36 Chambers, an insular and weird album by design, arrived not a moment too soon in a decade where insular and weird music found unexpected traction in the mainstream. It made an impact when it was released on November 9, 1993, peaking at No. 41 on the Billboard 200 and selling 30,000 units in its first week. But as the album sold and the singles spread, the Cult of Wu began to grow: The album went platinum by 1995, minting the collective and slashing a buck fifty across the face of anyone who would dare oppose New York hip-hop. It set the stage for the barrage of solo albums—Cuban Linx, GZA’s Liquid Swords, Method Man’s Tical, and Ghostface’s Ironman—that would further cement the Wu legacy by the end of the ’90s. Before long, RZA was legitimately scoring movies, beginning with 1999’s Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai; a fighting video game was conceived and eventually abandoned, though it would live on as a novelty about the time they made a fighting video game about the Wu-Tang Clan; the group’s West-meets-East ethos would become crystallized in books and Chappelle’s Show skits.

36 Chambers directly paved the way for harder-edged New York rap from Nas, Mobb Deep, and the Notorious B.I.G., and provided a hardcore hip-hop blueprint that’s been followed by rap purists and collectives for nearly three decades. It began the Tao of Wu, bonding nine Staten Island dreamers by philosophies of the mind and the scents of the fried food wafting past Brooklyn’s Palmetto Playground. But more than anything, it’s a testament to pop culture’s power to create and forge brotherhood. In 2004’s Wu-Tang Manual, just over 10 years after the album’s release, RZA broke down the significance of its title as only he could: “You have the thirty-six chambers, and there’s nine members of the Wu-Tang Clan. Each member of Wu-Tang has four chambers of the heart. And what’s nine times four?”