Solomon Childs

Born Walbert Ryan Dale in 1975, the Staten Island native who performs as Solomon Childs first connected with the Wu-Tang Clan through family links to his godbrother Cappadonna and his cousin Ghostface Killah. He supplied verses to a range of Wu-Tang-related projects from the late 1990s into the early 2000s, among them Cappadonna’s The Pillage, RZA’s Bobby Digital, Ghostface Killah’s Supreme Clientele, and additional releases. In the same early-2000s period he belonged to the Theodore Unit, the crew aligned with Ghostface, while also appearing on tracks by fellow artists and developing material of his own. Across the 2000s and early 2010s, Solomon Childs maintained a steady output of CD-R albums whose frenetic styles and hyper-prolific creative drive anticipated the mixtape-driven productivity that later defined hip-hop’s next generation. In 2016, while shopping in Staten Island, he was shot twice during a drive-by incident. Multiple surgeries followed, yet the rapper survived the attack and resurfaced in 2017 with the album Don’t Ask Permission, Ask for Forgiveness.