The secret to running a large organization, Clinton says, is letting things happen in their own time. “If you try and control somebody, they’re going to rebel like a motherfukker.” Ideally, in a group like Parliament-Funkadelic or Wu-Tang Clan, “you have the freedom to shine within the realm of everybody else, you pick your time and move into something and if it’s working, everybody will get behind you without even thinking. But that’s [the leader’s] job as a traffic cop—to kind of weave people in and out.”
Composed, in it for the long haul, RZA quietly pilots his own mothership. He passes out the comic-book names for crew members, but this isn’t a scene from RZA-voir Dogs. When U-God pulled a Steve Buscemi making it clear he didn’t want to be Mister Pink, RZA let him pick his own alter-ego. He has kept Wu-Tang on-point and thinking about the unit.
“Most of the time it’s like organized confusion, because you got nine members, nine individual thoughts hovering,” says Inspektah Dek. “Sometimes the beat can be on for three or four days with nobody saying nothing; then all it takes is that one head to go in there and lay that first vise, and then it’s smash.”
The group will conference out a general course; RZA’ll put his thoughts on the table and others are free to accept or disagree. On
Wu-Tang Forever, he noticed halfway through that the set was heavy with brutal stuff, so he started talking to everybody about writing wittier, lighter material.
For over two decades, Marshall Allen played alto sax in Sun Ra’s science-fiction jazz group Arkestra. When I asked him about the visionary band leader, he could’ve been speaking of RZA and the Wu-Tang. “Sun Ra knew people pretty well. He was good at psychology,” says Allen, age 73 and living in Philadelphia. “He tailor-made the music for the person. He would challenge each individual.” Discussion was critical. “There would be conversations about everything that is, and of the things that ain’t,” says Allen.
Even by himself, RZA courts confusion, looks for the mystery spot where sounds don’t quite harmonize, where a beat falls out of synch. Hit-making producers tend to use samples like designer logos, as recognizable artifacts that give a listener the illusion of unlimited access. But you can’t play a name-that-sample when RZA works; he uses ill moments from a tune nobody else hears, or defaces a classic until it’s a piece of Coke-bottle sea glass.
His music is a sleeping place that the ressurector brings to life, a funky-smelling wax museum where Blacula chases Roy Ayers through the crushed-velvet hallways.
“The way I look at it is, whatever we do in that studio is a recorded part of our life,” says RZA. “So there ain’t no ever to that.As long as life is, there ain’t no ever to life, cause you’re living in it. Whatever happens, happens. Sometimes there’ll be all kinds of errors in the music, and to me it makes it sound fatter because you can never expect an error, or else you wouldn’t make it.”
That’s easier done today. RZA was born in Brooklyn, but when he was three and a half, he was shipped off to live with an uncle in Murfreesboro, North Carolina. His parents were separating then, and in any case, there was no money at home to take care of a child. It was his uncle, a doctor, who RZA says gave him a positive image of himself, and exposed him to the world outside of the projects.
“That was the man who influenced me. He taught me to have my good nature. If you see me acting well-mannered—I can come to your house and eat right and not be obnoxious and treat you with respect—all my manners I learned from him.”
RZA doesn’t know why he was sent to live with his mom when he was seven; dad was out of the picture. The uncle died a year later. It signalled the end of a period of security in RZA’s life.
“I flash back to a lot of different bad things and see the goodness of it, you see what I’m saying? Just being young and shyt, you’re not feeling things your mother would feel—she’s the one that got to take care of you. You may not eat, but you playing
all night!”
Maybe here begins the nostalgia that threads through RZA’s 150-odd productions, echoey mixes that trigger sense-memories for places that you haven’t even seen. “Can it be so simple then?” Gladys Knight laments on a sample RZA loves. Nobody gets to look at their past through a microscope: it must be even harder to sort things out when your moment of personal awakening coincided with the peak in drug-trade insanity. Crack was Wu-Tang’s endless summer. Is it any wonder their longing is so full of panic?
***
Ghostface Killah can’t be a real ghost—his fly yellow ensemble makes the softest rustling sound as he enters the living room of his apartment in the L.A. complex. But then again, maybe he is an apparition. The rapper appears, disappears, and it’s a good half-hour before he reemerges from the bedroom and sits down to talk.
Before him on a coffee table is a well-thumbed through paperback,
Hit Men: From the Files of True Detective Magazine. Like everybody else in the group, Ghostface loves a good story, and he tells it like a prophecy, wisdom to be shared with the masses.
