Indyvisuals
Published in the May 2014 issue, part of our music extravaganza
In 1990, back on Staten Island, he called himself Prince—Prince Rakeem. That was the name he used then, making less-than-average novelty rap numbers, scratching his way toward a possible album, maybe a career of sorts. Prince Rakeem, Bobby Steels, Rzarector: He was all those things until he was just RZA, a name that felt earned by his stepping around the record deals and the management contracts. The stepping around resulted in his creating the Wu-Tang Clan when he was twenty-two. Nine disparate emcees picked up from the projects around Staten Island united behind RZA to release Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) in 1993, the White Album of hip-hop rec-ords, a generous sampling featuring a Chinese kung-fu movie; studio and live performances; throbbing, marauding, simple bass beats pierced by subtle piano riffs; and, rarest of rare, those nine different emcees willing to stand aside to let the others work, having been convinced by RZA—using the fundamentals of the samurai code—to act as one. Loyalty, code, discipline. RZA preached that, and the men listened.
"When we started, our goal was to become the industry," RZA says. "We started in my apartment. I didn't have no power, didn't pay the light bill. No one cared. No one knew any different. Making demo after demo, people just rotating through. I'm the only thing that was always there. And that's how 36 Chambers was formed—in the demos, in going into the studios as one. We recorded them again. Our own way. The whole industry. To take it [away] from people who had nothing to do with us. Record executives, managers, engineers. We took it. One army."
Here and now, RZA is a kind of prince. At forty-three, he is regal, elegant, contained—the embodiment of a prince. On this afternoon, there's a robe twisted all the way around him, held at the collar. Him sitting high in a chair, back set rigid, upright. An attendant at his side, a lieutenant dozing along a low garden wall. A woman brings drinks. This on a terrazzo set beneath a trellis, all of that sitting at the top of a tiered garden. The past—how he got here—described as a kind of long spiritual pilgrimage, detailed in a long ramble. Like: "I was spiritual before I became a performer, know what I'm sayin'? And that was after Christianity let me down. The teachings of it didn't work when I weighed it against the people who was teaching it to me. It was like saying, 'You exercise the body enough and everything be fine, you thrive'—only you saying it and you don't got no muscle. Anybody can see how weak you are, know what I'm sayin'? I'm a boy then. Ten, eleven, twelve. I'm like, 'What the fukk you talking about? It doesn't add up. It's not being practiced.' And it got to the point where I came to feel I was being persecuted by the people who were teaching me Christianity. There was no example for a young man to follow. Because I'm like, 'Don't tell me to turn the other cheek when you aren't turning your own.' " A lot of words, making for a dense patch of seconds. Like any poet or balladeer, like any prince who needs to be heard, the RZA punctuates his words with more words still. "Keep in mind now, I'm the guy who wrote, 'Turn the cheek and I'll break your fukking chin.' " Then he lets fall his conversation hook, the five-syllable rhythmic coda of his every decree: "Know what I'm sayin'?"
Regarding the scene above: The robe around RZA is a barber's smock. The throne, a kitchen stool. Around him—manager, driver, assistants, sure. But this is just a haircut for RZA, spiritual father of the ethereal and unending Wu-Tang Clan, in his own backyard. The Clan: RZA, Method Man, Ghostface Killah, Raekwon, GZA, U-God, Masta Killa, Inspectah Deck, the late Ol' Dirty b*stard— aliases all, still odd enough to come from the highly weird, weirdly unknowable future in which names are pure mask and metaphor.
"It flowed through me," he says. His barber slips the number one off the end of his clippers, and RZA assesses the rightness of the edge where hair meets forehead. "It was them, but it flowed through me. That's why I'm on the line every time it does or doesn't happen with us. It's on me right now, on me. Always on me. It's what I'm trying to do with this next album." The Wu-Tang are perennially working on a new album. This year, there are two. The first is a single-copy release—just one physical copy, which you can pay to hear in person, at a traveling display. Called Once Upon a Time in Shaolin, it's RZA's reinvention of the album release as public event, which will, he hopes, circumvent the power of BitTorrent and bootleggers. The second is a much-anticipated album that RZA talks about now as if it's hanging in the air right in front of him. To get it done, he's slogging through the familiar process of bringing the Wu together again, one by one. It's always tough.
He is asked what he will call the album.
"It's called A Better Tomorrow."
Anyone who knows RZA knows he has a weakness for the spiritual—not religion so much as the spiritual life. But there's a physical self here in the backyard, too. The man looks stouter than he should at forty-three. Standing, he gets broomed off by his barber and slips on a jacket held up by a lieutenant. He pulls at the lapels, releases his arms. He is a scene in and of himself, dressing for the rising of the sun: the black leather jacket, the boots, the dark glasses—even there in the garden. RZA straight up. Tall as hell. He's always seemed a little slump-shouldered, but this is not true. He's fluid when he moves, rigid when still, has biceps like cantaloupes. He looks damned ready to pull together an album, but it's been a year and a half since he started it. "I went down to Memphis last year, was in the studio with Al Green's original guitarist, his original band, and Isaac Hayes's musicians. I went to Europe, to studios of high standing, you get me? I've accumulated 70 percent of this album, and now I gotta wait," he says.
