RZA Interview about A.I. music

[The Predator]

The Wu-Tang visionary gives the long view on trend cycles, the possibilities (and dangers) of AI, and why struggling with production gear might be a good thing



 When RZA, then known as Prince Rakeem, got dropped from Tommy Boy after his 1989 “Ooh I Love You Rakeem” single underperformed commercially, he knew he had to go back to the drawing board. It’s said that in order to break the rules, you have to grasp them in the first place. RZA already had enough experience to know what he needed to do: Corral a crew of fellow Staten Islanders and kick down the door of the music industry.

Wu-Tang Clan’s classic 1993 debut, Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers), boasts a grungy sound that seems uninterested in mass appeal. But it became a rap touchstone anyway. RZA asked his Wu-Tang cohorts to give him five years to guide their careers, and he mapped out a game plan that helped make several of them standalone stars with iconic solo catalogs. Since then, he’s delved headfirst into Hollywood, acting, scoring, and producing films, while also helming Wu-Tang: An American Saga, the rap-biopic TV series.

RZA’s vision is undeniable, which makes him an ideal source to talk about the future of music. We talked to him about Afrobeats’ impact, why struggling with production gear might be a good thing, the possibilities and dangers of AI, and much, much more.

Who’s an artist that you expect to have a huge impact shaping the future of music?
Burna Boy is leading the pack. He’s having the best moment, but [I love] the Afrobeats and what’s coming from the motherland, the vibe that it inspires and our music out here. There was a lot of strong immigration into America in the Eighties and Nineties, and 2000s. A lot of the children from those different countries — whether it’s Nigeria, Liberia, Libya, Ghana — have second generations here and have a reference right back to their native culture and their native land with this Afrobeats movement.


If you look at Drake and Rihanna, or Beyoncé bringing in Afrobeats during the Lion King project, that vibe is something that within five to 10 years can be as influential and integrated as the South when [it] become the predominant sound of hip-hop.

You just mentioned Drake, Rihanna, Beyoncé. You see even more artists in the future trying to ingratiate themselves to Afrobeats?
If you look at the history of hip-hop, it’s always integrated culture. If you go back to this first big hip-hop hit, you’ll see that it’s actually Sugarhill Gang using the funk of Nile Rodgers and Chic. When you go further and we get into the Eighties, you’ll notice that every hip-hop artist had a reggae track on their album.

A couple of years later, everybody had an R&B track on their album. You get into the Nineties, and you get the big Method Man collaboration, and then you get a slew of that type of vibe that goes in. I skipped Run-D.M.C. with the rock infusion, Beastie Boys … but hip-hop always grabs something of it. And then eventually there’s artists that embrace it as a full and top the charts. I think Bruno Mars is a good example of embracing funk and R&B of the Seventies, Eighties, and Nineties, and then taking it to become one of the number-one artists in the world, modern day.

Are there any other current trends within music that you see growing bigger in the future?
Well, it’s a cycle, too. It seems there’s a bubbling underground-New York vibe coming back, which is interesting. But also, and this is my point of view, hip-hop has always been the voice of the streets, the gritty streets. No matter what part of the world the artists came from, it was rough upbringings.

I think with the success of artists like Drake, Childish Gambino, even when you look at Post Malone and the artists in that field, I think we’ll get a generation of artists that are not necessarily coming from the underprivileged point of view, just coming from hip-hop is their music, and that’s the art. That’s what they love. And they’ll give us versions of hip-hop that will continue to expand it.


New Yorkers are going drill right now. They’re drilling, they’re making songs, they shoot you, they make a demo on you. And [then consider] the censorship of lyrics, which personally I think is foolish — I think it’s foolish to say that you could take somebody’s lyrics and use them in a court of law. Then every artist has a level of guilt.

I think that there’s a generation that’s going to come up, whether they’re sons and daughters of the hip-hop community, [or] families of kids who are living respectable lives, who love the music, [are] able to get ahold of the equipment, create, and express themselves. So I see that as a movement that’s happening.

