THE RZA: First of all, it’s an imaginative truth of the art form. Hip-hop is a vast art form that to me has been dull lately. The stuff is in one mode. Now, I could bring it back to a Wu-Tang mode and get it back on some hardcore rough shit, but I decided to even chill on that for a second. Why circle back to that and cause all the... rowdiness at the concerts. You know how they say Wu-Tang is so violent in the clubs? That’s okay, I’ll bring it to em in a better form. To a form that’s more entertaining as well as educational. It’s got the educational side to it and also got the Hip-Hop feel to it. Cuz hip-hop to me, comic books, video games and shit, the arcade scene, the breakdancing, the hip-hop clothes we use to wear in the olden days, MCin’, DJin’, human beatboxin’, graffiti, that’s hip-hop to me. As well as mathematics and the gods. All of that was like the global Hip-Hop that I was coming up in in 1976. I’m a living witness. But a lot of things get pushed out because [when] certain niggas get a chance to shine, they only shine in one part of it, or they only shine in their limited view of it.

Bobby Digital is a chance for me to live out some of my Hip-Hop past that was smothered over by being RZA. When we first did Wu-Tang and blew up , I wasn’t the one that was on the microphone, I was behind the scenes making the beats, and so my little part of the history of it was not really told too much. So you only heard the man that I am now, you didn’t hear the things that molded me to be what I am here today, whether it was good or bad.

So the Bobby Digital persona gives me a chance to exploit those things, but I’m not exploitin’ em on a straight-up like trying to be so Blackadocious about em, to be so glorifyin’ em, I’m mixing them with the character, like how Richard Roundtree can play Shaft or Warren Beatty can play Bulworth or Wesley Snipes can play Blade. It’s like that. I’m using my personal life experiences to help mold the character. He’s basically a hip-hop superhero, a B-boy, the street’s his.

The film shows you about the ‘80s when he’s just a regular nigga without no knowledge, just gettin knowledge, tryin’ to get to things, he’s into gangs and shit like that, but somebody gets hurt, gets shot around the way. He gets tired of seein niggas shoot at each other, people gettin hurt, killin’ each other over bullshit. So he’s on some “Put away your guns! Fuck that! Put your guns away, let’s fight with our hands!” Niggas don’t want to hear that shit, they want to keep the guns. And also you got some undercover crooked police and the mayor, there’s too much money in drugs and guns in the ghetto for them to let the shit die, so they want Bobby Digital under ground also.

So this guy, he’s a B-Boy now, have the long braids of the ‘80s and shit. He runs around, but instead of gun scenes, you got martial arts scenes.  What happens is he’s forced to go underground, and Bobby Digital has a laboratory where he makes this serum called the honey serum. He’s down with the Killer Bees. He’s got these honeydipped blunts, he made this serum, he sticks this shit in. When he hits it -- [in sound effect Twilight Zone voice] boo dooda dooda dooda -- it transforms him, opens up his consciousness, gets him to a whole different mode. So throughout the movie you see him returnin’ to the laboratory. You know, he goes through a little trauma, you see him back at the laboratory still just trying to make a better formula! [laughs] And eventually when they force him underground in the ‘80s, there’s like a 12-year gap. He comes back in the ‘90s. Now he’s like some kind of superhero. He’s transformed himself. He’s got a lot of wealth. That part of the movie’s left out cuz of budget [laughter]. It’s a low-budget film so I did one of George Lucas’s moves where I started on Part 4, I’ll go back later.

YOU’LL GO BACK, MAYBE DO A SPECIAL EDITION.
[laughs] Yeah, shit like that. But he comes on the scene in the ‘90s, he wears a mask, but he’s a B-boy! Imagine a nigga with a mask like Green Lantern’s mask, imagine someone like that pullin’ up in a bodega, pullin’ in to get some White House, it’s like that. That’s the ironic part, he’s in real estate in a range rover. He’s a real B-boy nigga and shit, but his mission is to spread his digital signal. He’s come across what he calls a digital signal that can exist inside a man, a man can transmit for himself. an plug in to anything. Get in. Get connected. That’s what’s on the album, words like “plug in”, “get connected.”

