A soul loop from 1967, and a phrase borrowed on Staten Island
The sample is warmer than the room it describes. A woman’s voice from the Charmels’ 1967 As Long As I’ve Got You opens a corridor, and then the drums knock like a radiator in a building where the heat is a rumor. Raekwon does not romanticize the cold. C.R.E.A.M. is an accounting. Cash rules everything around me, dollar dollar bill, y’all, and the y’all is not festive. It is a roll call. Inspectah Deck comes in with the detail, the young mind, the crime, the way a day is priced. Method Man’s hook is the thesis the verses have to live under. RZA keeps the loop slightly dusty, so the soul record sounds like it has been played in the same hallway as the story.
The track is on Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers), released in November 1993, produced by RZA, much of the album cut at Firehouse Studio in Brooklyn from beats he had been sitting on for years. Raekwon told Complex in 2011 that this beat was old, around 1989, a break RZA kept because Raekwon had claimed it. The phrase itself was not Meth’s first. A friend of his, Raider Ruckus, had said cash rules everything around me. Meth heard it, turned it into a hook, and Raekwon co-signed the same day. The verses went back further than the record. Raekwon described standing in front of the building in 1987 or 1988, all black on, cold, trying to eat. The song, he said, put him back there. Survival, not a brand.
On the album it sits among skits and swordplay and still feels like the one the street already knew how to quote. The video put the clan in the places the lyric had priced. Live, the hook is a chant that can sound like a celebration if you miss the temperature. The clan did not miss it. C.R.E.A.M. became a password and then a proverb, printed on shirts by people who had not stood in front of that building. The proverb’s accuracy is what made the misuse possible. Money did rule the rooms they were describing. Saying so in a loop this beautiful was the trick, and the trick traveled farther than Staten Island’s ferry.
That beat is old. That was probably like a ’89 beat. I would be like, I want that beat, so don’t give that beat to nobody. Meth came up with the hook, but our dude named Raider Ruckus came up with the phrase cash rules everything around me.
(Raekwon, Complex, 2011)
Raekwon has been clear that the record did a private piece of work as well as a public one. It gave him a way to revisit a time when cream meant that much, which is a sadder sentence than the hook’s bark. Deck’s verse is the one that still gets recited in full by people who want to prove they were listening. The soul sample does not absolve the arithmetic. It makes the arithmetic hummable, which is how a proverb gets out of a basement and into a language.
What remains is the claim on the beat. RZA kept his word. Raekwon got the loop he had asked to be saved. A friend’s phrase became the clan’s most quoted line, and the woman’s voice from 1967 still opens the door onto a cold that the hook will not let you forget, no matter how warmly the sample asks you in.
