Oliver “Power” Grant, the close Wu-Tang Clan affiliate who oversaw the group’s enormously popular Wu Wear fashion line, has died. He was 52.
Grant’s death was confirmed by social media posts from several Wu-Tang members including Method Man, who wrote “Paradise my Brother safe Travels!!” under a post of the two together.
“We couldn’t have done it without him,” GZA wrote in his own post. “Wu wouldn’t have come to fruition without Power. His passing is a profound loss to us all.”
The group members’ posts did not cite a cause of death. The news was first reported by outlets including Okayplayer and Hot 97.
Grant, a childhood friend of Wu-Tang co-founder RZA’s older brother, was a crucial figure in the sprawling New York hip-hop collective’s ascent. Though he was not a performing member of the group, he helped raise capital for early recording sessions and structured Wu-Tang’s finances and record deals — no small feat for a collective with such a vast archipelago of group and solo projects.
“We knew that if a brother got a deal for 150k, he could keep the majority of it, but it also would facilitate and help the other brothers,” he told Passion of the Weiss in 2011. “It was part of our core and movement for us to spread the money around and help brothers eat, without a project out. It was like we were trust fund babies.”
His work set a precedent for autonomy and creative control as hip-hop became a commercial juggernaut in the ’90s.
“Everything that we learned was hard knock life, you figure it out as you go along, and take cues from those that are actively doing things,” he said. “I wasn’t a rapper, but the thrill of being a part of going and where they went, it was the inspiration for how it ended up that lead us all to going back, soaking up what we’d absorbed and coming back with ‘Protect Ya Neck.’”
He was also the driving force behind Wu Wear, the group’s wildly popular fashion line that netted tens of millions in revenue and became a fixture of ’90s hip-hop iconography. The line was later revamped as Wu-Tang Brand, and relaunched as Wu Wear in 2017. He also had cameos as an actor alongside Method Man in the 1998 hip-hop classic “Belly” and 1999’s “Black and White,” and served as an executive producer for the group’s many LPs.