In the ‘90s, he has computers hooked up to his laboratory, so now he has computers and chemicals mixin’ together...to make this, to try and get this signal into a physical form. The laboratory explodes, though, and in the future, which is the comic book we got comin’, it’s like what happened after that explosion. He is transformed, he can travel through digital signals and all that. But that’s the future part of it. In the movie, he’s trying to devise something to put this digital signal in. And the first thing he puts it into is a bullet. So instead of shooting you and killing you... the bullet AWAKENS you. Digitizes you. When you become digital, digits only dealing with numbers, only dealing with mathematics...

So he’s also goin’ through the ghetto community noticin’ that there’s a digital revolution goin’ on outside in the world around, but the ghetto’s stuck in analog! They don’t have no Internet access, they don’t know shit about nothing that’s goin on, they don’t even have fuckin digital phones, they probably still got analog phones. Rotaries, right? [laughs] So his mission is like to implant a little signal into man so they won’t have to rely on nothin' else for entertainment or information. For Bobby Digital, man is like an antenna. We walk on too much concrete to stay grounded. Breaks our frequency. He’s trying to implant that signal and awaken you. Because “digital” means to see things clear, for what they are, not for what they appear to be.

COMICS AND FILMS STIMULATED YOUR IMAGINATION AS A CHILD...
Right. Never take a child’s imagination for granted. Because really everything you see me bringing to fruition now is from the imagination that I had as a child. I used to read comics like a movie! I’d read it as if, I open it up. First page, I’d say [reading aloud in dramtic voice from the back of a book on the table], ‘Out of the bricks and mortar, godlike dreams! They laid the foundation... Stan Lee presents... SPIDER-MAN!’ I’d make music in my head. I’d see the action of it, I’d see the whole choreography of it. Take me like 40 minutes to read one! I was one of them kind of kids. On top of that, I’m a video game freak. And I’d go to the Regency, I’d go there Friday morning, and for like a dollar fifty or three dollars at most I’d watch six kung fu movies, like this [attentive stare]. Skip school. It was so ghetto-- it was the ‘80s, one nigga’d be sniffing glue, one nigga be’d taking dope, one nigga’d nod the fuck out, been sleeping there for two days probably. When I was 10-11 years old I was asking grown men in the street, “'scuse me mister, could you pay for my ticket?” Give a nigga a dollar, a nigga’d buy me ticket. Shit was crazy. That was crazy what we did to see a kung fu movie, man. All that molded me, though. That shit is what this Bobby Digital character is about, giving me a chance to show the comic book world, the video game world, the regular B-boy world. I’m part of all that. From the age 16 to 19 attitude -- the braggin’, the gettin’ bitches, my first getting high, my first guns, my first havin’ 5 or 6 girls at the same time, I’m back to that shit. Bobby’s the mack.

AND IT WAS AROUND THIS TIME THAT YOU BECOME INTERESTED IN THE FIVE PERCENT TEACHINGS?
At the age of 11.

SO ALL THIS STUFF WAS COMING TOGETHER FOR YOU ABOUT THE SAME TIME.
I went through puberty real bugged out. [laughs]

THAT’S A LOT OF STUFF TO INTAKE...
It is, man, but it never looked like it to me. When I first got the knowledge of the gods, it took me seven months to know everything. I don’t know everything -- you’re never gonna know everything -- but the basic what you call 120. There’s a hundred and twenty questions and answers that with that right there, I could relate to every part of life, everything I’ve ever seen in my life, everything goes back to that. Genius [who turned RZA onto it] was three years older than me, he was 14, I’m 11. I memorized the 120 lessons for seven months. Which was phenomenal. It’s like 10 or 15 pages, too! You had to know it word for word or you got beat up. They call that “universal beatdown.” See, a lot of that hip-hop terminology, all that comes from the Gods. “Word is bond” is like the 70th question in there, it tells you about the bond of your word.

