Audiopile Review: Who’s the greatest emcee of hip-hop history? Any answer is going to be considered controversial. But for our money, nobody’s done it better than the Wu-Tang Clan’s Ghostface Killah. He’s as at home with gritty crime narratives as he is with strings of bizarre non-sequiturs and baffling pop culture references. More importantly, there’s an unmistakable musicality to his flow that nobody else can quite match. Furthermore, and this is where things are going to start getting seriously controversial, we’d argue that Ghost managed to stay on point when many emcees in his orbit started to fall off. Certainly, the quality of Wu-Tang-related releases got patchier after 1997’s magnificently bloated ‘Wu-Tang Forever’. But Ghost’s year-2000 solo joint ‘Supreme Clientele’ is a bona fide Wu Classic. It continues the abstract-rhymes-over-soulful-beats formula of his classic solo debut, ‘Iron Man’. But we can’t help feeling that ‘Supreme Clientele’ is where Ghost really came into his own. One thing’s for sure: if you have any interest in the Wu-Tang Clan, or golden-age hip-hop generally, owning this album is 100% essential.

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Ghost is back! He never left, but the vinyl for Supreme Clientele has been out of print since we reissued it in 2010. Originally released twenty-five years ago, Sony Music’s Legacy is putting GFK’s classic Supreme Clientele back into print for the 25th Anniversary. The album is pressed on double black vinyl with printed inner sleeves, with the same track list that is currently on all streaming services today.