Wu be gone: RZA Too Much Of A Businessman To Consider Another Wu-Tang Album
title taken from idolator.com
full article taken from canada.com
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Rza is own master
Wu-Tang Clan mastermind goes beyond hip-hop
If there's one man who knows if the nine-man Wu-Tang Clan will ever reunite for another rap album, it is its leader, producer and driving force, The Rza.
The man born Robert Diggs 38 years ago won't say a reunion won't happen, but is honest about his reluctance to work again with Method Man, Ghostface Killah, GZA, Raekwon, U-God, Inspectah Deck and Masta Killa. The group's other member, the Ol' Dirty Bastard, died in 2004.
"I don't know, really, to tell you the truth," Rza says. "Wu-Tang is forever, I think, and we'll be making the same sounds, whether we make it together or separately. But as far as making an album together, I don't know.
"I wouldn't want to get into a business relationship with the Wu-Tang Clan because it hurt my business, Universal Music's business, the record business. It hurt a lot of people when they wouldn't show up for music videos, for press. It (wastes) a lot of people's money. A lot of people got fired -- the guys don't even know how many people got fired because of them.
"That's just not good business, and I'm a businessman. I need to keep my name clean, so I can go anywhere in the world and do anything and people know there's professionalism behind it."
The Rza (pronounced "Riz-ah") has worked hard to build up his professional profile over the past 20 years. With his lean, gritty, lo-fi production style, he banded together nine disparate New York rappers under the umbrella of The Wu-Tang Clan, promising to conquer the hip-hop world if they gave him total control of their careers. Conquer they did, with their 1993 debut album Enter The Wu-Tang (36 Chambers), which shifted the sonic landscape of rap from Dr. Dre's polished West coast G-funk to the gritty, sample-heavy sounds out east.
As each Wu-Tang member gained notoriety, they stepped out for solo records, Rza often producing for them to great success. But around 2000, he suddenly stopped producing for his bandmates, and each of them briefly struggled.
"I didn't want to stop," Rza says, "it's just those guys didn't understand the music, the studio process. They wanted to make waves into their own worlds. Someone was always asking me to help them do their own thing. And at the time, my mom had passed away, and suddenly, there was nobody for me to make proud. Ambition just fell away. It was like, 'who cares?'
"So I ended up giving the guys all their contracts back and told them to make their own decisions over how they wanted to make their music. And I would be available for those who wanted me to be available. But I was going to do things 50-50. . . So it was just a business decision to help them all get started."
Then Rza began another career path. In 1999, he got an unexpected call from filmmaker Jim Jarmusch (Dead Man, Broken Flowers), who wanted him to score his movie, Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai. That soon led to another call from Quentin Tarantino and, suddenly, he had gone from "rapper/ producer" to "film composer."
"I got a call from Jim Jarmusch and he said he was inspired by us, and he wanted me to compose all of Ghost Dog," Rza says. "We became buddies. And then the soundtrack became critically acclaimed.
"So when Kill Bill was coming out, Quentin Tarantino called me up and said, 'I've never had a composer before, and I want you to do it. And I want you to produce the soundtrack.' And he knew I understood what he was trying to do. He might have been able to find a better composer, but he wouldn't have found someone who understood a martial arts movie better. And so he got a composer and I got credibility."
It's around this time he says he made the mental switch from being a DJ to being a musician.
"As a DJ, you hear something that's dope but you don't know what it is, you don't know what musical notes those are," he says. "So you've got to sample or scratch it. But now as a musician, I can hear something in my head, or I can listen to an old record and I can assimilate it by creating an original sound. I can make it my own thing. That's the difference these days.
"Two things happened that changed it for me. One time, I was in a record store and a guy came up and said he was disappointed in me. He said, 'You're putting a lot of people out of work by using samples and drum machines, because we're real musicians.' And I was like, 'Get the f--- out of here,' but I understood what he meant.
"And then when the (sampling) started getting crazy -- like the horn player on this sample's gotta get paid, the guitar player's gotta get paid -- and they sue you but pay the lawyers and not the musicians. . . well, that's just not fair. It made me start sampling less and start using real musicians more."
So, for his latest solo record -- Digisnax, out this week -- Rza employed a number of musicians to help him create the right sound.
"Digisnax sounds like it has a lot of sampling, but it doesn't," he says. "We just learned more techniques and learned to incorporate them into the sound."
Digisnax will be the second album under Rza's alter-ego, Bobby Digital, a fictional character he debuted in 1998 that he says allows him to express himself in a different, perhaps more creative way.
"Bobby Digital is a character I developed about 10 years ago as a way to express things in my life that I could no longer perform," he says. "It was a way to escape the pressures of being the Rza -- by being Bobby Digital I could act, rap, dress in a way that the Rza wouldn't.
"The Rza is a grown man and he wouldn't act that way, Bobby Digital is the kid inside him. I think of myself as Tom Hanks in Big, Bobby lets me do little kid things in a grown man's body."
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Originally Posted by miha
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