Wu-Tang Clan's Oliver "Power" Grant Dead At 52

The Wu-Tang Clan’s Oliver “Power” Grant has died, per reports. a formal statement has not been shared as of this writing. Method Man shared a brief post on Instagram, telling fans he was “not ok” after hearing the news. “Paradise my Brother safe Travels!!” Meth wrote, alongside broken heart emojis. “Bruh I am not ok. Raekwon, RZA, GZA, and Cam’ron also paid tribute with posts of their own. “POWER we been everywhere …. Now you everywhere!” Raekwon wrote on IG. “The most high is merciful. I love you.” “We couldn’t have done it without him,” GZA added. “We wouldn’t have come to fruition without Power. His passing is a profound loss to us all. Power, reported to be 52 at the time of his death, was a close associate of the Wu-Tang Clan and a childhood friend of RZA’s older brother, Mitchell “Divine” Diggs. This would lead to Power becoming an instrumental figure in building the Wu-Tang brand from the bottom up, ultimately deciding that the group should have a clothing line. That legendary brand was Wu-Wear — and it became so popular during Wu-Tang Clan’s initial run that the clothing line had four brick and mortar stores in the United States. In a 2011 interview with Passion of the Weiss, Power revealed that, due to there not being many hip-hop fashion brands before he made Wu Wear, some Wu-Tang members didn’t believe in Wu-Wear’s success. “My crew had plenty of skeptics, doubters, and non-believers. It wasn’t anything personal, but I’d say that everyone is an individual and they didn’t really understand what I was doing or what I was initially trying to get across, or where I was coming from,” he said at the time. “They just hadn’t seen it. It hadn’t been done before, and it led them to be skeptical. I was laying my own trail. First and foremost, yeah it was going to benefit me, but at the end it would benefit all of us. I knew thought that it was ultimately about showing and proving.” Aside from being in charge of Wu-Wear (which was later rebirthed as the Wu-Tang Brand before being relaunched as Wu-Wear in 2017), Power served as an executive producer for all of the collective’s albums throughout its history.

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