The RZA, Collecting, and Quarantine.
This story starts in 2011. I started writing it in 2007.
I was walking with a friend down Telegraph Avenue past the then newly reopened Fox Theater when I noticed it. A familiar orange and black concert poster by local artist, Lil’ Tuffy. The show that was being promoted took place on Tuesday, Dec. 11 2007 at The Independent in San Francisco, CA. The headliner was The RZA, technically performing as Bobby Digital, which for RZA was something between an alter-ego and alias. Three support acts were listed. One of those acts was me.
As it turned out the gig promoted by this particularly artful poster was the last performance of my largely unremarkable rap career. Looking at the poster, I was filled with a specific combination of anxiety and affirmation. A feeling that can only come from having your name placed directly in the shadow of your idol. An echo of the feeling I had in the days leading up to that gig.
On March 14th, 2020, one of the last days before shelter in place orders were initiated across the Bay Area, I moved in with my girlfriend. My girlfriend’s place east of the Lake is the sixth I have called home in Oakland, my eleventh home since 2005, and the fourth time the poster that promoted the best night of my unremarkable rap career made a move with me.
Because I have moved so often, I have never been one to keep track of my things. Often I will run to my bookshelf only to find that a title I know I’ve purchased more than once is not in its place. I am even worse with vinyl. I can recall one move, from Santa Cruz to Los Angeles, that precipitated the jettisoning of over 1000 records.
Almost every aspect of moving sucks, but one of the few fun parts about it is the excuse it offers to sort through the treasures we do manage to hang on to. Boxing up all of one’s possessions, only to pull them out shortly thereafter in a new home, allows us to encounter old things in new ways. To bring the past into the present; a convergence that promises new memories will be made.
The thrill of sharing a marquee with my hero. The luck of ending up in his limousine on the way to the after-party. The pride of sharing the moment with friends that I knew would treasure it as I have. The best night of my largely unremarkable rap career. I take them all with me into every new home.
If I had been honest with myself about how lucky I was that night in 2007, how slim the chances were that I’d ever get that close to my dreams again, maybe I would have photographed the marquee. Maybe I would have summoned the courage to ask RZA to pose with me backstage. Instead, I got lucky. I had to be walking down Telegraph and run right into my posterity.
In the days preceding Saturday, April 11th, 2020 I was again marveling at my good fortune. I had moved into a much bigger place, in cozy private proximity with the woman I love. And, I did it just days before a shelter-in-place order might have prevented my doing so. I’d spent the past three weeks rediscovering treasures, Netflix-and-chilling, and otherwise acclimating to my much-improved station.
Still, no amount of good fortune or budding domestic bliss could stave off the boredom and estrangement that comes along with prolonged isolation. Quarantine offers its safety in unrelenting sameness.
April 11th seemed that to be the day that a number of us Oaklanders reached a breaking point. It was sunny, the sky was clear blue and the air quality was immaculate. My girlfriend broke first. She had to be out of the house. A few hours later the dog and I snuck out to Grand Avenue to meet her. We walked around a portion of Lake. It was crowded. Struck by feelings of paranoia and irresponsibility we compromised and settled for a private rooftop overlooking the Lake to sip our beers. The view was incredible, the socially-distanced fellowship was too. But really, any change of perspective would have done the trick.
I was so busy escaping my shelter-in-place that it wasn’t until about 4:30 that I realized I’d lost track of time. A few days prior it was announced that the RZA would be joining DJ Premier on his Instagram live for a battle of their two superlative catalogs. The battle was starting at 5 o’clock and unless I hurried I would arrive back at my new home to find it already underway. It felt good to be in a rush, to have to be somewhere.
When I arrived back at my new home, I scrambled to connect my phone to the best sound system in the house, cursing pieces of unfamiliar technology the whole time. When I finally joined the session DJ Premier was there, along with about 100,000 others. Premier wore a black ball cap and a t-shirt with a photo of Dionne Warwick. I smirked to myself recalling that Primo had sampled Dionne Warwick to make “Recognize,” the best song on the second LOX album.
We were all waiting for The RZA.
Waiting alone with DJ Premier and 100,000 others, I thought back to my first ever Wu-Tang concert. Following the release of “Wu-Tang Forever” I went to see the Clan perform at the since-shuttered Maritime Hall in San Francisco. More than two hours after the final opening act left the stage and there was still no sign of the headliners and no indication that the performance would begin soon. The wait had been long enough that the house speakers played the entirety of “Wu-Tang Forever.” By the time the album began to play for a second time the crowd that had been buzzing with anticipation two hours prior, had become completely stagnant, aside from periodic outbursts of frustration.
Just as my fear that the Clan may not show up at all began to turn into fear about what that crowd might do if they didn’t, RZA appeared. Nothing changed. The lights did not go up, no fanfare played. Just RZA, bouncing to a beat only he could hear and greeting the entire front row with dap and head nods. After about one minute of these greetings, RZA stared at selected a member of the crowd and said, “oh, what? You want a pound? You want a pound?!?…
“You want a pound crab? Nah let his hand swing/
I ought to punch a hole in his palm with these pointy ass rings/
Wu-Tang DJ Allah Mathematics had snuck behind the turntables and the track “Duck Seazon” kicked in right on time…
No more said, knew your chump ass was dead/
When I saw the .44 reflecting off your shiny forehead/
The place was mayhem, 3000 of us, lifted from stillness to ruckus in a matter of seconds.
