Interview: RZA

Everybody loves Wu-Tang – even now, after 15 years of highs and lows. White rock kids who don’t buy hip hop… you ask them if they like Wu-Tang: “Oh yeah, Wu-Tang! That’s the only hip hop I had.” The most successful and influential act in the game, Wu-Tang was the brainchild of one man with production genius, an utterly uncompromising five-year business plan and a unique, if baffling, philosophy. The RZA, the GZA, Ol’ Dirty Bastard, Inspectah Deck, Method Man, Raekwon the Chef, Ghostface Killa, Master Killa, U-God: all household MC names thanks to their leader’s vision, but it’s the RZA who has really transcended hip hop.

He may score Hollywood flicks for Tarantino, but he never lost his hardcore. Prior to a rare, wow-they-all-turned-up Wu-Tang show in London, RZA broke down how it came to pass.

Rakeem Zig-Zag-Zig Allah was born plain Robert Diggs in Brooklyn in 1969, one of 11 siblings: “I came in number four or five,” he says, grinning. “I had a welfare moms. She did little hustles – run numbers [a kind of ghetto lottery] and shit like that. Pop disappeared; our stepfather grew up with us. He was a unique gambler. Unique. Gambler. This dude know how to win. My stepfather? You could do a movie about this guy, man. He’s one of the last dinosaurs of a certain breed of people. You ever see that movie Rounders? Matt Damon and them? You know how these certain gamblers got everything a certain way? He was one of those people – that rare breed of people that really knew how to make sure he won.”

I suggest he must have been a big influence on his stepson – who has done little but win – and he agrees in kind: “Yeah definitely, as a kid ’cos he was the male figure in our house. And, as a kid he’d send me into gambling dens – the pit – with a bottle of liquor and a box of cards. I’d go in and sell it to the owner. Nah’m sayin?”

Well, yes and no. At just what age was his stepfather employing him as an illegal gambling runner? “Pro’lly nine-years-old. Imagine that. Started at nine and at 13 I was regularly doin’ it; kinda lookin’ forward to doin’ it.”

It almost sounds too Henry Hill, gangster-romantic to be true, but some kids just get dealt all wild cards: RZA had already been lucky enough to witness hip hop’s baby steps while he was still in shorts when his older cousin Gary Grice – the Genius, the GZA – took him to a block party. “I was about seven-years-old,” he continues. “Musta been the summer of ’77, maybe ’76. I heard the DJ and the rappers just… doing their thing. Shit blew my mind, yo.”

The cousins didn’t need to haul up to The Bronx or Harlem, either: “It was Staten Island, actually. Staten Island had pioneers as well. You think about them top stars – personalities like Grandmaster Flash and Grand Wizard Theodore – they came to Staten Island to battle Doctor Rock and The Force MCs. Doctor Rock took the mixer, put it on the floor [holds arms wide, swings foot] dah dah dah dah! I was blown away. So from that point on, I was basically lookin’ for the beat, nah’mean? Maybe around age 11, I was DJing. Got a pair of straight-arm Technics turntables.”

He also got around more than most; it’s how the Wu-Tang Clan was eventually drawn together. “Y’know, you gotta think, I was a kid from a big family of poverty, so every year, we’d move,” he recalls. “I lived in over 20 locations by the time I was 18… Pittsburgh and Ohio also, so I knew so many people. I done been to 12 schools, pro’lly.”

In his teens, Diggs (then going by the name of Rakeem) became a fearless everything-everywhere man. With his cousins GZA and Ol’ Dirty Bastard (RIP), he picked up cohorts by battling all-comers with turntables, rhymes and beat-boxing. He met Ghostface around 1985 in a beat-box battle (“Ghost went by the name of Doug, Doug Lover,” he says, laughing) and quickly won a reputation as Staten’s finest all-rounder, making contacts in every borough and city he landed in: “One thing I’d say, all praises due, was the multi-talented thing I had about me. I tried to do it all and still collect my comic books, nah’m sayin’? We all never put a record out though; we put out neighbourhood tapes. That’s what got us famous. You know Big Daddy Kane, who was one of the top MCs in 1987? He was lookin’ for us! I found this out a few years ago. We was talking about the old days and he was like ‘Yo, y’all made that All In Together tape?’ That tape was spreading from New York to Miami. You know, me and Raekwon made two full albums before, in ’87, maybe ’86. Two full-length tapes of like 12 songs.” I salivate.

