Only Built 4 Cuban Linx...
1995 studio album by Raekwon
Only Built 4 Cuban Linx... (commonly referred to as the Purple Tape) is the debut solo album by the American rapper and Wu-Tang Clan member Raekwon, released on August 1, 1995, by Wu-Tang Records, Loud Records, RCA Records, and Bertelsmann Music Group (BMG). The album was loosely composed to play like a film with Raekwon as the "star", fellow Wu-Tang member Ghostface Killah as the "guest-star", and producer RZA as the "director". It features appearances from most members of the Wu-Tang Clan. The album introduces affiliates Cappadonna and Blue Raspberry, and has a guest appearance from rapper Nas, which marked the first collaboration with a non-Wu-Tang-affiliated artist.
Only Built 4 Cuban Linx... debuted at number 4 on the Billboard 200 chart, and number 2 on the Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums chart, while selling 130,000 copies in its opening week. The album was certified Gold by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) on October 2, 1995, and Platinum on February 24, 2020. According to Nielsen Soundscan, it has sold 1.1 million copies in the United States as of 2009. Although it failed to acquire the same initial sales success as previous Wu-Tang solo albums, Cuban Linx achieved greater critical praise, with many complimenting its cinematic lyricism and production.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Only Built 4 Cuban Linx...” is 1995 studio album by Raekwon. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Only, Built and Cuban, not as a finished interpretation.
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Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 16, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1187999. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1995, 2020 and 2009.
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This entry incorporates text from “Only Built 4 Cuban Linx...” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.