Bookstores continue to receive books about music at a surprising rate. But these days there is no more unusual title on the shelves of the music section than The TAO of Wu, autobiography of RZA, the ideologist, founder and producer of New York rap group Wu-Tang Clan. To date, no one had written a book on hip-hop culture alternating chess strategies, horror and martial arts films, philosophical thoughts and references to the Old Testament, Islam and Taoism. Published in 2009 and now translated by Blackie Books, some passages would invite placement in the self-help section. Not in vain, the New York Times called him “a Siddharta for the 21st century.”
The TAO of Wu It is a strange and fascinating work. Includes quotes from Saint Francis of Assisi and pulp fiction, of Aristotle and Spiderman. What other book can sum up a hip-hop band’s expansion strategy with a Chinese proverb? That of the Wu-Tang Clan is summarized in this: “If you plan for a year, plant corn. If you plan ahead a decade, plant trees. If you plan for a life, you train and educate people.” The Wu-Tang Clan journey had to be more than just a musical career. In RZA’s head, it was about “bringing together eight unique individuals to act as one man.” And it wasn’t easy. From a certain point, it would be impossible.
Wu-Tang Clan is not just a fruit of the ghetto, boredom or adversity. It is also born from meditation, reading and… walking. According to its ideologue, the clan took shape during some walks in 1991. “In Staten Island I dedicated myself to walking every day for hours. I walked like Da’Mo did from India to China. Those walks didn’t create anything, but they did reveal something, something that was already floating over the island,” he says, referring to the songs he had produced for rappers from different neighborhoods. “I understood that what I wanted, could and should do was create a record company, bring together the best MCs I knew and form a rap group like no one had imagined.” Two years later he arrived Enter the Wu-Tang (36 chambers). The album cost $36,000 (34,500 euros at today’s exchange rate, a relatively modest budget). In the United States alone, it sold more than three million copies.
Abducted at seven years old
Robert Fitzgerald Diggs was born in Brooklyn in 1969. Hip-hop was not yet a hypothesis, but it would not take long for RZA to be abducted by that new music and culture. This is how he recalls his epiphany: “Anyone can hear the call at any time. I know this because I heard it one night, in July 1976, in a housing block on Staten Island. That seven-year-old boy was going to his cousin’s house, the future GZA, and saw some disc jockeys who had connected the music system to the street lighting. He stood there mesmerized for hours. He arrived home at eleven at night. The fight that fell on him was also unforgettable, but only the verses that a rapper had improvised echoed in his mind: “Su-su-submerge, so-so-socialize, clean your ears, open your eyes.”
Movie scenes like this abound throughout the 200 pages of the book. RZA claims to have saved Method Man’s life by casually leading him away from a gunfight. It must be remembered that Wu-Tang Clan, before becoming one of the most influential bands in hip-hop, was a street gang used to getting into trouble. At the age of 18, RZA himself went to trial and could have received eight years in prison for shooting with a rival gang of traffickers, but the judge acquitted him. “That day I recovered eight years of my life,” he says. He left the bad life and concentrated even more on reading and music. Not everyone in the group made it. His cousin Ol’ Dirty Bastard would go to prison several times and die in 2004 from an overdose. The chapter in which RZA remembers how Ol’ Dirty Bastard forced his son to watch him do drugs a few days before he died is one of the most moving in the book.
Each person will explain themselves how their life has gone. And RZA’s has been a dizzying roller coaster that began more or less like this: “In 1978, my mother, who worked in an underground betting house, guessed the number right and won about four thousand bucks, enough money for the eight of us. We were moving into a three-bedroom house on Dumont Avenue. At that time we lived in Marcus Garvey, a violent ghetto, but for a moment we felt like the white kids in the series Eight is enough: eight children with toys, bicycles and a new home. Before we could move in, they broke into it. “All our stuff (toys, bikes, furniture) disappeared right before Christmas.” Installed in the new neighborhood, RZA met a slightly older boy who dealt drugs and who fell in love with that young newcomer. When they were already friends, one day he confessed that he was the one who robbed his house.
