Ghostface Killah is not one to stand, or sit, on ceremony. Seated in the lounge area of his smallish but well-appointed midtown Manhattan hotel room, just blocks from Times Square, he greets the introduction of a tape recorder to the room with a reverberating belch. With Ghost, what you hear is what you get.

And as his string of stunning, introspective, textured solo albums shows, what you hear is the most vivid, unpretentious, daring rapper in mainstream hip-hop. His debut, 1996’s Ironman, and his follow-up, 2000’s Supreme Clientele (both on Epic), are masterworks of the genre, thick with hood melancholy and searing emotional pain. "I feel that there is no creativity out there in hip-hop. I just feel like niggas is caught in one frame of mind," he laments, swiping a handful of vitamins from an imposing collection of jars. "I like to go other places when I be doing my thing. Niggas is caught up almost in the disco era, like when disco came through at first when it was soul they was taking over. So it’s time to bring that back to the foundation. That’s why we try to come with the shit that we come with."

Ghost’s latest, Bulletproof Wallets (also Epic), shows the Wu philosopher in a more upbeat mode than before. "Never Be the Same Again" and "Ghost Showers" — both staples on New York radio — are uncharacteristically charming for Wu product. But though the music is sexy, the words show Ghost hasn’t changed a bit. The former is a classic Ghostface cuckoldry tale, and though it lacks the vitriol of "Wildflower" (from Ironman), when he shrieks, "All I’m saying is, let me find out you got men around my kids," you know the pain he’s speaking of is nothing short of real.

"I’m just giving out memories," he says. "Niggas are scared to go there. I ain’t afraid to cry on a track. It gets raw like that sometime. It’s real. What I do, I take you there, and that’s why a lot of people could respect it. When I was talking about that roaches-in-the-cereal-box shit, motherfuckers was bugging out, ‘He got roaches!’ Damn right I got roaches."

In spite of the two obscenely large items of jewelry — a hubcap of a necklace and a six-inch eagle on a bracelet — he totes, Ghost, who keeps a house in New York and one in Miami for when he needs to relax, is utterly without ostentation. Indeed, the scope of his pieces is so grand as to be a comment on excess.

Call him an organic rapper. Even as the flash of Times Square beckons loudly, he’s content just to keep it mellow. It’s something that’s apparent in his personal life as well. He makes loose references to children — "I got a lot of kids, man" — and says he tries his best to spend time with them when he can. Whereas most MCs make passing reference to going back to Africa, he actually went, in the downtime between his first and second albums. For three weeks, he shed the clothes he’d arrived with and lived in a small village." I seen how people was living, and how white people ran everything over there. It was fucked up," he says with bitterness. "That’s the best place I ever been in my life, regardless of how the situation was, because I lived with them. I shit and pissed where they pissed. I made it my home. I’m one of them brothers, I’ll fuck around and get a crib in Africa somewhere and just feed the babies all my fucking life. I give that back to God. I got a blessing with God-given talent, and I got to give it back. That’s my sacrifice."

A good-hearted rapper who’s also spiritual? Ghost is all that and more. And praise is due: "When I meditate, it’s all to the energy, because God has no face. Before we was even on a planet, before the planets was even made, he was there."

Midway through the interview, there’s a knock at the hotel-room door. In marches Saturday Night Live’s Tracy Morgan, a friend of Ghost’s, accompanied by one of the show’s young cast members. "We them same babies, man," Ghost smiles, "We can relate to each other. I love my nigga for what he do because it’s real."

Morgan is eager to return the favor: "I put it on TV. My man told his story in Supreme Clientele that inspired me to tell mine [he’s referring to the recurring SNL character of Woodrow the bum]. If he could get on an album and tell his story, I got to tell mine. This is my man right here, and he inspires me not to be self-conscious, to be free."

The ensuing conversation is a rollicking one, touching on everything from The Matrix to local porn shops to the difficulties of Hollywood as compared with those of the record industry. Morgan and Ghost seem to have a genuine affection for each other, as if each were surprised to have found the other in a system that otherwise seeks to corrupt them. For both men, it seems, true happiness is in short supply. "When I laugh, that’s my happiness," Ghost says, "God made me happy the other night, when Tracy was up here until 6:30 in the morning. I didn’t have no bad shit on my mind. My mind was free. That’s my happiness when I can smile and feel relaxed."

There was a little bit of business mixed in with the pleasure here. Having observed the success of his fellow Wu-Tanger Method Man on the big screen of late, Ghost has decided to explore other avenues for his vision. He and Morgan hope to pen a script together, either for a film or for a TV pilot. "We not scared," Morgan says. "We hit walls already. The wall is an illusion. It’s like what bin Laden took from America. You know what he took? All of our illusions. We love show business — it’s a glorious thing — but we wanna do our thing, too. You seen that movie Glory, when Denzel was getting whooped and they took his shirt off and he already had scars on his back? They couldn’t do nothing to us that they ain’t already did."

Says Ghost, "This is just a stepping stone to get to where we really want to go. Mentally, it’s just to explore. The first thing I want to do is be happy in life. I got the love. Love is love. I’m searching for the happiness. I find it through my babies. I find it through Allah. There’s my music, too, but at the same time, only God knows how it’s gonna end up at the end when all this is said and done."

It all comes down to catharsis, complete release through art. No one does it like Ghost, mostly because no one wants to do it like Ghost. Anyone who did would be exposed as shallow and directionless, as flavor without texture. In that regard, Ghost’s friendship with the black face of comedy that mainstream America knows is fitting. Morgan himself works in the shadows, but he still has to be aware of mainstream expectations. Nevertheless, he says, "I don’t make a fuss over this. I don’t like for people to make a fuss over me. It’s embarrassing. Don’t blow me up. I don’t want that. I don’t need that. Tell me if I’m corny. Don’t laugh at everything I motherfucking say. There’ll be times that I don’t feel like being fucking funny. I want to be human today. There has to be some redemption.

A few weeks later, Ghost and 30 of his friends are holding down the tiny stage at a Manhattan nightclub. He’s more than two hours late going on, and now that he’s here, he shows no sign of bringing the evening to an efficient close. Whereas previously he spoke of the difficulty of finding joy, here he seems truly alive, a grin perpetually plastered on his face. He runs through hits — "Ice Cream," "Camay," "Incarcerated Scarfaces," "Cherchez La Ghost" — and trades banter with Raekwon and GZA and swings his plate-sized necklace.

As at the Wu-Tang Clan reunion show the previous week, he spits free verse about growing up poor. And just as the show is coming to a raucous, confused end, up to the stage stumbles Tracy Morgan, inebriated in gesture if not in fact. Sparking a blunt off a lighter proffered from the crowd, Morgan rants aimlessly for several minutes, at one point waving a pink cock ring at the crowd (we are, after all, less than a block from Times Square), and generally appears discombobulated. No one’s laughing. Although it’s the day after Christmas, everyone’s hurting. This is perhaps the realest comedy of all: tragedy. Ghost is right at home.