No. 100 - Wu-Tang Clan’s “Da Mystery of Chessboxin’” changed my life

Dewey Fox loves what he loves, and you should too

Jul 25, 2025

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This Song Changed My Life is an independent music publication featuring weekly essays from people all around the world about the songs that mean the most to them. Created (and illustrated) by Grace Lilly.

• 4 min read •

I’m a skateboarder. I’m 45 years old and I haven’t set foot on a skateboard in a decade, and the last time I did I busted my ass trying to ride over a sidewalk crack. Boohoo. We get old and ugly and the things that used to feel light are terribly heavy now. What can you say? I hate myself and want to die. I didn’t say that. Kurt Cobain did, and Stephen Malkmus quoted him later on. And while Pavement and Nirvana cast long shadows on this tail-end Gen Xer’s life, this isn’t about them. It’s about a hip-hop group from New York that thirty years ago told me it’s alright to like what you like.

Raaawwww I’ma give it ya with no trivia, raw like cocaine straight from Bolivia.

It’s not so hard to describe being a skateboarder in 1994. You had to wait for everything. I lived in a tiny town on the I-95 corridor, so the news from Baltimore and Philadelphia filtered up and down to me relatively quickly, but quickly back then meant weeks, minimum. Vinny Ponte ollied the Love Gap. That was in November and I’m reading about it in Transworld in March. The Love Gap, that’s in Philadelphia, in a place called Love Park. Stevie Williams, whom my crew and I idolized because he was the same age as us and already a sponsored skater at 14, skated there. He was skating there in the Philly section of Eastern Exposure 2, which we couldn’t get our hands on until six months after it came out. I can’t watch that video now other than in short bits — it’s just too much having your youth played back to you.

My friends and I are sitting in my living room watching this tape we’ve been hearing about forever. It’s nothing but East Coast skaters. Playing over the opening sequence is this jazz song with corny whoosh sound effects by a band I’ll get better acquainted with a few years down the road. Fifteen minutes later the Philadelphia section comes on. There’s a soundbite from what sounds like an old martial arts film — It’s almost invincible — then two quick beats, and on the third a guy with sandblasted vocal cords (U-God) kicks the door in: Raaawwww I’ma give it ya with no trivia, raw like cocaine straight from Bolivia.

Stevie Williams, my hero who’s only a month older than me, is skating Love Park wearing a black shirt with a huge W on the back. I’ve seen the logo before but haven’t heard the music. It’s a group from New York City that sounds like a gimmick, which hip-hop was full of back then. They sing about kung fu movies and shit — the Wu-Tang something. This isn’t a gimmick though. It’s a fucking sledgehammer: the coldest, hardest beat ever — two bass thumps and a high-hat, over and over; an eerie four-note piano figure; a huge crew of MCs with different styles who all seemed to want to do the same thing — rip your head off.

I’ve never encountered anything as raw as “Da Mystery of Chessboxin’,” and we don’t even get the entire song. It cuts off right at the end of the fourth verse, just as the most unhinged of the vocalists we’ve heard (Ol’ Dirty Bastard) introduces someone named Ghostface. I rewind those two minutes of the video at least ten times and rewatch it. None of my friends bag on me for doing this, which is strange. We’re all trying to figure out what we just heard. Someone says, Those guys are gnarly.

Ten years later I’ll read Bob Dylan’s Chronicles: Volume One, and in it I’ll find his description of Roy Orbison (whom I love as much as the Wu-Tang): With Roy, you didn't know if you were listening to mariachi or opera. He kept you on your toes. With him, it was all about fat and blood. He sounded like he was singing from an Olympian mountaintop and he meant business… He sang like a professional criminal. I love that so much, even if I can’t completely decrypt what fat and blood and singing like a professional criminal imply. That’s how “Da Mystery of Chessboxin’” made me feel. These guys meant business too, and they weren’t operating on the same set of laws as the rest of us.

Being a whiteboy hip-hop enthusiast in semi-rural Maryland thirty years ago was about as cool as being a skater. I’d stop short of calling either of them dangerous, but they would sometimes get you into trouble. I couldn’t hide that I skated other than to do it where the cops and other teenagers weren’t going to write me a ticket or try to start a fight. But I didn’t really advertise that a friend’s musically omnivorous older brother had given me a bootleg cassette of People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm and that I’d loved it, and that I’d bought Tribe’s Midnight Marauders two weeks after it came out and loved it even more. Funny, that album dropped the exact same day as another important one, but it took half a year for one of its songs to reach me. You had to wait for everything.

My little brother, 12 at the time, was already running a scheme where he could exploit Columbia House’s “eight CDs for a penny” promotion. A few days after I’d heard “Da Mystery of Chessboxin’,” I asked him to look through the catalog for whatever the Wu-Tang Clan had put out. There’s only one. It’s called 36 Chambers or something. It showed up a few weeks later and we listened to it together. Nothing we’d heard before had come close to this, not even Midnight Marauders (which is still a top-five album for both of us, probably).

I didn’t go out and buy the Wu-Tang shirt Stevie Williams was wearing in Eastern Exposure 2 — I wasn’t that cool, and I’ve never been much for band shirts — but I did wave goodbye to a myopic, pernicious way of thinking about music (and film, and books, and art, for that matter): that anyone should ever feel bad or weird or guilty for liking what they like. I love Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers). I love Ride the Lightning. I love Hounds of Love. I love Terry Riley’s In C. I love Homotopy to Marie.

The band that played the jazz song with corny sound effects in Eastern Exposure 2 — that was Pavement. I love them too. Stephen Malkmus wrote something good in the liner notes for the reissue of Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain (which I'm going to have to paraphrase a bit since my copy of the album is long gone and the notes aren’t anywhere on the internet that I can find): I hate myself and want to die. It’s a shame he never used that title. I really do not like myself much and feel guilty for even expressing myself. I feel like that, and the Kurt Cobains of the world feel like that. What can you do? Love yourself and start to live. I don’t care what level of irony Malkmus was on when he wrote that, it’s still good advice. Love yourself and the music you love. Wu-Tang taught me that. ◆

About Dewey

Dewey Fox is a poet and educator who lives in Ohio. His original life plan involved moving to California to be a professional skateboarder. One of his works was selected for the Best New Poets 2024 anthology.

Instagram @yewed80

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