Very read, very smoked
Although it focuses on the trajectory of Wu-Tang Clan, The TAO of Wu is most revealing when it expands its narrative scope to hip-hop in general. Especially striking is his comparison between East Coast hardcore rap and West Coast gangsta rap. “Music with a violent sound gives those who listen to it the opportunity to bring out the violence they have inside,” he says about the first. On the other hand, “when you hear violent lyrics over a soft rhythm, that violence goes directly to your mind,” he laments, referring to the second. In another passage, he is suspicious of an audiovisual industry that is betting on technologies that offer increasingly clearer images, while marketing devices that provide “increasingly simpler, flatter, more insubstantial” sound. “We are getting used to an increasingly better image and an increasingly worse sound,” he warns.
But the most amazing thing about The TAO of Wu It is the breadth of records he manages when recounting his time in this world. “If you were poor and black, mathematics directly attacked the idea that you were predestined to be ignorant and uneducated,” he says, referring to one of the teachings of the Nation of Islam. From the African-American record label of the 1960s, Stax learned how to survive in a white music industry. From the Bible I would learn to polish rhymes with precision to cut ears like the apostle Simon Peter. From kung-fu, to producing rhythms “that made you want to punch a hole in the wall.” In turn, his love for chess allows him to compare the Ruy López opening with the style of rapper Rakim. And in the same way that he states that dragon ball is “one of the most profound cartoon series in history” he assures that night of the living dead It was a prophecy about the arrival of crack cocaine where the living dead symbolized black men in the United States.
A warning for those allergic to self-help books: several passages from The TAO of Wu It can be very indigestible. The book is full of phrases such as “do your best to reach the superconsciousness that comes at the end of life”, “to become an ocean you first have to drown”, “death is the biggest scam in history” or “the best “The tactic you can apply to chess is the same one you should use in life: never give up.” RZA is a well-read guy, but also a very smoked guy. In one of those perjured smokes that a demon possessed him. And in the final stretch of the book, he lets out tirades about God and the Devil that are scarier than the darkest cuts of Wu-Tang forever. On the other hand, this need to find meaning in his existence in such an adverse social context sharpens his capacity for observation and allows him to strengthen deep-seated thoughts: “Poverty in the United States is something that dwarfs you, reduces your horizons and clouds you.” the sight,” he discovered very early.
From the neighborhood to Olympus
“It’s not easy to explain what it means to be rich, famous and from the neighborhood. One way to do this is to think of a superhero: someone who has special powers, a double identity and maybe one or two weak points that he keeps secret,” RZA cleverly outlines. The son of a large family who at some stages shared a two-bedroom apartment with 18 other people, he became the family nerd thanks to his obsession with reading. At 11 years old, and after discovering the Rapper’s Delight of the Sugarhill Gang, he composed twenty songs at once based on the rhythmic bases of his mother’s r&b records. At that age he was already a skilled chess player and had lost his virginity. In just twenty years he would be composing soundtracks for Jim Jarmush and Quentin Tarantino.
RZA had a vision and took it to the limit. He recorded the famous Wu-Tang Clan ain’t nothing ta F’with illegally tapping the studio light, he sold the first demos from the trunk of his cousin’s Mercury Scorpio and from the beginning he decided to use a different voice compressor for each rapper in the group: Method Man, Raekwon, Inspectah Deck, U-God, Ghostface Killa… Their plan was for each one to sign solo for different record labels. This way they would expand the word of the clan and the impact of future joint albums. “I told them that no one could question my authority, that this was going to be a dictatorship,” he admits. Therefore, he has no problem assuming calculation errors. In 1997 he decided to have Wu-Tang Clan join Rage Against The Machine’s tour as opening act. In just two months that brotherhood was blown up.
The TAO of Wu was originally published in 2009. Therefore, there are no references to Once upon a time in Shaolin (2015), the controversial album that no one heard because only a copy was pressed that millionaire Martin Shkreli would buy for two million dollars or at the group’s creaky residencies in Las Vegas. The book also appeared in full obamamaniawhich is why the last chapter exudes hope and desire for change for the black community. Wrapped in a mystical haze, he says goodbye like this: “We all carry that capacity (for change) within us, so first put order in your own house and then you can help put order in the other five million houses. And God will show and demonstrate that he is the Agent of Universal Change. Peace”.
Well okay: peace.
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