There are two Wu-Tang Clan songs called A Better Tomorrow, seventeen years apart.
The first is on Wu-Tang Forever, from 1997. The second is the title track of their sixth album, A Better Tomorrow, which came out in December 2014 on Asylum and Warner Bros. It’s the 2014 one I’m talking about here, because it has the line I picked this record for.
Method Man opens his verse with it:
My ambition won’t let me live in this poor condition
Method Man, A Better Tomorrow (2014)
I think that fits the mood of being ready for it. Ambition is what gets you out training before the marathon and preparing before the pitch. It won’t let you sit still and hope.
A soul record from 1975 underneath it
RZA produced the track. It’s built on a sample of Wake Up Everybody by Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes, a 1975 soul record asking people to make the world a better place. The writers of that song, Gene McFadden, John Whitehead and Victor Carstarphen, are credited on the Wu-Tang track too, and Tekitha sings on it.
For anyone who doesn’t dig for records, sampling is building a new track around a piece of an older one. I love it when the sample carries the message as well as the groove. A soul record from 1975 telling everybody to wake up, picked up by Wu-Tang nearly forty years later to say it all over again.
Even the title has a story. It goes back to John Woo’s 1986 film A Better Tomorrow, though RZA told Billboard he meant something wider than the film: “We need a better tomorrow.”
Why it had to be Wu-Tang
If there’s a Sun Tzu quote anywhere in the mix, it could only really be Wu-Tang. This is the group that put a track called Da Mystery of Chessboxin’ on their 1993 debut and built a whole world out of kung fu films, strategy and discipline.
So save this one for just before the thing you’ve prepared for. In the car park before the pitch, or on the way to the start line. The work’s done by then, and all that’s left is to walk out and do it.
If you need something louder to get you moving in the first place, try Time 4 Sumaksion by Redman.
Here’s to a better tomorrow.