YOU WERE TALKING ABOUT HIP-HOP BEING IN A DULL PHASE...
It IS in a dull stage. Hip-Hop right now is trapped up in bullshit, it’s trapped up in commercial. Hip-hop even out there, it’s commercial rap that’s out there again. Like when Hammer had it like that, Vanilla Ice, all them muthafuckers. The radio and video part of it is fucked up. There’s a lot of underground niggas rockin' some shit. It’s like for instance L.A.’s underground scene is phatter than New York’s underground scene, man. Now how is that? L.A. DJs sound phatter than New York DJs do. How is that? What happened is the West Coast blew up, remember? And we [the East Coast] came with Wu-Tang, and Biggie’s first album, and we was raw, right?. So East Coast kinda came into its own. But the gold and platinums wasn’t comparing to the double platinums and quadruple platinums that was fuckin’ Dre and Snoop according to the mindstate or the lust and greed of the artists -- and the businessmen that runs the business on the East Coast.

So these producers and all that tried to match that. Same thing with the players start coming up, E-40 and all that player shit was rising up. These niggas came with their player shit so when Puff and Big came back with their player shit, it was like put the East Coast in that mode. They influenced new artists and other players came out and followed suit. What happened over here [on the west coast] is that the shit died out! And over there it’s new there and they’re getting fucked up by it. That’s why I spent the first six months of my year out here. I’m like, ‘I ain’t fuckin with New York, those niggas are too analog for me.’ I’m going digital. Niggas is analog.

YOU’RE MAKING MUSIC DIFFERENTLY THESE DAYS...
Yeah. No samples. I got a keyboard everywhere I live. I got a few headquarters, I got my hide-outs and shit. There’s one in Jersey. We call it the Wu-Mansion, only because we’re from the projects. [laughs] Everyone else would say, ‘Get the fuck out of here, guy. Nice house!’ It’s about 7000 square feet, five acres of land, got a nice probably $5-700,000 studio in there. It’s quiet. My parking lot is a quarter mile from the road. We got the Wu Mountain too, that’s in Ohio. I go there, and I Ieave beats there.

Somebody tried to tell me, he said ‘Wu-Tang ain’t in the ghetto no more, white boys is buying your music.’ He was telling me that people in the Bay Area, people in the South listen to P. And he wondered how come Wu-Tang ain’t ‘keeping it ghetto,‘ he say they listen to the tape, it’s like we’re talking French, they don’t know what we’re talking about. I said, ‘Because you don’t KNOW nothing. What do you mean “keepin’ it ghetto”? You want us to keep it at 25-cent Sun drinks? You gonna compare me to fuckin’ P? All P is saying is talkin’ drugs, guns and pussy and “unggh.” And you’re gonna say that Wu ain’t the shit and we’re talking....’ Then I had to say a verse to him. I said, ‘Now what part of that don’t you understand?’ And he’s like “Uhhh...” But he still came with his shit.

Basically, especially in those Southern states, there’s a total lack of knowledge. I’ve been there. There’s so lack of knowledge there’s like niggas that are like sixth-grade drop-outs. So of course they don’t know what the fuck we’re talkin’ about. And I told him, ‘I ain’t making it for them. I’m making it for the children.’ And that’s what I really do. I make my music moreso for the future. For those who are moving towards that mentality already, congrats to them. Like the RZA album, that’s something I plan to leave here. That’s something I think ten years from now you’re gonna clutch and grasp inspiration from, like you can open up a verse from the Bible and grasp what you need to.

YOU GOT KIDS, RIGHT?
I got babies. I don’t call em kids--animals have kids. We have children, babies.

OK. HOW OLD ARE THEY?
I don’t want to get into all that... I attempt not to mix that with this shit, cuz the poison of this, I ain’t trying... But on my album, though, on the RZA album, cuz it’s so personal and intimate, I do have my daughter singing a simple song that I want you to understand. It’s called “Sunshine.” And she’s singing it, it’s like an old TV commercial thing, “You are my sunshine/my only sunshine.” What she means by the song, and the context I got the song in, is that I’m the sunshine to her. That’s like Malcolm X and all the other Black leaders are the sunshine to our people. And we say, [singing] “Please don’t take my sunshine away.” Don’t take that away from us, because that...because they try to assassinate us, they want to snuff out our sun, they want to blind our light from my family. The powers that be are evil. And that song is trying to show the duty of a father to his family and the sunlight to the planets to the plant to the flowers and it’s similar to that. The RZA album is very, very intimate.

