“Growing up as hard, as rough, as wild, as crazy as we in the Wu-Tang did, death was always part of my life…It seemed whenever shit was going down, there was always music playing along with it.” So begins this propulsive memoir by Lamont “U-God” Hawkins. Hawkins was raised by a single mother in the projects of New York in the ’70s and ’80s, where he honed his survival instinct—seeing a young Mike Tyson rip out your mother’s earrings will do that to you. Along the way he found the creative collaborators in his fellow Wu-Tang members, who would change the face of hip-hop. In this timely memoir, Hawkins’ reflects on his childhood—a period when drugs exacerbated the violence in the streets—and the heady years of fame that followed, revealing a man grateful for the music that saved his life.
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