RZA’s teenage years were set against a backdrop almost unique to black youth in US cities. Around 1985, the crack cocaine pandemic exploded, changing their society forever. Families were torn up; prostitution, gun crime and incarceration shot through the roof. “A year to a gram it got, at one point,” RZA remembers. “A gram of cocaine was 15 dollars. That means the wholesale price was seven, eight dollars. So the import price from Colombia musta been two to three dollars? So, a black man’s life was worth three dollars a year. Crack took over the adults and empowered the youth, but the power it gave was a negative power. I remember guys I went to high school with… they wasn’t nervous, but they wasn’t thugs, you know? Just okay dudes. When crack came, we all start tryin’ to hustle and those same guys became… killer instinct – started carrying guns, everybody thought they was cooler, tryin’ to get a Benz. I remember U-God when he first bought a lil’ Volvo – 16, 17 with a Volvo? Everybody thought they was the coolest motherfuckers and shit – 16-year-old with a car and a big gold chain. Crack empowered the youth, but certainly went and fucked up the adults. I mean, you got grown women suckin’ your dick, nah’mean? Pretty women that you’d fantasise about? A year later they fuckin’ like…[he hunches, beckoning], ‘Pst pst pst!’”

He, like many black men running wild in the upturned era, kept his soul in check through Five-Percent Nation ideals: “I was part of the Gods and Earths, so I would have ciphers [teaching circles], y’know? The 120 lessons?” [Hip hop fans will. It’s a peculiarly black American Islamic system of finding ‘knowledge of self’ using codified Supreme Mathematics and Alphabet. It was common currency in hip hop back then, but you rarely come across it now, since 9/11 and America’s misguided fear of Islam.] “I mastered mines by the age of 13. Some people in the Wu still haven’t mastered it. By the age of 13, I’m a teacher. By the time I was 15, I already had 20 students. Students. In Brooklyn. Some of the meanest niggas too. They was protecting me, my students. They looked up to me. They used to call me ‘The Scientist’.”

Still, the teachings of Clarence 13X, founder of the Five Percenters, didn’t keep him out of trouble permanently, and though he knew he had talent and great achievement must soon come, a master plan to keep him out of jail for good had yet to come and fully form.

“I meditated on this for months and months,” RZA explains. “I had an epiphany after I walked out of court one time. My mother gave me that word – that certain mother eye-to-eye thing – and my face was just stuck in a smile. I’ll never forget this. I was smiling for 24 hours. I mean, I don’t even know how to smile…”

But you’re smiling now.

“Nah, I’m serious! You rarely see me smile. I can laugh when I’m talking, but you rarely… I was… stuck. People was looking at me like, huh? I was in Ohio at the time, I said, ‘Mom, I’m going back to New York,’ and I went back and got an apartment. Five of us all living together. At this time, me and Ghost[face] was inseparable. I even tried to separate myself from him. I was like, ‘Yo, I’m gonna ruin your life,’ ’cos we were doing so much… shit, nah’mean? He had got shot and all this shit, so I was like, ‘You go your way and I’ll go my way, man. I don’t wanna ruin your life,’ and Ghost was like, ‘Nah, I don’t wanna go. I wanna let you know I believe this is us.’ So I say, ‘Give me some months, take a few months apart.’ I remember we had nearly 20 grand; he took 10, I took 10. I was walking round… thinking.”

Weaving his own life experiences into those of the warriors in the Kung Fu flicks over which he obsessed, he found Wu-Tang its name and ideology and spoke with some artists he knew to come up with a logo to brand his then nebulous plan. “I offered 200 dollars – half my rent at the time – but after three different tries I finally said, ‘You know what? Nah, take this: I just want a sword and a book, and that’s what I wanna bring to the world. I want them to choose. They either choose the book and we give ’em the wisdom, or they choose the sword and we chop their fuckin’ heads off.’ That’s what ‘Protect Ya Neck’ came outta.”

‘Protect Ya Neck’ was the first Wu-Tang Clan 12” that caught the ear of the street and underground radio, late 1992, and the label bore the illustration of his ethic. By the time he’d got an album deal, it had been redeveloped into the W-shaped fighting blade that would end up gracing millions of records sleeves and garments and become a globally recognised hand signal.