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“We’re here to civilize the uncivilized. That’s our job.” His worlds are a bullet-blast from the heart, just like his songs “Wildflower and “All I Got Is You.”
When talking about himself, Ghost stammers self-consciously. But ask him about “Mathematics,” the root science of the Five Percent Nation, and he can’t be, won’t be, stopped.
“Stop following these false holidays, Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving and all that shyt,” he exhorts. “You know who celebrates Christmas? The nikka that manufactures the toys! Why the fukk we got to be celebrating just that one day when I could give you a gift or give you my love throughout the fukking whole year? In all reality, Jesus wasn’t born on Christmas. That’s the day of the Nimrod. And the fukking balls and all ya’ll be putting on the Christmas tree was the fukking heads the nikkas chopped off of our people and shyt that they hung from the tree.”
I am dumbstruck, in awe. But the rapper’s friend in the room with us, sits watching videos, his face registering absolutely no reaction to what is being said.
“My mind is on a totally different plane than what everybody else’s mind is on,” continues Ghost. “It’s getting too serious here, man! Cutting welfare, hundreds of cops on the fukking block, everything—soon they’ll be injecting microchips inside your babies, everything is starting to happen. So you’d be a fool being out there, left in the fukking dust like that.”
***
There’s something reassuringly rock’n’roll about Wu-Tang’s mysticism; they look a little like Led Zeppelin chilling with the Druids. Possessing secret knowledge makes you cool. It makes you cool because it gives you power, and power is what’s missing from a life in Killah Hills.
I got the chance to peep where the power is and where it isn’t when I went to Las Vegas last winter for a clothing industry show. The group’s Wu-Wear was on display; they plan to market their custom clothing in a chain of their own stores as well as to other retailers. The group itself was supposed to drop by the Wu-Wear booth and hype the product. But they missed their plane, and arrived in town just in time to play a special show that night for assorted rag tradesmen, models, and hip-hop fans.
In a swanky club’s upstains lounge, people are playing all around, but RZA ducks into a booth, pulls a hood over his head, and meditates, like a knight focusing on the battle ahead.
Downstairs, two salesmen have already put away too many drinks as they spot my notebook and seize the opportunity to unburden themselves.
“Rap, just like rock’n’roll, will never die,” says a Boss salesman. “Rebellion, revolution, whatever bullshyt, it sells, and whoever stays ahead of the curve of the moment is going to make millions.” The guilty secret he needs to drunkenly share is that the clothes are all alike and it’s simply a hot logo that makes the sale.
“It’s a sad fukking business,” he adds a little later, waving a cocktail at the room. “The ethnic business. But that’s the reality of it. These guys, I’m talking about the grown-ups, they get their check on Friday, their paycheck, their welfare check. And they go and they spend it on the logo. They want their branded look. That’s their car, that’s their house, that’s their bank account and 401K.”
Another drink and one of them waves over Artis, a 19-year-old black man in stylish pistachio shorts and matching top. Artis has logged over 30,000 miles on the road working for Rego Sports, a company whose president is standing six feet away. “Hey Artis, Artis…” one salesman shouts, gesturing at the young entrepreneur. As the house system pumps Redman, Artis does as he’s told, dancing freestyle moves that put a broad smile on the faces of the salesman and the boss.
And I’m thinking: click. There are a whole lot of salesmen who still like to make a black man dance. A whole lot of white guys who make a fortune off of black kids who want to be “branded.” This I’m thinking, is the limits of Wu-ism. It’s what leads the Wu-Tang Clan to embrace the laws of “Mathematics” and their kung fu mythology. Faced with that, they improvised their own rules.
Well, it was a nice thought. Then the group comes on, and Method Man commands the front of the stage like the box-office everyman he so palpably is, and the crowd throws a fit. When he falls back, GZA moves to the front, not loose and loving the love he’s getting like Meth, but metallic and intense, every syllable, every tight bend from the hip meaning something. It’s a great show, and a room full of fashion victims are raising a motherfukkin’ ruckus.
At the end everybody abandons the stage except RZA, who walks up to the front and double-times an elongated prophecy, ruby red and streaked with ash, some crazed apocalyptic prediction that takes us right up to the millennium. Then he says “Peace,” and stomps off.
Later, when it’s over, I realize this is the way to see Wu-Tang. The salesmen, RZA’s monologue, the smile on Artis’s face when he freestyled—none of this makes any sense at all. This is not a trade show, this is not Las Vegas, we’re in Wu-World. They blow in, panic blooms, and when it’s over you’re standing there rubbing your jaw, wondering what hit you. And if any of it ever really happened. Peace.
RJ Smith
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