So there is an earlier version of this piece running around. I sent that version to Oliver Wang (soul-sides.com) he sent back a critique that has lead to this revised version of “The RZA Blog.”

On Tuesday Dec. 11 2007 I opened for The Rza.

In the days leading up to this gig I was filled with unprecedented anticipation and anxiety, a combination that I imagine is only found when standing directly in the shadow of one’s predominant influence. More than any other artist The Rza shaped my “definition of dope.” His work as the leader and producer of The Wu-Tang Clan is responsible for the aesthetic that I attempt to honor in my own music.

In the two months since the gig I have made a handful of attempts to write about my experience. The thrill of sharing a marquee with an artist that I can safely call a hero should supply enough material for me give you a decent read. However, each time I have sat down to collect the details of the night into a narrative it has snowballed into something much bigger. A simple recounting of one of the more exciting nights in my rap career has become a study in artistic procreation. It has led me to examine how I fit into hip-hop’s lineage through the lenses of history, appropriation, inheritance and influence.

To my ear the first seven Wu-Tang albums along with the first Gravediggaz record constitute the absolute best that hip-hop music has ever been. With all appropriate apologies to the mid-nineties Dungeon Family, and early-nineties Native Tongues, no crew, group or artist can boast a run of eight consecutive albums to compare with: 36 Chambers, Return To The 36 Chambers, Liquid Swords, Tical, Only Built For Cuban Linx, Ironman, Six Feet Deep and Wu-Tang Forever.

These albums juxtapose ideals of struggle, loyalty, tradition, honor, humility, faith, and family with images of violence, misogyny, and despair. They were wise as they were juvenile, profane as they were passionate, and inspiring as they were depraved.

The more I have allowed myself to sink into the nostalgia of these records, the more I love them. 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. Even if you are not a Wu-Tang fan, as long you are roughly my age I would wager that you know someone who has taken up interest in samurai film, martial arts or even chess, based upon something they heard a Clan member say or reference.

For me the pursuit of being an informed Wu-Tang fan led to a deeper knowledge and love of soul music. Collecting southern soul records, especially on the Stax/Volt label has become one of the great passions of my life. Tracking down records that Rza has sampled has led me to some of the best music I have ever heard. If you are not familiar with “Hard Times” by Baby Huey or “Let’s Straighten It Out” by O.V. Wright or “Could I Be Falling In Love With You” by Syl Johnson, your life could be drastically improved by picking up Shaolin Soul Vols. 1-3 today. Having an appreciation of the songs that Rza sampled has made listening to those classic Wu-Tang Clan albums, as well as discovering the original records, more rewarding than either pursuit would have been on its own.

More than any other sample-based composer, Rza’s production highlights hip-hop’s multi-faceted relationship to its predecessors. Like his friend and collaborator Quentin Tarantino has done with his films, RZA’s music compliments, critiques and complicates its source material. This is what is fascinating about great sample based work; the relationship between what is being used and what it is being used for/in is itself a text that can communicate its own messages to the listener or viewer. Appreciating such aspects of sample-based work requires that we familiarize ourselves with the source material.

Most of Wu-Tang’s classic songs are composed from samples of southern soul music from the 1960’s and early ‘70s. These were the songs that served as the soundtrack of The Civil Rights Era in Black America. The theme music to a movement of people who truly believed “A Change Is Gonna Come.” Removed from that context, chopped, filtered, stretched and reassembled into Wu-Tang instrumentals, the very same notes are stripped of that spirit. Rza’s production, especially on the albums listed earlier, conveys a tangible emptiness, a hopelessness born of Reaganomics, project living and the drug war.

The classic example of this phenomenon can be heard within the classic Wu-Tang Clan single, “C.R.E.A.M.” “C.R.E.A.M.” is composed from pieces of a ballad titled “As Long As I’ve Got You” by The Charmels. “As Long As I’ve Got You” is a sonic testament to the transcendent power of love released in 1968. Written by Isaac Hayes and David Porter, two young, Black men, the lyrics of the song reflect a soaring optimism so common to that era it has become cliché…

No fire is too hot, no snow is too cold/
Youth will never leave me, I’ll never grow old/
I feel free as a bird, flying around in the blue/
As long as… Baby, as long as I’ve got you/

Contrast this with the nihilistic sentiment of “C.ash R.ules E.verything A.round M.e.” Covered with twenty-five years of dust and processed by the RZA’s ASR-10 the tones are transformed from a devout love song into eerie and haunting backdrop to which Inspectah Deck and Raekwon depict incarceration, drugs, depression, desperation and poverty.