Just as this memory had entered my conscious RZA entered the Livestream. Inexplicably dressed in a sleeveless black vest and fingerless black gloves, he was talking of technological challenges of his own. He explained that Instagram live was a new space for him. The RZA and DJ Premier were there together, joined now by 150,000 of us.
DJ Premier is one of the few men on earth who can stand next to RZA and cast his own shadow. While the Wu-Tang Clan shaped my musical North Star, there are likely just as many around my age for whom Primo’s sound constitutes their personal “definition of dope.”
RZA and DJ Premier both produce music that bears a signature. Even a relative hip-hop newbie can likely identify their work after just a few bars. Premier you can tell from the punch of his drums and the sushi chef knife skills employed to produce his melodies and hooks. He creates music in such a manner that only the deepest crate diggers know where to find the bits and pieces he has brought together. Three manicured snare sounds stacked on top of one another, a stray key stab, four different raps punching in for a half bar each to create a 2 bar chorus. That is Premier.
RZA, on the other hand, would loop several bars of melody or present a classic drum break in its entirety if that’s what it takes to tell the story.
The Wu-Tang doesn’t just want to depict or reflect worlds, instead, they endeavor to build them. They create alternate identities, masks, fantasies, and spectacular stories. Even their most hyper-realistic moments like Ghostface’s soliloquy on “Impossible,” digress into the promise of epic tales unspun…
“When we was eight we went to bat day the see the Yanks/
In ’69 his father and mines they rob banks/”
Precision is not as vital to the work of creating a saga.
RZA opened the battle with the title track from the most cinematic rap album ever made, “Liquid Swords.” He played the entire 88-second long introduction, a young boy describing his samurai father and the murder of his mother by “ninja spies.” The beat that drops when the boy is finished takes the organ stabs from Willie Mitchell’s “Cruisin” and somehow transforms them from something one might play while sipping a spritz or mowing the lawn into something ominous, dark, and driving.
The more you allow yourself to sink into the ambiance of a Wu-Tang record, the more you will treasure it. Anyone who has listened to “Liquid Swords” before, and then subsequently after, seeing the film “Shogun’s Assassin” should know what I am getting at. As long as you are roughly my age it is likely that you know someone who has an interest in B-movies, martial arts, Clark Wallabees, or even chess, drawn out by something they heard on a Wu-Tang record.
For me, the pursuit of being an informed Wu-Tang fan led to soul music. I became obsessed with tracking down the records that RZA had sampled. A search that at various moments led me into “Hard Times” by Baby Huey, “Let’s Straighten It Out” by O.V. Wright, or “Could I Be Falling In Love With You” by Syl Johnson.
DJ Premier responded with “A Million And One Questions,” a 12-inch single released between Jay-Z’s first two albums, that is propelled by a sample from Aaliyah’ s “One In A Million.”
At this point, I was standing. RZA and Premier were being cast onto my television, and I was on my laptop toggling between Twitter, where many of my favorite strangers were sharing their by-the-minute reactions, and a Zoom meeting I’d created with my college roommate JT, who has the Wu-Tang logo tattooed on his calf. As Hov considered what he’d do “if this Roc-A-Fella shit fold,” I thought back to the first time I heard “Miss You,” the tribute Jay did for Aaliyah after she died.
All we listen to is all the different yous/
Four-page letters in addition to/
Have you ever loved somebody, you used to get the party poppin’/
We used to party-hop, we used to be in the Hamptons, party a lot/
At one point both RZA and Primo played songs they’d produced from The Notorious BIG’s “Life After Death.” Premier choosing “10 Crack Commandments,” which drew ire from Chuck D for how it used his voice. RZA selected “Long Kiss Goodnight,” which some of my friends are convinced contains Puff Daddy bragging about having Tupac murdered.
Later RZA wouldn’t let Primo turn off “DWYCK” until we all heard Guru chant “eenie meenie miney moe, I wreck a mic like pimp pimps hoes.” I thought back to 2005 when Guru showed up unexpectedly to the bar I was working at in Santa Cruz.
When RZA played two songs back to back from his cousin, Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s debut album “Return To The 36 Chambers: The Dirty Version” Dante Ross took to Twitter to take credit for the drums on “Brooklyn Zoo.” Jeff Weiss from pitchfork asserted that if ODB arrived today he would be the biggest artist in the world. I thought about Anime’s new single “Shimmy” and realized Weiss might have a point. Then I tried to imagine what Dirty would sound like on a remix of “Savage” by Megan Thee Stallion and I chuckled.
The night I opened for RZA was the same day the Wu-Tang Clan released “8 Diagrams,” which was their first album as a group following ODB’s passing. That night was the only time I ever saw RZA get drunk on stage. He even brought all the liquor from backstage out to share with the crowd, something ODB often did.
It went on like this, two legends going back and forth turning each other into fans. Had it been a boxing match I’d tell you that the knockout blow came when RZA dropped “Dark Fantasy,” a song he co-produced with Kanye West to play the same role on its album as the title track does for “Liquid Swords.”
Kanye is the most celebrated practitioner of RZA’s musical legacy. Like RZA he often deploys and manipulates the human voice as his most effective melodic instrument. Like RZA, Kanye’s best work reanimates its source material, taking disparate pieces of bygone culture and dropping them right back into the zeitgeist.
When this is done well enough, some will forever associate a beloved instance with the place they found it, others will front as though they’ve always known where it was hiding.
When the battle concluded I took to my social media feeds to declare RZA the winner. I joined with my estranged friends and my precious strangers in delighting over what we’d just shared. RZA and DJ Premier had found a way to mine the past for fresh joy, to make spectacular new moments entirely out of memories.
