RZA new interview (one of the most interesting interviews i've ever read)

[Elano]

It's hard enough to keep up with the nine original members of the Wu-Tang Clan and their Gambino aliases. But what happens when, after finally getting a beat on those 18 characters, the clansmen start entering chambers that you didn't even know existed? Think of it as W.E.B. DuBois' famous quote about "two warring ideas in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder," with a Shaolin twist.
Take RZA, for instance. He was perfectly happy, chilling in his multi-million dollar home when the call came. Technically, the actual phone call to record another Bobby Digital album probably came from someone at Koch Records. But, the more you hear him talk about his varied interests, the more likely it is that some inner call to rhyme came from Robert Diggs, The Abbot or even Bobby Digital himself. Even with all of his accolades and the money that comes with them, RZA still sounds like he's in search of his true calling. Even if he doesn't reconcile all of the different aspects of his personality which battle within him on his Digi Snax album, it's going to be entertaining to listen to him try.

Back in 1999, you said the Bobby Digital persona created too much of a contradiction inside you. Did you change your mind, or is this side of you like a werewolf during a full moon that needs to be let out every couple years?
RZA: [Laughs] You could say that in one way. This one came about from two different methods actually. First, the people over at Koch came to me and were like, “Hey Bobby, how about another record?” I was in the middle of my Hollywood excursions and shit, and I kind of put that to the side for a minute. And then, after the 8 Diagrams situation and how that turned out, I kind of had a little emcee vengeance in me. I figured I would just bung, bung it out like this and get that energy out through this medium.

Now that the dust has settled, how do you feel about the good and the bad that went down with 8 Diagrams?
R: As far as the good of it, I think it’s a good album. I mean, I still rock it to this day. It’s been in my CD player for, what, almost seven months now? I still know it by heart. I think it’s a good album. That’s the good of it. If you like Wu-Tang and you’ve got the other records, it’s another one to put in that vein.
The bad of it is that we prematurely shot ourselves in the foot. I mean, that’s my opinion, and everybody’s got their own. But, I think we spoke against ourselves. It’s like if you’re in the ring, you gotta box, man. You can’t complain about your glove being untied; you can’t complain about nothing—you gotta just start swinging. I feel like we sabotaged ourselves, in all reality. We did two tours and didn’t perform the music. The Raekwon incident was big, nahmean? That was over a couple hundred thousand views, and it made Miss Info’s website actually worth money now. People don’t realize what they do when they do things like that. I wouldn’t be surprised if in a year she had her own TV show. But, everyone’s got their own opinions, yo. I put a lot of hard work into that record and I appreciate how it sounds. I’ve got a lot of fans and friends who appreciate it as well.

True. It seems that the overall sound has changed, and that’s not just limited to 8 Diagrams. Is it age, studying music theory or the live instruments that makes it seem mellower?
R: Nah, it’s just music. If you take all my music and take all my shit and really check it without a biased thought in your mind, you won’t see too much change. I don’t think there’s too much change, besides clarity due to the equipment being used. If we’re talking about 8 Diagrams, name a song, and I’ll give you another one that you loved as much.

Off 8 Diagrams?
R: Yeah, name a song.

“Weak Spot.”
R: Okay, “Weak Spot,” that’s classic Wu shit. From the drums, the Kung-fu samples, the weird noises, the emcees to the drops—that’s classic Wu-Tang material. That’s obvious Wu-Tang, name another one.

What about “Heart Gently Weeps?”
R: Okay, take “Heart Gently Weeps” and compare it to “Can It All Be So Simple.” Take “Babies” off the Iron Flag album, ‘cause “Heart Gently Weeps” is a live band. Go to [Ghostface Killah's] Bulletproof Wallets and get “Maxine,” because that’s a live band too. You can even go back to Ol’ Dirty’s [Return to the 36 Chambers] album and compare it to [“Drunk Game" (Sweet Sugar Pie)"] Those elements have always been in my music in one way or another.

