Renaissance Man

Rapper, producer, actor, composer, martial-arts enthusiast, chess aficionado, author, businessman — RZA wears many hats, all of which fit. It's hard to think of a more ubiquitously iconic figure in hip-hop, or a more visionary individual: RZA doesn't just make beats and spit rhymes, he captures moods, drops depth-charge metaphors, and creates epic mythologies.

"I did start with nothing and I made something," says the man also known as Bobby Digital, who grew up in Park Hill, a notorious Staten Island housing project. "When you're living in the projects, with felons and criminals, you have to learn knowledge of self."

Eric K. Arnold

The RZA diagrams a prolific future.

Details

RZA performs on Tuesday, Dec. 11, at 9 p.m. Admission is $30; call 771-1422 or visit www.theindependentsf.com for more info.

The Independent

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More About

• RZA (Rapper)
• Wu-Tang Clan
• Bobby Digital
• Hip-Hop and Rap
• Chess

RZA relates that he grew up with true hip-hop culture, unlike the current generation. "A lot of people that's doing hip-hop right now, they learned it from TV," he says. "They don't really know. When I spit my first lyric, there must have been 100 MCs in the world. Now there's a million."

A powerful force both as a solo artist and as the self-styled "Abbot" of Wu-Tang Clan, RZA notes the group's impact has been felt throughout the pop-culture spectrum. "So many people say the first hip-hop they ever bought was Wu-Tang. ... We opened that world up."

In addition to the motherfuckin' ruckus, RZA feels Wu-Tang brought "a certain sense of mysticism" to the music scene: "We're not only hip-hop artists, but we also appeared to be superheroes. It made kids wanna be that."

Despite his lack of musical training, RZA's first album as producer — 1993's Enter the Wu-Tang: 36 Chambers — went platinum. "That was a time I took sound and pulses, whereas music is supposed to be harmony and melody," he explains. "Nobody ever looked at music as being a pulse. That's why I was able to take a sound like 'wa-wa-wa' and put drums on it and make it something totally new and different." Digital technology can result in a too-clean sound, yet, he says, "My shit sounded gritty because of the grit that I sampled."

RZA's technique has been emulated not just by other producers, but also by programs like Motif, which offer "lo-fi" drums. "Now, there's a button on your computer," he says. "Even software has mimicked my way of production. So I think I opened up the minds of technology people."

He also inspired director Jim Jarmusch, who, in turn, "opened me up to a world I was itching to get into" by asking RZA to score his 1998 film Ghost Dog. RZA then met Quentin Tarantino, also a Wu fan. "He never used a composer in none of his movies before," RZA says. Working with the likes of Ridley Scott — RZA plays a detective in Scott's American Gangster — Giancarlo Esposito, and Danny Glover additionally pushed the musician-turned-actor into further pursuing his silver-screen ambitions.

Though he's moved to Los Angeles, RZA hasn't gone completely Hollywood. He's still very much a hip-hopper at heart, and his fervent hope is that the new Wu-Tang album 8 Diagrams (slated for Dec. 11 release; see review online this week) will return "balance" to the genre. "When 8 Diagrams comes out, it's not gonna sound like anything else that's out there," he says. "It's gonna be up to the fans, and the hip-hop community, to accept that difference and to force hip-hop to grow. If they don't accept that difference, it'll still be stuck in the stalemate point that we're in."

It's fitting that this maverick grandmaster would use a chess reference to describe today's rap game. It would be foolish to doubt the accuracy of his statement; RZA has already altered the course of music history. There's no reason to believe he can't do it again.