Wu-Tung Clan’s Raekwon: ‘It was like Armageddon’
Twenty years later, Raekwon still remembers what he witnessed in in New York on Sept. 11, 2001, in vivid, heartbreaking detail.
The longtime Wu-Tang Clan rapper was staying at a hotel about eight blocks from the World Trade Center after a night of recording music in Manhattan when the twin towers were struck by planes in the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
“Once I got upstairs and got out of the hotel, I started seeing all this mayhem,” Raekwon (photo) told the Daily News. “People running around. Things all covered in white dust. It was a scary moment, Man. It was like Armageddon.”
Raekwon first realized something was wrong that morning when he woke up and noticed his hotel room’s TV wasn’t working. He was moved by the way New Yorkers came together amid the tragedy.
“People were getting together,” Raekwon remembered. “People were helping each other. People were just treading through the mayhem in the best way they could. I’d seen people picking up people. I’d seen people with all types of emotion: crying, screaming, yelling. People calming other people down.”
Raekwon added, “What I’d seen that day was strength, dignity. People were there to assist one another in the best way they could. We all really mean that when we say that our essential workers were superheroes.”
He was devastated by the people who lost their lives, calling them “our heroes as well.”
Wu-Tang Clan got its start on Staten Island. Raekwon, 51, was born in New York, and his mother and aunt worked in the World Trade Center at one point.
“I’ve been up in the World Trade before, so it kind of brought me back to being a kid again and just being up there, and never thinking that something like this could happen because of the way the buildings were built. It was just sad, Man,” Raekwon said.
He paused his focus on making music in the aftermath of the attacks.
“When all of that was going on, my mind went blank with music and all of that,” Raekwon said. “It was just all about people. It was about prayer and people and love.”