Good point. Since we’re comparing old and new, can you talk about reworking “Drama” from the Words from the Genius album?
R: Yeah, I like that idea and I’m proud of that one. I’m such a fan, because GZA is my big cousin and he taught me and schooled me about a lot of stuff in life growing up. I’m proud to be able to cover a Hip Hop song like that and totally make a new song out of it.

Being in this recession makes that line about “no lights, no gas and much backed up rent” even more relevant now than it was then. As you went back and looked at his lyrics did you bug out off of how nothing’s really changed?
R: Yeah, because ain’t nothing changed, man. It only changed for a few of us. It changed for me. I’ve got a two million dollar crib, with the waterfall running right now in the backyard. But it ain’t changed for my cousins. It changed for a few of my cousins, but I’ve got hundreds of cousins. I’ve got a sister stuck in the projects. So, nah it ain’t changed, man. It’s only changed on TV, but in real life it remains the same.
That’s why I’m disappointed with a lot of these…I’m just disappointed with a lot of shit. I just want to say this real quick. I’m just disappointed with the images on TV of everybody playing, blinging and chillin’. You see the videos and shit and everybody will be going through the hood with all the diamonds and all the jewelry, but they’re in the grimiest hood. They film the video in the grimiest location, but they have the most beautiful cars, beautiful bitches and diamonds going on. Get the fuck outta here, man.

Since you’ve been chilling with Quentin Tarantino and Jim Jarmusch, how much closer are you to controlling the images people see?
R: I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to control the images people see, but I’m striving to be a director and put some movies out.

I phrased that one wrong. I mean how much closer are you to providing alternatives to the images out now?
R: Oh yeah, I think I’m very close to realizing that. I think that by the end of this year we will have shot my first movie if everything goes according to plan.

What are you hoping to put out?
R: The Man with the Iron Fist

There have been so many projects you’ve mentioned that have never seen the light of day. There’s the Bobby Digital movie, The Cure and The Z Chronicles…
R: It’s funny you mention The Z Chronicles, because I was just watching that yesterday. I’m thinking about doing something with that one, because I think people will like that one, man. I see you kind of know my history, so I can talk honestly with you.
I’ve got all that shit, son. It’s just sitting there, but I’m not just throwing my shit out there like that. The funny thing about the Bobby Digital movie is that I watched it about two weeks ago. I showed it to Ol’ Dirty’s son, Barson, who is 17-years-old now. He’s a grown boy now, but he had never seen it before. So I showed it to him, because his father is in it, and this is before [Ol’ Dirty Bastard] went to jail. He looks just like him—he looks just like Unique Ason, and he was so happy to see that shit. He loved that movie, and I love it too because I made it 10 years ago. I made it 10 years ago, but it was based in 1989, so that makes it even funnier. When you see it in retrospect, you’re really like, “Oh shit that’s crazy,” because of the quality.
But these were movies I did myself without a script. It’s improvised and I basically wrote it without a script. I had money and I had the time, so I did what I did. And there’s a philosophy: as I become more of a star, they become more and more valuable.

Prior to the movies, you made some history in terms of how artists deal with labels. Now that the record industry as we know it is dead, will doing all these independent deals open up new lanes for you?
R: I don’t know. The music industry needs more than the independent route; it needs a new product. I provided one, and I thought of one. I talked to a few people at some labels about it, and I don’t know if they heard me or not. I’m just gonna keep it to myself from now on. But, I’ve got an idea that would help boost the sales of the actual hard copies. You’ve got to look at what’s going on.
I told them ahead of time. In 1997 I said, “Listen. Instead of making videos when we do our albums, because we’re spending a million dollars on our videos, give me the money and I’ll do a whole movie for you. When niggas are in their cars, they can have my album and they can have my movie. They can just pay $20 for all this shit.” Nobody listened. I said, “Trust me. In five years, everybody’s going to have TVs in their cars.” They weren’t having it. I told them everything was going digital, and they didn’t listen.

