanced CDs are beginning to overcome their industry reputation as a costly add-on that was favored by progressive artists and plagued with compatibility issues.
"Companies are still supporting the format despite a lot of early problems with it technically," Atwood said. "It's getting less experimental and more mainstream in terms of the types of acts we're seeing embrace this. As indicated by Aerosmith and Wu-Tang Clan, they're high-profile artists; they [record labels] aren't sneaking these things out there."
He said most consumers remain unaware of multimedia content on an ECD, even though an increasing number of young listeners are using their computer's CD-ROM drive as an audio-CD player.
"The experience still needs to get a little more compelling to draw more people into it," Atwood said. "People buy CDs for music first and foremost. That hasn't changed at all and I don't see that changing in the near future. But I do think you'll see more of these. It's another way for the record companies to position their artists as career artists. Just like music videos, it helps add an image."
Also spurring the growth, he said, was the decline in cost of multimedia development.
"It's always been a practical matter of how much the record companies have been willing to invest in the creation of this content, and it's evolved to a place where it can be done fairly efficiently for a reasonable amount of money," Atwood asserted. "And the infrastructure is already there, so a lot of the growing pains are behind the format."
Still, not all computer-savvy music fans are rushing to take their new enhanced CDs for a spin.
Charles Sued (pronounced "swade") is president of Upstairs Records, a Brooklyn retailer specializing in urban music. He already has sold 500 copies of the Wu-Tang Clan album through the commercial Web site he established three years ago.
"The rap market is really big into computers now," he said. "If you look in the newsgroups, there's alt.rap and rec.music.hip-hop, which are really big. Those guys are going to get an added bonus because they'll also be able to look at the multimedia stuff. But a majority of the units that are being sold have got to be for the actual music."
What does Sued think of the multimedia portion of "Wu-Tang Forever"?
"I'll be honest with you," he said. "I haven't popped it into my computer yet."