Nowadays, you’ll see these videos of nine-year-olds, 10-year-olds playing with production software or hardware in a way that I didn’t see when I was that age. What do you think are the implications of aspiring producers being introduced to the art form at younger ages?
That’s great for the future of music because the entry point is always important, and technology allows that entry point to be in the palm of their hands. You could have a whole orchestra in your phone. That’s powerful. That’s going to lead to more younger, advanced [producers]. When Rodney Jerkins came, he was a phenomenon. There wasn’t a lot of people like him. And soon we have a generation where maybe there’s a thousand who, because of technology, their entry point, and their love of music, are able to use the production tools to create tracks and sounds that are way ahead of us. If I would’ve had the things that we have now, no telling what would’ve been created with the ambition that I had.

So, hopefully that technology doesn’t dampen the ambition. There is something in struggling to make the machine do what you want. There is something in the limitation of the SP-1200 or the ASR-10. There was something in those limitations that forced you to calculate and use the time you’re sampling almost like money. You had to conserve, you couldn’t just go ahead. Now they got samplers [where you can] sample for 24 hours, versus 12 seconds when we was doing it.

How do you feel about the proliferation of artificial intelligence in the industry?
AI is a powerful thing, and it should be just another tool for us. It should be just like the ASR, the MPC, Pro Tools, or Ableton — another tool used to get musical creative ideas expressed, captured, and then make the best song that we can that make people dance, laugh, become inspired or introspective. But if it becomes something that makes the song for you, I think there’s a danger in that. And I think the danger in it is not immediate, but in the long term, that natural human quality of inspiration that we can’t actually define [may lessen]. I don’t think computers have reached the level of definition of that.

Even if you have a quantum computer, because just that pause I just did to speak, I didn’t intentionally plan that pause. There’s something natural about life itself that music captures. That becomes a recording of space, time, spirit, energy of a person that just continues to go on and go on for generations. Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On” is a great example of that. Look at how simple that track actually is in the production and the amount of production there, but yet just how soulful and inspiring and engaging that track is. I hope we don’t lose that.

How do you feel about the prospect of people using RZA vocals or putting Drake vocals on a Wu-Tang beat?
One, it’s entertainment. Music is to entertain. Anything that’s in your phone or your TV set or your electronic keyboard, and even your wooden guitar, it’s for entertainment, so use it to entertain. But when you start talking about people’s catalog and things, there’s business to it, too. So that’s just something I would be conscious of. If somebody took a Wu-Tang song and put another rapper on it and people loved it, great. That’s like me sampling somebody, and redefining it for my generation. That’s part of creativity. But there’s still … it’s a business to it. And I don’t always agree with the business.

The sample laws were harmful to the culture. There was no floor and ceiling. I think everything should have a floor and ceiling. If you take somebody’s song and sample it, and then the copyright holder comes in and takes 90 percent of that song from you, something is wrong with the system — especially if the copyright holder took the 90 percent of the song from you, but didn’t go back and pay the musicians who played on the damn song, right?

So it’s like, “Hold on.” If it’s for a cause, it’s for a cause. But it was just a yank. I always thought that this would be a system that had a floor and a ceiling based on what you took. So maybe there’s only five percent [of what a rights holder could take for a sample]. To me, the ceiling would be 50 percent. Because no matter what, a song consists of music and vocals, so I would have a 50 percent ceiling for anything. Even on the AI, if a creative guy got out there and created something that didn’t exist by using what did exist, meaning my voice or Wu-Tang voice and Drake voice and all of that, and it became lucrative, there should be some economics involved. I would put a ceiling at 50 percent, but of course that won’t happen. It’ll be a total copyright infringement. And most likely they would have to call for 100 percent.