“So man, this is all part of the philosophy of Wu-Tang; the Kung Fu and… just really becoming a better man,” he says. “I wasn’t the first person to use Wu-Tang as a slang word. I think I could credit Ghost and them Stapleton niggas for that. They would call Olde English beer… ‘That’s Wu-Tang! That’s that Wu-Juice!’ They was doing this before… maybe I wasn’t around this time, when I was in Brooklyn more. Then I hear, ‘Y’all know about Wu-Tang?’ I said, ‘Yeah,’ and I started explaining what it really was, ’cos I knew what it was. I knew some of the philosophy of Asian culture and I was like, ‘Well, Shaolin is the foundation of Wu-Tang, and so we come from Shaolin. But the Wu-Tang would be the people that leave and spread the knowledge and shit – negatively and positively – ’cos in most of the movies they were the bad guys, nah’mean?”

Thus, Staten Island was re-christened Shaolin and, in hip hop, the borough is still so called to this day. As RZA’s artistic tenets took shape, all he had to do was cement his disciples and shop the music he’d made piecemeal with them to a label: “We didn’t have the album yet. What I had by that time was songs with everybody in the crew. Everybody in Wu-Tang wasn’t tight wit’ each other like that at first. Y’know, Rae and Ghost was from opposing street teams? I remember the day when I was telling everybody, ‘I’m gonna form this,’ and I had to get Ghost and Rae and everybody to…” He pauses and presses his hands calmly down together. “You know what I learned years later, even though I brought them together to squash they beef? They came with guns. It wasn’t really gonna get squashed. Only thing that squashed it was me being there, ’cos everybody there respected me as the god. I’m not being egotistical, but I did have a location. I lived in Stapleton, they was in Park Hill – still at war to this day, going back and forth over some bullshit – but my house was the place where you come in and your enemy be sittin’ on the couch. And then you gotta put your gun down and be neutral. That’s what started everybody getting respect; that’s what started all of us getting tight and then everybody start appreciating everybody’s lyrical style. I started going back to all my favourite MCs: U-God, Method Man, all of them. I was like ‘Yo, I got a plan.’ I had to talk to them individually at first, and it took about a year for the plan to come to fruition. After that time, we had ‘Protect Ya Neck’, and we already had a lotta demos, ’cos everybody would come to my house to do ’em. We recorded ‘Method Man’, which is one of them Wu Tang classics, when my lights was out! I had to plug a plug downstairs through my aunt’s house, stealin’ the electricity! But when I seen the path? The true path? I was like, ‘Yo, yo – I got it. I see it. Just give me five years.’”

RZA naturally took control. It was a given; nobody doubted his leadership.

“Well, it was recognised I was the best knower,” he admits. “You talk to U-God. Yo, he knew me for some wild things, but mostly that I was one of the most intelligent young brothers he ever met.”

All eight other members happily agreed to let RZA head a five-year dynasty with their collective fates in his hands and, armed with an almost foolishly ambitious business plan, he set to work turning his ideas into the most successful hip hop act of all time: music, video, clothing lines, Playstation game, the works: “At the time, I think it was Elektra or one of them companies offered about 200,000 for the group. We had the deal on the table, but 200,000? My niggas? They didn’t go in for it, especially not niggas from the streets that, in a minute, was making money doing that… other shit. We understand the power of money, nah’mean? So it was more like, ‘Nah, it gotta be a situation where we do a deal wit’ choo for the group, but be prepared to go out there and shop the individual talents so we can increase.’”

It was an immensely bold pitch to throw at any label, but with ‘Protect Ya Neck’ making waves, with GZA having had an LP out through Warners and RZA’s own earlier EP on Tommy Boy (as Prince Rakeem), he carried enough weight to catch the right ears in the industry and Loud Records, an RCA subsidiary, finally opened up and inked the page.

In 1993, the Wu-Tang debut, Enter The Wu-Tang (36 Chambers), hit the streets. The rest, as RZA plainly says, is history. The debut went platinum, the individuals quickly went solo (RZA recently released his fourth album, Digi Snacks) and thanks to his fair-deal Wu-Tang Productions management (up until he relinquished total control, as he always promised), everybody got their C.R.E.A.M.

“My idea was to keep getting these deals and building up the money and that’s what happened,” he states with due pride. “Method Man got signed, Ol’ Dirty got signed, GZA got signed. And other gods who didn’t get signed still was able to have some money coming, because the company had money, nah’mean? ‘Here’s 25 Gs to keep you up.’ It kept things balanced and shit, even for those who had deals, but were in between records. The company had built up money repertoire and that was my main plan: to be able to have each one of us taking care of each other as we growing.”

He shrugs, because to the RZA, that’s how life is, and you can’t fuck with that.

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