That’s crazy. So now that everybody is calling themselves “content providers” instead of artists, how can you profit off of your actual music without making some ringtone shit?
R: That’s a good question, baby. I just got off the phone with the label, and it basically went like this:
“Yo, I hope y’all shipped a couple hundred thousand units, man.”
“Oh, that’s too many units to ship.”
“What do you mean?”
“It will mostly be downloads.”
“Ah, man. Some niggas still buy records, man. You still have a CD player in your ride, and you still gotta drive around bopping to your shit, right?”

Yeah, and even if you have an MP3 player in the car, the quality isn’t always the same.
R: Yo, in Africa they still have cassette players in their cars. Did you know that?

Wow. I guess there’s still a couple people holding on.
R: Not a couple, homie. In some of these countries there are millions of them. We don’t realize that the old shit we have here, they’ll put it over there and sell it to niggas as new shit.

It sounds like the underlying themes of these conversations you have with the executives is that you tell them something and they don’t understand it until five or 10 years after the fact.
[Laughs] Yeah.

Since you’re a fan of the five year plan, what are you working toward now?
R: As far as my five year plan, I’m keeping that to myself. But, it’s materializing. You see me in the films, now. You saw me studying with Mr. Tarantino for six years, and I want to be a movie director. When I hit that ripe age, and I think I’m getting close to that age, in the next year or two it’s gonna be there. First, I’m gonna make movies for entertainment purposes, of course. My style of Hip Hop was an invented style, and I think I can do the same with films. I think I can make films differently from those that we see now.
Some filmmakers are doing it—just like some producers were doing it when I was. They just didn’t get a chance to crack out of the box. But, there’s only a few of us. Tarantino was one of them, and that’s why I studied him. He’s making movies that are entertaining, homie—those are the [movies] that take two bags of popcorn! He’s sending motherfuckers back to that concession stand.

Between the “You Can’t Stop Me” video, Afro Samurai and all the Bobby Digital artwork, there’s a heavy comic book influence. What’s your favorite?
R: I’m a Silver Surfer fan, but I was a little disappointed with how they did him in the movie. I’ll tell you a couple comics that I like that haven’t been turned into movies yet, like Rom the Spaceknight. I loved Rom. Do you know about that comic Rom the Spaceknight?

Wasn’t that the cat with the big cannon on his arm?
R: Yeah, son. Yo, the story to that comic is serious, and that would be a crazy movie. Moon Knight, remember him?

Nah, I haven’t heard of him.
R: They only made 20 issues, so he didn’t make it that far. That was one of my favorite comics that I used to love too. His fuckin’ costume was off the chain! And, I’m a Spiderman buff too. I used to buy any Spiderman that came out. Then there was Sub-Mariner, Ironman—I was into the old shit. Then when X-men came out I got into that. I’m talking about the old X-Men and the new one.
I love buying comics, but I kind of stopped when Image came into the business. I slowly scaled down from there, and now I still buy a few novels. I bought the [Reginald] Hudlin’s Black Panther, and I still pick up a few here and there. Now my daughter, she has about a thousand Manga comics. She doesn’t buy Marvel, Image or any of that. It’s all Manga, and she’s got over a thousand of them shits right now

I won’t even front. I kind of purposely segued into comics because that “4th Chamber” verse about “Camouflaged chameleon, ninjas scaling your building,” has that comic book quality that makes it a favorite for us die-hard fans. But there’s a lot of your rhymes, like “Twelve Jewelz” that are so complex I don’t think a casual fan can appreciate everything you’re talking about.
R: Yeah, those aren’t just verses. Those can be written down and you just put it in your pocket as a scroll.

There are a lot of obscure pop references and Five Percent knowledge in there. Could you break that first verse down?
R: Let’s go to “Twelve Jewelz.” It starts with “The preexistence of the mathematical biochemical equation,” and you almost gotta stop right there. The rhyme goes on with, “Is the manifestation of rock, plant, air, fire and water/which are in its basic formation solid, liquid and gases,” but the preexistence of the mathematical biochemical equation—what is that? What is the mathematical, biochemical equation and what is its preexistence? Our bodies are the mathematical, biochemical equation. It’s perfectly engineered. It took time to make this, yo.

