Wu-Tang Clan’s “C.R.E.A.M.” Is Not the Capitalist Anthem You Think It Is

Twenty-five years after its release, the iconic rap group’s biggest hit remains deeply misunderstood.
A text graphic reading “Cash to Everyone Around Me“
Image by Drew Litowitz

A group like Wu-Tang Clan never should have worked—because of their abrasively lo-fi aesthetic, because of their general disinterest in adhering to commercial rap trends, and because of the very basic reason that it included nine MCs: the RZA, the GZA, Ol’ Dirty Bastard, Inspectah Deck, Raekwon the Chef, Ghostface Killah, Method Man, U-God, and Masta Killa. That’s nine personalities, with nine sets of differing ideas, needs, and desires, attempting to operate as one. Against the odds, though, the crew has lasted for more than 25 years and now stands as one of the most influential hip-hop acts of all time.

This year, they have celebrated this achievement through the release of the four-part docuseries, Wu-Tang Clan: Of Mics and Men, as well as the new Hulu miniseries Wu-Tang: An American Saga. Both shows offer an opportunity to gain insight into how each member’s contributions shape the group’s collective—and sometimes contradictory—message.

There’s a familiar Wu-Tang track that repeats through the promotion of the two projects: “C.R.E.A.M.” That’s no accident, since the song remains their highest-charting single as a unit, hitting No. 60 in 1994, helping to propel the sales of their debut album, Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers), to multi-platinum status. Of the videos they have uploaded to YouTube, “C.R.E.A.M.” is by far the most popular, with over 90 million views. It’s a song that, like Wu-Tang itself, was an unlikely hit but nonetheless became an indelible part of the pop music landscape and culture at large. Even if you don’t really know Wu-Tang, you might still know “C.R.E.A.M.”

But the song’s underlying idea about the hopelessness of a capitalist system that’s built to trap so many into lives of crime and poverty has largely been lost.

The first thing that draws you into “C.R.E.A.M.” is that piano. RZA chopped up a sample of the 1967 Isaac Hayes-produced track “As Long as I’ve Got You” by the Charmels, an obscure soul group signed to Stax. The keys are high and staggered, providing a dark melody that’s augmented by looped, moaning vocals, adding a touch of longing, as though there’s something knowingly out of reach that the singer still can’t help but yearn for.

But the song’s popularity owes more to its hook than any other element. As RZA tells it in Of Mics and Men, “C.R.E.A.M.” originally featured Raekwon and Inspectah Deck rhyming for around 64 bars each, with no chorus—which wasn’t going to cut it, even within the austere world of the Wu. So he tasked Method Man with crafting a hook, a skill considered his specialty. Meth recalled a letter he had received from his friend Raider Ruckus, who was incarcerated at the time, that talked about getting “cream”—which was already circulating as hood slang for money—that was then broken down into an acronym: Cash Rules Everything Around Me.

Meth’s hook is catchy, simple, and infinitely repeatable: “Cash rules everything around me/C.R.E.A.M./Get the money/Dollar, dollar bill y’all.” Rae and Deck’s verses are the opposite: dense with vivid imagery that require repeated listening to fully appreciate. That creative tension is part of what makes “C.R.E.A.M.” such a great song. But it’s also why a song that was meant to be an indictment of the conditions created by a capitalist economy has become synonymous with capitalist pursuits.

It stands against the group’s origin story that they could be co-opted in such a way. Wu-Tang debuted and first found success during the G-funk era, when Dr. Dre and his West Coast cohort was focusing in on melodies while smoothing out rap’s rough edges. Wu was a grimy rebuke of that transition, shifting the focus back to New York City and hip-hop’s gutter roots. And as other New York rappers started leaving the streets behind and moving toward the shiny suit era initiated by Puff Daddy and Bad Boy, Wu-Tang stood strong as a collective committed to mining the dirtiest and oft-neglected corners of life in America’s hoods. But “C.R.E.A.M.”—led by its money-hungry hook—took on a life of its own.

The song’s original title was more explicitly ironic. The version of “C.R.E.A.M.” that was just Rae and Deck trading long verses was called “Lifestyles of the Megarich,” which would have stood in stark contrast to the grim realities of poverty in the lyrics, all but forcing listeners to understand the critique. If heard through the lens of the verses, the now-iconic hook does the same work, but it has to be contextualized. If we listen as Raekwon describes the circumstances that push him into the black market economy of drug sales and robbery, and yet his life “got no better,” Method Man’s declaration that “cash rules everything around me” feels less celebratory and more frustrated. Likewise when it comes to Inspectah Deck, who raps:

A man with a dream with plans to make C.R.E.A.M.
Which failed I went to jail at the age of 15
A young buck sellin’ drugs and such who never had much
Trying to get a clutch at what I could not touch
The court played me short, now I face incarceration
Pacin’ going upstate’s my destination
Handcuffed in back of a bus, 40 of us
Life as a shorty shouldn’t be so rough
But as the world turned I learned life is hell
Living in the world no different from a cell

If Deck’s life, at the ripe old age of 22, felt no different inside or outside of prison, Meth’s cries to “get the money” are utterly meaningless. They sound less like a rallying call and more like desperate pleas of escape shouted into a void. Chasing cash, by whatever means available, is the only option for survival, as it rules everything around us—but should it? Should a lack of money make one’s life indistinguishable from prison?