THAT’S THE THING A LOT OF PEOPLE MISS ON THE WU-TANG ALBUMS, THE SADNESS IN THEM. LIKE THE GHOST DUET WITH MARY...
Yeah. The first song like that you could say was Tears (Can It Be So Simple)...You could see that we was on like that.

The RZA solo record, it’s been in the works for a while. I got tracks like three years old on there. One song that’s gonna blow your mind, “Flowing Down the River of Life” [singing]. I couldn’t let RZA come on and do that without [having Bobby Digital first]. Because it would contradict myself, if Bobby came second. With Bobby coming first is gonna make you understand RZA more.

I SEE, BECAUSE YOU GOTTA FILL IN THE PAST BEFORE YOU GO FORWARD. WHAT ABOUT THE OTHER WU-TANG SOLO ALBUMS THAT’VE BEEN ON SCHEDULE FOREVER?
[laughs] Ghostface is about 9, 10 songs done. Raekwon is 60 songs. He just called me and told me he’d finished his 60th song.

WELL, WHERE ARE THEY?
Waiting for proper business and everything now. We got to take our shit more seriously, we can’t be running around blindly... Cuz we love Hip-Hop so much that we’ll give this shit out for free! But everybody is so much capitalizing off of it, what we gotta do is take a look ,go ‘Hold on. HOLD ON. We gotta be serious about this business right here.’ Not only are we the trendsetters, we the most [focal] point where a lot of things spring off our thinking, off our influence. Take a look. Step back. It’s the same thing with stopping that tour, Look man, let’s take a look at what’s going on, man. Gotta be careful.

I’m not stupid. I don’t have no time to be fuckin’ around. Nothing’s going to be controlling me, not women, not drugs, not even the beats. I won’t make beats [if it’s hurting me physically]. I could feel it right here [points to place on cheek]. I stopped puttin out beats. I was like yo, son I’m not going deaf for this shit. I ain’t stupid, so I be chillin. I don’t listen loud no more. I listen loud, but after two years of not listening loud then I listen loud.

A LOT OF YOUR GUYS GOT LEGAL PROBLEMS.
That’s just a natural shit of being a motherfucking Black man. Just going back to your neighborhood, you know, buying a bag of weed, you wanna see one of your girls or some shit, you wanna see one of your children out there, you know how it is, we real niggas and shit. Wu-Tang is real people, so when it come to that legal shit, all I’m saying is, that’s just how it is. I’ve been arrested over 30 times, probably! I used to get arrested every...First of all, I was a wild little kid too though. I was a wild little motherfucker too...

I lived in at least ten different projects in my life. Moved like 20 times in my life. To me, projects do seem like a science project and it do seem like it’s like jail really. It’s the same motherfucker who built that shit or something. Stapleton projects we lived in, you would swear it was jail cuz our shit was like tiers, and to go to your house, you got to walk past everybody’s door on that particular lobby. Or jail cell. And now with the helicopters, it’s definitely like a jail. And everything around the projects is based on that project. Check cashing places right there. Everything is right there so you don’t got to leave a four-block radius.

The one thing I know, though, is that it really is the mentality of the people in it. All that other shit.is dead. They fucked us up in the beginning, and we continued the whole process. Even the Black leaders and all them niggas, it’s all a scam, a money scam. But -- I slept in mud houses in the village. West Africa...Benin...Beautiful spots, right outside of Ghana also. And my project Park Hill is about 40 percent African now. Lot of people move over there.And they love it! Why they love it? Because they compare it to where they came from. In Africa, it’s all sleepin together.