Can you speak to the way that artificial intelligence has been relatively productive over the years? I talked to Pharrell Williams and he expressed that people have always been integrating AI in some fashion.
The digital sampler is a form of AI. The sampler interprets the wave of the music [as] what it’s supposed to be. It’s not what it is. It’s a mathematical number saying an evaluation of what it is. And that all depends on if you’re doing 12 bits, 17 bits, 44 bits, and all that — that would give you the different interpretation of that evaluation. When you go back and listen to a lot of the big songs and the echo voices and all the effects that was used, those were all basically digitally, therefore artificially, produced. Before there was a digital echo chamber, you had to get a big-ass piece of metal, put it in the studio, get a plate, and the shit was the size of a refrigerator.

So it’s always been here, like Pharrell said. Now, it’s advanced. Now, the AI that Roger Troutman was trying to do with his vocoder, it can use anybody’s voice clearly. Just like your telephone, just like Siri. They sound clear, with inflections of their voice, and almost as if there’s communication going on.

Now, here’s the glitch in it, because I haven’t heard the song yet, but I know the Beatles are doing the song right now with John Lennon’s artificially produced voice through AI. Anything with John Lennon we’re going to love. What a voice. But the Catch-22 is that Paul and the rest of the guys’ voices have evolved and have changed.

The AI hasn’t reached the level that I’m going to always sound like the 19-year-old RZA. It doesn’t have that equation yet. It’s nothing like the real thing. So AI at this moment to me is like McDonald’s. Of course you could eat McDonald’s and get full and make it to the next day, but as that movie Super Size Me showed us, after 30 days of eating that shit, you’re going to need some real food, bro. And I say the same thing about music: You’re going to want the real thing. You’re going to want something else, something real, whether it’s somebody that’s picking up a guitar.… My last thing, and I’ll pass you the mic: Remember the year when Bobby McFerrin wins the Grammy for “Don’t Worry Be Happy”? And he just used his mouth for every damn instrument?

It was at that time in the Eighties when the overproduced music and the overproduced sound and the big bands, we just got tired of it. And we just wanted some simple shit. And if you go back 20, 30 years before him, that’s basically Harry Belafonte, [sings] “Day-o.” The simplicity returns because that’s just the human nature. After a while, you just want purity. The purity has to reemerge. And I don’t think AI will be able to produce that force. So as it grows, it’ll be somebody else that’ll pop up with the purity that’ll come in and reset the game.

What do you think it would take for streaming to be more fair and equitable for musicians?
It’s come a long way. It takes a lot to make money, but it seems the industry is rebounding a little bit. Definitely from 10 years ago, 15 years ago, it was a soggy diet of potato chips. But [DSPs] could lose another zero and move that digit closer to the decimal point. And I think that’s just going to take coalition. There’s not a unified system for musicians. It’s no union that gets together and delegates and sets a standard.… [There] has to be a redefinition of the value of what someone should be paying based on their music being performed.

The industry was smart in the old days, so the mechanical royalty simply [referred to] if you pressed it up and the [people who produced the album artwork and vinyls] all made money based on your music. So there was a mechanical right for you to get a piece of the action. It was pennies, but it was something. Now, it’s nothing. I could stream your music a billion times, and at best you’ll make maybe five percent of the true value of what you generated. So if that change wants to happen and we want to change, the musicians got to [come together] against that.

In 2020, you sold a portion of your publishing. I was wondering if you anticipate that being more of a standard in the future for artists with a vast catalog? Is that something that aspiring artists should have as part of their game plan for their careers?
The majority of people [selling their catalogs] have been the ones who are at their retirement age. And it’s something you can count on for your estate planning. Maybe artists should be conscious of that. My point of view was, “Can you find a partner that can take what you have now, put a value on it?” Let’s just say it’s valued at one dollar. Can that person then take 50 cents of that dollar, pay you a multiple on your other 50 cents, and then help you turn that dollar to two dollars? If that can happen, and if you can forecast and plan with that capacity, then yeah, artists could think that way in the midlevel of their careers.

You think about Future, it was reported that he sold a big piece of his, right? And he’s got a long way to go still. So the idea that he liquidates a chunk of his past so he can go ahead in his present, build value for his future? That’s smart business.