When you see a snake, you get “Snakes” by Ol’ Dirty Bastard stuck in your head too, right?

My wife and I saw one on a hike, and while that as a memory isn’t one I wanted to relive multiple times more than we needed to on the way home, I’ve been singing this song to myself every day since.

The “bad bad Leroy Brown” bit alone, how could I not.

So let’s start there. For the brilliance of it. Did you think Jim Croce’s 1973 hit was on a 90s rapper’s quotability list? Because it was. And, in fairness, it’s such a great song.

Leroy Brown is a bad, bad man. He’s a snake. He’s slick in the armless and legless way, which makes him slippery, and not like us, and given the stories of his charm and danger, we feel a little good when he finally overplays his hand in Croce’s telling of the story.

There is justice, for snakes. In the stories and the songs. ODB wanted to channel it, hence why it shows up in what we’ll call the bridge.

But before we get to ODB’s, we should unpack the core sample, too. It’s easy to forget how encompassing and on brand Wu was. RZA was just a genius with this stuff. ODB’s contributions withstanding, the song opens up with samples from The Five Deadly venoms movie, discussing the snake fighting style (that’s a whole other post explaining it, but know the snake is one of the bad guys in the movie and you’re good to go). That’s not even the best part.

The sample at the bed of the track itself comes from RZA chopping up Joe Tex’s mid-60s classic, “I’ll Never Do You Wrong.”

This is a pre-emptive promise by a lover. Tex is swearing that if he ever becomes a snake, “If I ever do you wrong / If I ever leave you all alone / If I ever tell you a lie / If I ever make you cry” - then he wishes all sorts of tragedy upon himself.

Tex is a self-aware anti-snake, at least on record, and this is the contrast.

We have the established movie snake bad guy, we have the anti-snake self-promise of Tex’s chipmunk’d voice, and the tell-tale of the Leroy Brown reference.

All of which is to say, the world is full of snakes, the world is full of stories of snakes, and the assurance we must swear to ourselves and others, is that we will not be them.

Killah Priest opens the song with the imagery of snakes as spiritual deceivers. He is the Priest after all. He knows all about “the serpents out there.”

RZA puts it in legal and financial perspectives. He’s the abbot, running the temple, so this makes sense. Why he’s “snatchin up snakes on a roof butt-naked” is a little questionable, but that’s just how RZA gets down sometimes.

Then Masta Killa comes in. He talks about loyalty, he talks about consequences. He talks about how the collective, the Wu, is a unit to identify, isolate, and remove snakes for their survival. And snakes travel, which means vigilance needs to stay top of mind. I love how he brings in the “bad rudeboy from the land of Jamaica” to land the point.

All of those verses are about recognition and lessons at multiple levels and scales.

ODB enters and we get the Jim Croce callback. The morality tales and the lived truths are on the ground. He’s a beast of styles, that ODB. From the singing, to the fractured lines, to the expansion of snakes, to include salamanders, piranhas, black panthers, and you really should take this to be the composite of the song so far.

But we’re not done. Because even when ODB exits, it’s still a setup for one more part, the entrance of honorary Wu member, Buddha Monk, who closes us out by capturing how, just like ODB just did, we have to transform into a “demon beast” to win out over the snakes.

That’s a far cry from our little snake on some rocks on the hiking trail, but here we are.

I’ve known some real snakes. I feel the metaphorical value of this composition.

(I had no idea how much more connected I’d see all these things until I started writing - Personal Archive plug 4,080)