Raekwon insists the mafia made him change his album title

Raekwon was some of the thrilling MCs within the Wu-Tang Clan. The Nineteen Nineties Staten Island crew exploded into the mainstream with their 1993 hit ‘Protect Ya Neck’ and continued to churn out hits. Nevertheless, Raekwon was some of the lyrical, and his debut album, Solely Constructed 4 Cuban Linx, was some of the critically acclaimed. Unusually, although, the lyricist was pressured to alter the undertaking’s preliminary title.

In an interview with DJ Vlad for Vlad TV, Raekwon (actual title Corey Woods) made a groundbreaking revelation about his debut album and revealed how the New York Mafia performed a job in renaming it.

Woods admitted that rising up in New York, he was a fan of the Mafia and cherished the way in which they dealt with enterprise. As such, he usually referred to the Wu-Tang Clan because the “Wu-Gambinos.” He used the phrase a lot that he utilised the time period for a monitor title. Furthermore, he even named the album Wu-Gambinos.

Nevertheless, Woods claimed that the late founder of Loud Records, Steven Rifkind, was cautioned by associates of The Gambino household concerning the undertaking’s title, stating, “They was like, ‘Yo, you can’t call no albums that.’ This was a conversation I had with [Steve] Rifkind because Rifkind’s pops, he was connected. He had a lot of relationships. I remember me enforcing the title on Steve and saying, ‘Yo, this is what we want to call it. We want to call it Wu-Gambinos, and he was like, ‘Yo, I’m gonna look into that.’”

He continued, “And I remember him coming back to me and saying, ‘Yo, that’s not happening.’ And I was like, ‘You serious?’ And he was like, ‘It’s not gonna happen. They not having that.’”

The Gambinos are an notorious Italian-American gang based in New York and are one of many infamous “Five Families” that ran the East Coast through the early twentieth century.

Reflecting on why they blocked it, Woods declared, “At the end of the day, a song is a song, but when you start using somebody’s likeness or whatever on that level, it could’ve been a situation where now you gotta take a conversation or meeting behind this.”

He concluded, “It was something funny to me because I wanted to do it anyway. Back then, our mentality was to take the risk, fuck it. But like I said, being young and kind of immature and not understanding the business to the fullest, we had to second-guess that motion and be like, ‘You know what? Don’t do it.”

You may watch Raekwon’s interview within the video beneath.