Sorry, Arctic Monkeys. My bad, Cardigans. Apologies to Bombay Bicycle Club. Phoenix, French Kiwi Juice, and Kings of Convenience, I beg your pardon.

Cue the violins. It’s the Wu motherf*cker. Wu-Tang motherf*cker.

Each of those artists or groups is great in their own right, but they aren’t the legendary nine-headed Shaolin Hip Hop monster named THE WU-TANG CLAN that is going to swarm the city of Hong Kong like killer bees on Sunday, March 5. The heads of Clockenflap really brought da ruckus with this booking and placement at the end of the festival with all the other stages closed down. The whole city better protect their necks, kid.

LiFTED has come up with some essential Wu-Tang tracks that warrant multiple spins before checking out one of Asia’s best Rap concerts in a long, long time.

In the land and time before numbers, likes, and followers mattered, C.R.E.A.M. made its debut and only went to number 60 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. For many artists nowadays, that would be a total failure, but for Wu-Tang, they have one of the best and most endearing songs in Hip Hop history. ‘C.R.E.A.M.’ features a timeless piano riff sampled by the RZA from The Charmels 1967 song, ‘As Long As I’ve Got You.’ The verses from Raekwon and Inspectah Deck are deeply moving and highly emotional as they explain the economics of street capitalism in the early 1990s. With the always-blunted Method Man on the hook, the Clan came up with one of the best acronyms of all time.

There’s no doubt that this song will be played as it should be as the opener, the closer, or bringing the crew back on stage for the encore. Those simple piano notes will bring out the loudest screams of the whole festival and EVERYONE in Hong Kong should be screaming, “Cash rules everything around me/C.R.E.A.M get the money/Dolla Dolla Bill, y’all.”

There are very few groups in recorded history that can put out a six-minute song without a chorus and still go platinum. They didn’t need an R&B singer on the hook or cut the song down to three minutes for radio play. The acclaim started as soon as the song did when Inspectah Deck spit these bars hotter than any effects used in the video, “I bomb atomically/Socrates' philosophies and hypotheses/Can't define how I be droppin' these/Mockeries/Lyrically/Perform armed robbery/Flee with the lottery/Possibly/They spotted me.”

Boom. Mind-blown.

This song won’t be easy to rap along to at Clockenflap. Get your reps in before heading to the festival so you sound good when Raekwon says at the end of it, “Guaranteed to make ‘em jump like Rod Strickland.”

This song is the reason why RZA is the abbot of The Wu. After unceremoniously being dropped from Tommy Boy Records, who then signed House of Pain, RZA started experimenting with sonic collages, left-field samples, and free-form rhyme association, which are all still very much in the Hip Hop DNA today. His beats always had a dirty quality, which matched the haunting deliveries recorded in a studio that was too small for everyone.

This sounds like a number that will be done in the middle of the set, after each member gets a solo song or two. Then, they all come back on stage and chant the chorus “‘Wu-Tang Clan Ain’t Nuthin’ ta F Wit.”

If you don’t get goosebumps when you hear that Gladys Knight sample, are you even human? Raekwon and Ghostface Killah show how two friends can be perfectly complimentary to each other, but still have their own things going on without being in a group together. Over the years, they’ve been on each other’s albums and songs countless times, but this is the first time that everyone thought it might be a great idea for them to do that.

If you don’t get goosebumps when this song comes on at Clockenflap, are you even a Hip Hop lover?

‘Reunited’ shows how the Wu-Tang Clan comes together as one to form the Hip Hop version of Voltron. In this incredibly soulful song that should break Hong Kong when it’s played, each of the four verses would be the best verse of any other song it was on. It starts with the GZA doing genius things and then floats into peak Ol’ Dirty Bastard going full drunken master on the mic. RZA comes in to prove he’s more than just a beast behind the boards, and then Method Man is on clean-up is SUUUUUUUUUUUU.

If there was a choice, this would be my pick for the last song, but just make the crowd keep saying, “It’s Wu motherf*cker/Wu-Tang motherf*cker” to that ill beat for 10 minutes before they walk off the stage. The crowd would leave with huge smiles on their faces and no one would go to work on Monday morning because “It’s Wu motherf*cker.”

Fingers crossed for:

‘Tearz’, ‘Ice Cream’, ‘Hollow Bones’, ‘Brooklyn Zoo’