So it’s really a more complex version of that conversation at the beginning of “Black Jesus,”where Ghostface is talking about everything that exists is already inside you?
R: Yeah, right. That’s a great example. There are over 60,000 miles of veins in your body. Did you know that?

No.
R: That means you can wrap all the veins in your body around the Earth two-and-a-half times. So that’s what I was getting at by the mathematical, biochemical equation. But, remember, I said the preexistence of it though. [Laughs] Now the preexistence is rock, plant, air, fire and water. The elements were made first, and then those elements were put together to make the body. First the 99 elements, that’s like 99 names, those elements were here first. The sun is just two elements—hydrogen and helium. From just those two elements alone, the whole fuckin’ solar system is nourished.
In that one sentence, I was trying to give brothers a sentence that, if they deciphered that lyric, it was a lesson. I learned that lesson from mathematics as well. If they could decipher that lyric, it explains life, creation and the meaning of life in that one song. It starts from gas, because we existed as gases first, then liquid, and then sold. The first atom moved out of darkness, so I was trying to take brothers back to that in their minds. Your mind knows about all this shit.

What about the part with the broke Sudanese immigrant telling stories to the kids?
R: He’s an immigrant from Sudan, and Sudan is one of the ripest places on Earth. That’s where we were captured from, and it was a beautiful land. But this man was from the new colony of Sudan, and he knows certain things about history, astronomy, Deuteronomy, and books of The Bible, but he doesn’t understand the basic principles of economy in our world. That’s what you need to understand in this world. That’s why I told him, “A wise man don’t play the rules of a fool/the first thing a man must obtain is his twelve jewels.” He obtains his knowledge first, and then his wisdom.

When there’s that much in a 16-bar verse, then that probably creates the need for a Bobby Digital, which comes with the less complex stuff.
R: Yeah, that’s where I go back to having fun just rhyming. I started as an emcee, and I never wrote rhymes about sex, driving cars, imaginary stuff, life’s tales or things that happened in my life. As I started getting knowledge of self and knowledge of different things, I wrote lyrics so I would never forget what I learned. I don’t know if you heard Birth of a Prince, where I have a song called “See the Joy"

Yeah, it’s like the last song on the album, right?
R: Right. When I wrote the sperm-cell rhyme, I wrote some of those rhymes so I don’t forget. I could be in my science class, and the teacher would be teaching me a science lesson, but I’d write a rhyme out of it like, “Mitosis, meiosis,” or something.

When you’re still dropping rhymes from high school, how do you find time to balance it with all the other stuff?
R: The sad part about it is that I feel like I didn’t do nothing. How about that?

How so?
R: I feel like I’m not doing what I’m supposed to yet. I feel like…Okay, I come from the ghetto. We were a poor, starving family—I had 11 brothers and sisters. It was all kinds of hell, and I’m not talking about that to brag about it or anything. I had to get out of there, and I wanted my family out of there. We got out of there, and all praises are due to Allah for getting out of there. All praises due to Allah for everything, you know that. But, I got out of there from entertainment, so I feel that I’m not really being utilized properly in this world.
If I was somebody in power and I knew the RZA existed, I would call him to my aid. I would have him as one of my people to talk to, because I see he has an analytical way of thinking. If I was somebody in power, I’d be like, “Yo, let’s hire him.” Even if I was in the scientific community, or a professor at a college I would invite somebody like me to come. I have the analogies to make things make since to the common man, because I started as a common man. I was blessed to study, and I had a greed for knowledge. I engulfed that stuff, and at the same time I have an analytical mind. Maybe it’s genetic, because I can’t really trace that.
I’m grateful and gracious and I’m proud. I’m gonna keep doing what I’m doing—making movies and new music and whatever I do. They pay me to do that, yo. I need money, and I definitely need money now, because I’ve got a lot of shit I have to keep up.