Rarely as explicit, the way these two songs reflect upon each other parallels an interesting irony in the relationship between hip-hop and soul. There could not be hip-hop if there had not been soul. Both as source material, and as a cultural forbearer, soul music made hip-hop possible. Hip-hop could never have made it so quickly from its inception in the Bronx, NY to my cul-de-sac in suburban Cotati, CA if Motown had not already marched down that road.

Still, the iconic hip-hop albums of my youth do not spend much time celebrating the progress made by previous generations. On the contrary, albums like Illmatic, The Chronic, Ready To Die, or any of the aforementioned Wu-Tang Clan releases, detail the consequence one of the most tragic ideological shifts in recent American history.

The sad fact is that many of the same young, white “hippies” who added numbers and political capitol to the Civil Rights Movement in ’60s and early ’70s, would grow into middle-aged, white “yuppies” and support the Reagan administration as it disenfranchised a generation of inner-city youth in the 1980’s. Under Reagan, the Federal Government cut inner-city public assistance programs, bankrupted urban school districts, concentrated wealth among the upper class, exacerbated the crack epidemic, and incarcerated Black men and boys at unprecedented rates.

This is the America depicted by songs like C.R.E.A.M. It is fascinating to think that producers like the Rza actually recontextualized the soundtrack to the Civil Rights Movement, to create music that one could read as a tragic epilogue to the movement’s history of faith and promise.

This makes me I am a fantastic irony. A middle-class white-boy born in 1981, cultured by a music that is the product of an odd collaboration between the best and the worst impulses of my parent’s generation. If it had not been for the Civil Rights Movement chances are I would have grown up in a world where a child of my socioeconomic circumstances would not have had such unfettered access to music being made by young poor Blacks in inner-city New York, LA and Atlanta. Having parents that lived through the Civil Rights Movement, and raised me in a time of increased superficial sensitivity and political correctness, allowed hip-hop to find its way to me faster and in a fundamentally different form then Motown came to my parent’s generation. However, it was not the fleeting political selflessness demonstrated by White America during the Civil Rights Movement, but the subsequent selfish indifference of the American Suburbs that made hip-hop sound the way it did by the time it got to my ears.

Obviously looking back on my youth today I know that I was often being sold a sensationalized and even fictionalized version of the Black experience, but this does not change the fact that hip-hop music constituted a relatively uncensored dispatch from a segment of the American population that had never before spoken so frankly to kids like me. As my generation began to evaluate the historic moments of our adolescence we were always privy to another side of the story. Whether it was the drug-war, the LA riots, or the OJ Simpson trial, we had our counter-narratives piped directly into our headphones.

This is not to say that my generation is any less racist or intolerant, it is to say that the racism and intolerance displayed by my generation is even more inexcusable. It is tragic that our increased cognizance and awareness has not led to much in the way of action. Off hand I cannot think of one tangible improvement to American politics, economics or equality that my generation can take credit for. It is fair to say that hip-hop’s penetration into my world began and has continued despite the re-segregation of America caused by apathy, suburban sprawl and the other consequences of the aforementioned “tragic ideological shift” that turned “hippies” into “yuppies” and “we” into “me.”

Many have documented what hip-hop has not done, I am writing about what rap did to me.

Before it ever brought me to the back of a limousine with one of my heroes, hip-hop brought me the faculty to understand how we got there, and what it meant for me to be there. My desire to appreciate hip-hop told me to listen to Funkadelic, James Brown, Sam Cooke, OV Wright, Curtis Mayfield, Betty Wright and Nina Simone. Nina Simone led to Billie Holiday and Billie led to people like Langston Hughes. Hip-hop told me to read Iceberg Slim, Monster Cody, Malcolm X. That led to James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison. Hip-hop told me to say “Fuck The Police” four years before I knew the name Rodney King. Hip-hop took this sheltered suburban white-boy and turned him into a young man who could not sufficiently tell the story of “standing in the shadow of his predominant influence” without considering racial dynamics, appropriation and generational politics. Hip-hop ensured that I did not have to seek out my alternative histories the way that Clapton and his kind dug up Robert Johnson, or Rza and his contemporaries dusted off the songs their predecessors sang. Hip-hop came right to my welcome mat adorned doorstep and told me plainly that I was “now about to witness the strength of street knowledge.”

Posted by Mr. Sayre on Thursday, February 28th, 2008 at 3:38 pm.