Early in “A Wu-Tang Experience: Live at Red Rocks Amphitheatre,” the impresario Robert Diggs, a.k.a. RZA, the co-founding leader of the Wu-Tang Clan and the co-director of “A Wu-Tang Experience,” declares that “music is a universal language.” It’s a statement so cliche as to make you want to roll your eyes.
Fortunately, in the case of “A Wu-Tang Experience,” it’s also a pretty fair point. An earnest and reverent documentary capturing Wu-Tang’s one-night engagement at the legendary Red Rocks Amphitheatre located on the outskirts of Denver, Colorado, in the summer of 2021, “A Wu-Tang Experience” is a testament to the group’s broad appeal and to the global audience that hip-hop has established over 50-plus years.
The venue is Exhibit A in this argument. Colorado’s white population constitutes almost 90% of the state and the film’s lively interviews with audience members outside Red Rocks feature soccer moms, senior citizens and prepubescent kids alike, all flashing “Ws,” citing Wu-Tang trivia, and skillfully spitting Wu lyrics.
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The true conceit, however, of “A Wu-Tang Experience” is the 60-member Colorado Symphony Orchestra that accompanies the live D.J., and much ado is made throughout the film of the marriage between Wu-Tang’s performance and the classical arrangement. RZA makes the comment that hip-hop has historically struggled to be considered real music, suggesting that the concert is an elaborate attempt to make their art, first conceived in Staten Island public housing, more respectable.
This of course is not new. From Run DMC’s rock inspirations and Guru’s jazz hip-hop fusions, to Nas’ performance at Lincoln Center and Kendrick’s Pulitzer, hip-hop has, over the years, found itself either seeking cross-cultural validation or being unwittingly crowned with it.
But RZA is a product of his era, when hip-hop was still relatively unsure of itself. As Australia-born Christopher Dragon, who at the time of the concert was a 31-year-old resident conductor of the Colorado Symphony, points out, the generations of music fans who came of age in the decades after “Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers)” dropped in 1993 have never doubted hop-hip’s legitimacy or music primacy. To that end, the Colorado Symphony accompaniment is so seamlessly blended with the recorded music of the D.J. during the concert, that it’s not always clear where one starts and the other ends — demonstrating just how sonically complex hip-hop production has become.
“A Wu-Tang Experience” is just the latest filmic behind the scenes of Wu-Tang life. There are no fewer than six documentaries and a fictionalized biographical drama about the Wu-Tang Clan, the most comprehensive being the May 2019 Showtime four-episode documentary series, “Wu-Tang Clan: Of Mics and Men.”
While “A Wu-Tang Experience” offers little in the way of additional insight into the relationships, history or artistry of Wu-Tang, it is a welcomed anecdote to the tired “Behind the Music” archetype of a group making it to the top of the charts, only to be eventually torn apart by fame, drugs, egos, and power struggles.
It’s unheard of that seven original members of a highly successful pop group, each of whom can claim their own identity and individual success, are not just surviving, but seemingly thriving. Rather than looking worn down by time and the excesses of the business, they appear relatively healthy and still fully invested in the musical project that RZA recruited them for in the early nineties. Even the one member of the group who succumbed to an overdose in 2004, Ol’ Dirty Bastard, is resurrected in the form of his son whose stage name is, of course, Young Dirty Bastard.
What’s more, they still got it. If nothing else, “A Wu-Tang Experience” gives us what we really came for: Bangers like “Protect Ya Neck,” “Bring Da Pain,” “C.R.E.A.M.,” “Ain’t Nuthing ta F’ Wit,” “Method Man,” “Shimmy Shimmy Ya,” and “Triumph,” each reprised with the energy and crisp urgency that Wu-Tang is known for.
Just before hitting the stage, RZA quips that “We gonna find out if this is a night to remember or the night where RZA just needs to shut the f*ck up and stick to hip hop.” While it’s important to appreciate Wu-Tang’s evolution and the creative ambitions of the concert, which included the simultaneous screening of Wu-Tang’s original muse film, “The 36th Chamber of Shaolin,” it’s the intact fraternity of these middle-aged Black men on stage that is the most enduring theme of “A Wu-Tang Experience.” That and the fact that their music has lasted so long, not through gimmickry and exhaustive reinvention, but by the group remaining exactly who they’ve always been and by delivering unvarnished, uncompromised, roots hip-hop. Perhaps that’s as universal as music gets.
A Wu-Tang Experience first premiered on PBS on November 11, 2024. It will be available on major streaming platforms on May 6, 2025.