Niggas is just so fucked up and so misconstrued. Because the Negro was made, he was made. We was made. They say the first slave came what year? 1619. 1555 is when they captured a tribe and brought them over to the Caribbean. They kept us for 64 years, just studying us. So they knew all our dislikes, likes, habits, they knew a million things about us. And they also had other niggas who they programmed to come in, infiltrate and teach and train like how you see Fiddler teaching Kunta Kinte in Roots. So you figure, hundreds of years of that kind of shit. We stained with the horror of that shit. It’s a constant threat in our matrix. And then the diets and the things we do daily in these projects? For instance: Like this little kid right here [points at picture of young child outside Robert Foster Chicago projects]. He will go to the corner store, buy him a 25 cent pack of Now & Laters, Lemonheads. He’s eatin that shit, a block of fuckin sugar and poisons. They eat five packs of those a day. A 10-cent pack of sunflower seeds with a whole bunch of salt. Some fried corn chips. And they wash it all down with a 25-cent Sun Dew drink, that’s just artificial flavoring, coloring, sugar, corn syrup, fructose. And to tell the truth, I ate that many days. All that’s for one dollar. Then you got to another level of the same store and get five pounds of chicken wings. What the fuck?! Five pounds of chicken wings for fuckin’ three dollars! What kind of chicken is this? Yet there ain’t no pigeons around no more.

Then you got these motherfuckers [pointing at gang members] who don’t got no more common sense than nothing, they tryin to make money. I did the same thing. You think a thousand dollars is “money”? This is a thousand dollars a night, right here [pointing to hotel suite]. I ain’t even paying for it. I been flown out here, set up in this shit, ordered all kinda shit, cuz I fuckin’ rap [laughs at the absurdity]. But this motherfucker will kill this man for a thousand dollars or for one gram of cocaine. You can go to jail for one gram per year. Now if it cost you 30 dollars, and you bought it from the fuckin nigga uptown for maybe 15 dollars, he bought it from somebody for maybe less and the person who shipped this whole shit over here had it for even less. Let’s say the total retail value of it is only five dollars, aight, before it left that country it came from. That means my life is only worth five dollars a year? Even for thirty dollars -- my life is only worth thirty dollars a fuckin’ year? It’s such some fuckin’ real shit they doin’, son.

But then on top of what they doin’, we doin’ it on top of ourselves. That’s why in the Bobby Digital movie, he’s like ,’Put away the guns, man.’ I’ll punch him in his motherfuckin face. That’ll make a nigga fuck up. Then a dude come back, ‘Yeah but soon as you punch a nigga in his face, he gon run and get his gun.’ Which is true. Cuz niggas is so bitchy! Our diets and our way of thinking is bitch.

Niggas is bitches, for real. Niggas remind me of bitches because they be acting emotional like a woman. “Yeah yeah motherfucker yeah” -- all that, man, is bitches. You know how girls get. [male voice:] ‘Hey is the baby alright?’ [annoyed female voice:]‘I ain’t taking care of it!’ [laughs] That’s the way I look at it. Most of our men have a bitch mentality. They gotta get that out of them.

Everybody say they did it to us from the shit they put us through over the years, all the thing the government put us through. But right now there are too many great leaders from both nationalities that’s spoke so many wise words that it shouldn’t be like that for the average man. He should be able to catch on. I caught on. That’s why I know it can be caught on. My whole clan caught on! And we’s the ‘degenerates’! Me and Raekwon, you shoulda seen us when we was little kids. We almost died chewin’ so much goddamned bubblegum in one day! And we done stole cars, and did all the things you would do, anything a nigga would do, but the light and the truth set us free when we heard it.

WITH THE FIVE PERCENT TEACHINGS, DO YOU LITERALLY FEEL LIKE WE’RE IN THE...
Final stages? We’re coming to the end of a time. We’re coming to the end of a way of thinking. There’s about to be a major change. Some people think it’s gonna be a lot of missiles and [chaos] and something gonna come out of the sky and all that shit. I ain’t lookin for all that. But there’s gonna be a major change and all that. I think it is about to hit the fan. There is, you can tell. It’s building up, building up.
 

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