These are questions that arise if we’re listening to the song as a whole, but pop success alters the way music is heard. As such, “C.R.E.A.M.” has been stripped for parts: The only aspects of real interest to a mass audience are the use of “cream” as slang for money and the repetition of the hook as an admonishment to work harder, longer, and more ruthlessly in the pursuit of it.

The song has become a tool of the unscrupulous system it was meant to expose. By 2014, Drake and JAY-Z were interpolating the hook into their opulent collaboration “Pound Cake” without any semblance of the struggle Wu was rapping about, while Financial Times was using “Cash Rules Everything Around Me” as a headline for a story detailing a select few rappers’ immense wealth. At this point, there’s even a nerdy YouTube tutorial that borrows the acronym to extol the virtues of Google Instant Buy.

In this way, “C.R.E.A.M.” has become something like the hip-hop equivalent of Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.” Right out the gate, Springsteen’s hit was being co-opted into a bland patriotism. After attending one of his concerts in 1984, the conservative columnist George Will wrote: “I have not got a clue about Springsteen’s politics, if any, but flags get waved at his concerts while he sings songs about hard times. He is no whiner, and the recitation of closed factories and other problems always seems punctuated by a grand, cheerful affirmation: ‘Born in the U.S.A.!’”

Just a few weeks later, Ronald Reagan began incorporating Springsteen into his campaign stump speech, saying: “America’s future rests in a thousand dreams inside our hearts. It rests in the message of hope in the songs of a man so many young Americans admire: New Jersey’s own Bruce Springsteen.”

Of course, “Born in the U.S.A.” is anything but hopeful. Springsteen sings from the perspective of a Vietnam War veteran who sees all of his opportunities for work, stability, and comfort slipping away. The chorus, then, is less “cheerful affirmation,” as Will suggested, but a beleaguered recollection of a promise unfulfilled. Springsteen’s narrator had hope once, tied up in the American Dream, but that hope was stripped away by the real world conditions of rural America at the height of the Cold War.

And yet, those who stand ideologically opposed to even acknowledging such a reality still sing along to Springsteen’s hit because the melody soars and carries the pared down chorus toward stadium-filling bombasity. This led Kyle Smith, critic-at-large for the conservative magazine National Review, to write that, “If you want your audience to feel despondent, don’t set your synthesizer to ‘triumphant.’” Except that’s exactly what you do if you want to reach as wide an audience as possible.

What distorts the message of both “Born in the U.S.A.” and “C.R.E.A.M” is also what makes them popular songs that have endured. They have instantly recognizable melodies and easily remembered hooks that the casual fan will find themselves singing along to almost without thought. That’s how you get inside people’s heads; that’s how you sell records. And while that may obscure the songs’ underlying message to some degree, it doesn’t mean that it goes away. It means that you have an opportunity to unpack it with more people.

Where these two songs differ is that Springsteen was presented an opportunity to course-correct the trajectory of his song because it was co-opted by the perfect villain. The anti-union purveyor of trickle-down economics, Reagan was the most obvious foil for “Born in the U.S.A.” and allowed for a clear drawing of the line for which side Springsteen stood on.

For Wu-Tang, it’s more muddled. It’s not as though George W. Bush was caught listening to “C.R.E.A.M.” during campaign strategy meetings, compelling RZA to swing by CNN in order to distance the song from Republican politics. “C.R.E.A.M.” has had a more organic absorption into a culture where capitalism is the predominant ideological force dictating our reception of art. It wasn’t turned into a tool by an outside manipulator, á la Reagan and Springsteen, but warped by the audience it reached so that it could fit the way of thinking they already found comfortable.

But also, no member of the Wu is explicitly anti-capitalist—indeed, each of them has rapped, to varying degrees, about the building of individual wealth as well as the materialist trappings of that accumulation. (Method Man’s embrace of capitalists went as far as including a personal recording from Donald Trump as a skit for his 1998 album, Tical 2000: Judgement Day.) The distortion of this one song in their catalog is not a betrayal of their overall philosophy. However, “C.R.E.A.M.” still contains within it a potent critique of the ways capitalism renders life unlivable for those on the wrong side of the ownership pyramid. Perhaps in this new political climate, where critiquing capitalism no longer makes you a pariah, “C.R.E.A.M.” can find a second life as a socialist anthem, where the fact that cash rules everything around us is seen as a problem, and “get the money” sounds like a direct order to fleece the rich for all they’ve got.