With all the drama surrounding the release of Wu Tang's "8 Diagrams", it's easy to forget there was a time when stumbling upon a track like this one would have your homies stuffing tissue paper in the top of their cassette tapes faster than they could empty the White Owls. Nowadays this will probably get lost in your iTunes library before you can even finish downloading it, just another freestyle from some mixtape. Sure the sound quality is horrible and yes, that sure is the SMPTE timecode you hear bleeding throughout the entire track, but the haphazard immediacy of it all is where the real charm lies. The Sandman beat is a great dose of 90's minimalism: cinder block drums, a bass tone and a dusted rhodes sample and Meth sounds high off the vibe of the mid 90's Wu season. At the time, that's all we really needed and the shit was banging, son.Method Man - Off The Wu Headbanger Freestyle (bootleg, 1995)