I think you might be underestimating the influence of quality entertainment. If you were to give it to us straight, like that “Twelve Jewelz” verse with no explanation, nobody would understand that.
R: Yeah, I guess so. I mean, I’m not taking anything away from what I did, I just feel like they’re not utilizing me properly. I’m a grown man now, and in two years I’ll be prophet age. It’s just like how the Prophet Muhammad didn’t reach prophethood until the age of 40. I’m 38 now, and in two years I’ll be a real grown man. I think that’s when true manhood starts. I’m stepping toward that. Someone is supposed to invite me in to be a part of something to help in any direction they want to go in. I’m well-studied in many subjects. Anyway, that’s a whole different conversation.

think a good way to put a bow on it is to go grab this Digi Snax album—be entertained, pick the jewels out of there, and RZA gets another check too... [Laughs]
R: [Laughs] Exactly. That’s funny though, because to be honest with you—and I’ll be honest with you because I haven’t really told anyone else this and I’ve been doing interviews all day. I’m hired to do this. I didn’t make the album and go shop for a deal. The label called and literally asked, “How about another Bobby Digital album?” I didn’t want to do it at first because I was chillin’ and making money doing whatever I’m doing. But, after 8 Diagrams I was like, “Alright, fuck it. I might as well.” That was like a bad taste in my mouth and I had that emcee vengeance in me, so I figured I might as well do that.
The time I spent from January all the way up until September is part of Bobby Digital. Basically, the money I’m making for that is paying me for this year. I give myself a quota that I have to make every year, and this is helping to reach that quota. But, I would’ve taken that same amount of money from the scientific community. I’d have taken it from the philosophic community if they would’ve approached me.

It just so happened that it came from Koch, so maybe this is meant to be for right now.
R: Exactly, it just came from Koch, right? [Laughs]

(hhdx)

[Michael]

enjoyed reading that

thanks for posting!

[Elano]

 this DOPE interview deserves a BUMP

[TraceOneInfinite]

Hmmmm.... interesting.....  thought provoking... mentally stimulating....

It's nice to hear how much thought he actually puts into his work.

But as far as him thinking he's a scientist and all that and needs to be an advisor to a world leader, dude kind of sounds like a pseudo intellectual.  Kind of like when your sitting in a room and everyone is staring blankly at each other, then the ganga gets passed around and suddenly everyone is talking like a great philospher and thinks they are a genius.

But regardless, great interview, props to Rza, and also nice to hear him mention the prophet Muhammad of Mekkah.

[Episcop Cruel Cvrle]

propz elano

[Australian Bastard]

Props Elano

Hmmmm.... interesting.....  thought provoking... mentally stimulating....

It's nice to hear how much thought he actually puts into his work.

But as far as him thinking he's a scientist and all that and needs to be an advisor to a world leader, dude kind of sounds like a pseudo intellectual.  Kind of like when your sitting in a room and everyone is staring blankly at each other, then the ganga gets passed around and suddenly everyone is talking like a great philospher and thinks they are a genius.

^Why the cynicism and pompous attitude Infinite?  What is a real 'intellectual' anyway? A real intellectual is humble cus he may know he knows  a little, but in the great scheme of things he knows he knows very little...


Ive sat with people who originally didn't know or care much for the world save for that directly infront of them, only to blaze the ganja and conversation then leaps to great heights and lows, the most basic facts are then profound revelations and their significance is simply recognised. But I never regard people going through this stage as 'pseudo intellectuals' because it is something we all go through and continue to go through; ignorance to enlightenement, day to day minute to minute.

 
I personnally think alot of answers to the World's problems are very simple and basic. However we complicate things greatly and demand more and more complications.



Make the smallest distinction, and heaven and earth are set infintely apart.
-Dogen.

[heat]

Rza is smart, interesting interview indeed but the part where hes talking bout becoming an advisor to a leader of the world or whatever was abit too much.. Interesting what he said that we have enough veins in our body to go 2,5 times around the world! Thats crazy..