For most artists, if you change the landscape of hip-hop, you’d puff a cigar and call it a day. Not RZA. The founder of Wu-Tang keeps pumping out new material (8 Diagrams, DigiSnacks, Only Built 4 Cuban Linx II), scoring movies and video games, and somehow finding time to co-star with Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe in—appropriately enough—American Gangster. He spoke to CP about the movie, naked drug-dealers, and the future of hip-hop.
Clubplanet: It’s been a long time since 36 Chambers. How have things changed over the years?
RZA: It’s still a lot of weed, a lot of drinking—not a lot of women in the studio, we don’t allow that—but there’s a lot of jokes, a lot of bullsh*t, a lot of arguments. But work gets done. I think Reakwon said it best in a Source interview: “When we together, we don’t have no problems. It’s when we apart.” And that’s what’s changed. In the old days, we could be apart, and everything would still be understood. And now when we’re apart, we drift. We all drift.
So when you’re not in the studio, what do you and the Wu-Tang do to screw around?
Bowling, playing chess, video games, kung fu.. I like the fighting games the most. Every once in a while if I’ve got a day to myself, I will do one of the role-playing games. The new John Woo game Hard Boiled—it’s like you’re playing the movie yourself. It’s is kind of fat, it’s kind of deep.
How about Meth, what does he play?
He’s into SOCOM, he’s into the online entertainment. He’s probably online right now, playing somebody. [Laughs]
Any similarities between American Gangster and your life?
Yeah. I can relate to the movie because I lived it. The rise from rags to riches—that’s what I did with Wu-Tang Clan. Life was very bad: a bunch of guys from the streets that had nothing. A lot of us lived in the ghetto, working for some drug-dealer or whatever.
How about any particular scenes?
Some of that stuff from the movie—like the naked ladies making the drugs—some of that stuff is real. It’s real to my life. I’ve been involved with stupid sh*t like that.
What’s next for hip-hop?
The young people coming up, I think they’re going to have more chances than we had. In the old days, everybody just wanted to be a rapper. That’s all they want to be. Now, you don’t have to rap, you can be a movie composer. You can compose music for the number one film in the country.
Or video games…
Or video games. There’s so many outlets, I think it’s going to continue to grow. I think this new Wu-Tang album will be an influx of creativity, because it will make people say, “We don’t got to do it like that,” because Wu-Tang did something totally sideways.