Bookstores continue to receive music books at a surprising rate. But these days, there is no more unusual title on the shelves of the music department than The TAO of Wu, autobiography of RZA, the ideologue, founder and producer of the 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 reflections 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. It is not for nothing that the New York Times called him “Siddharta of the 21st century”.
Wu’s TAO It is a strange and fascinating work. Includes quotes from St. Francis of Assisi and Pulp Fiction, of Aristotle and Spiderman. What other book can sum up a hip-hop group’s expansion strategy with a Chinese proverb? That of the Wu-Tang Clan is summed up like this: “If you plan for a year, plant corn. If you plan ten years ahead, plant trees. If you plan your life, you train and educate people. The Wu-Tang Clan’s journey had to be more than just a musical career. In RZA’s mind, 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.
The Wu-Tang Clan is not just the product of the ghetto, boredom or adversity. It is also born from meditation, reading and… walking. According to its ideologue, the clan was formed during a few walks in 1991. “In Staten Island, I dedicated myself to walking for hours every day. I walked like Da’Mo from India to China. These walks didn’t create anything, but they revealed something, something that was already floating on the island,” he says, referring to the songs he produced for rappers from different neighborhoods. “I realized that what I wanted, could and should do was start a record label, bring together the best MCs I knew and form a rap group like no one had imagined.” Two years later he arrived Enter Wu-Tang (36 rooms). The album cost $36,000 (34,500 euros at current exchange rates, a relatively modest budget). In the United States alone, it has sold more than three million copies.
Abducted at age seven
Robert Fitzgerald Diggs was born in Brooklyn in 1969. Hip-hop wasn’t yet a thing, but it wouldn’t be long before RZA was caught up in this new music and culture. This is how he describes his epiphany: “Anyone can hear the call at any time. I know this because I heard it one night in July 1976 in an apartment building on Staten Island. This seven-year-old boy was going to his cousin, the future GZA, and saw disc jockeys who had connected the music system to the street lights. He stood there, hypnotized, for hours. He arrived home at eleven o’clock in the evening. The fight that befell him was also unforgettable, but only the verses that a rapper had improvised resonated in his mind: “Su-su-submerge, so-so-socialize, clean your ears, open your eyes. »
Movie scenes like this abound throughout the book’s 200 pages. RZA claims to have saved Method Man’s life by casually walking him away from a gunfight. It should be remembered that the Wu-Tang Clan, before becoming one of the most influential groups in hip-hop, was a street gang accustomed to trouble. At the age of 18, RZA himself was put on trial and could have received eight years in prison for shooting with a rival drug gang, but the judge acquitted him. “That day, I got eight years of my life back,” he says. He gave up the bad life and focused even more on reading and music. Not all members of the group made it. His cousin Ol’ Dirty Bastard went to prison several times and died in 2004 of an overdose. The chapter in which RZA recalls how Ol’ Dirty Bastard forced his son to watch him do drugs days before his death is one of the most moving in the book.
Everyone will explain how their life went. And RZA has been a dizzying roller coaster ride that began more or less like this: “In 1978, my mother, who worked in an underground betting house, guessed the correct number and won about four thousand dollars, enough money for eight of us. We were moving into a three-bedroom house on Dumont Avenue. At the time we were living in Marcus Garvey, a violent ghetto, but for a while we felt like the white kids on the show. Eight is enough: eight children with toys, bikes and a new house. Before we could move in, they broke in. “All our stuff (toys, bikes, furniture) disappeared just before Christmas.” Installed in the new neighborhood, RZA met a slightly older boy who dealt drugs and who fell in love with this young newcomer. While they were already friends, one day he confessed that he was the one who robbed her house.
Very read, very smoked
Although it focuses on the trajectory of the Wu-Tang Clan, Wu’s TAO is particularly revealing when it extends its narrative scope to hip-hop in general. His comparison between East Coast hardcore rap and West Coast gangsta rap is particularly striking. “Music with a violent sound gives the listener the opportunity to bring out the violence within him,” he says of the former. On the other hand, “when you hear violent words on a gentle rhythm, this violence comes directly to your mind,” he laments, referring to the second. In another passage, he is wary of an audiovisual industry that bets on technologies offering increasingly clear images, while marketing devices that provide “increasingly simpler, flatter, less substantial” sound. “We get used to better and better picture and worse and worse sound,” he warns.
But the most amazing thing about Wu’s TAO This is the extent of the records he manages when he recounts his stay in this world. “If you were poor and black, mathematics directly attacked the idea that you were predestined to be ignorant and uneducated,” he said, referring to one of the teachings of the Nation of Islam. Thanks to the African-American label of the 1960s, Stax learned to survive in a white music industry. Through the Bible, I would learn to polish rhymes with precision to cut my ears like the apostle Simon Peter. From kung fu to producing beats “that made you want to punch a hole in the wall.” In turn, his love for chess allows him to compare the opening of Ruy López with the style of rapper Rakim. And in the same way that he declares that dragon ball is “one of the most profound cartoon series in history”, he assures night of the living dead It was a prophecy about the arrival of crack where the undead symbolized black men in the United States.
A warning for those allergic to personal development books: several passages from Wu’s TAO It can be very indigestible. The book is full of phrases such as “do your best to achieve the superconsciousness that comes at the end of life”, “to become an ocean, you must first drown”, “death is the biggest scam of the story” or “the best “The tactic you can apply in chess is the same tactic you should use in life: never give up.” RZA is an educated guy, but also a very smoked guy. It was in one of these perjuries that a demon possessed him. And in the last part of the book, he lets loose tirades about God and the Devil that are more frightening than the darkest passages of Wu-Tang forever. On the other hand, this need to find meaning in one’s existence in such an unfavorable social context sharpens his capacity for observation and allows him to reinforce his deep thoughts: “Poverty in the United States is something that eclipses you, reduces your horizons and obscures your view,” he discovered early on.
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 dual identity, and maybe a weakness or two that they keep secret,” RZA smartly points out. The son of a large family who sometimes 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 a time based on the rhythmic bases of his mother’s r&b records. At that age, he was already a good chess player and had lost his virginity. In just twenty years, he will compose the soundtracks of Jim Jarmush and Quentin Tarantino.
RZA had a vision and took it to the end. He recorded the famous The Wu-Tang Clan is nothing to F’with Illegally tapping the studio light, he sold early demos from the trunk of his cousin’s Mercury Scorpio and decided early on to use a different vocal compressor for each rapper in the group: Method Man, Raekwon, Inspectah Deck, U- God, Ghostface Killa… Their plan was for each to sign solo for different labels. In 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 it would be a dictatorship,” he admits. So he has no problem assuming calculation errors. In 1997, he decided to have the Wu-Tang Clan join the Rage Against The Machine tour as the opening act. In just two months, this fraternity has exploded.
Wu’s TAO was originally published in 2009. Therefore, there is no reference to Once upon a time in Shaolin (2015), the controversial album that no one heard because only a pressed copy was pressed and that millionaire Martin Shkreli would buy for two million dollars or at the band’s creaky Las Vegas residences. The book has also been published in its entirety obamamaniathis is why the final chapter breathes hope and desire for change for the black community. Shrouded in a mystical fog, he said goodbye thus: “We all carry within us this capacity (for change), so first put your own house in order and then you can help put your own house in order. the other five million houses. And God will show and demonstrate that he is the agent of universal change. Peace”.
Okay: peace.
