Stuart Braithwaite: I hear science is a big influence on your new album [Dark Matter]. Is it something you’ve always studied?

GZA: I was inspired by it, but it’s not that I have always been interested in science – science is everything. It’s in everything in the world. Most of it is actually based on physics, it’s actually energy and matter, and most of the album has been inspired by that.

SB: It is an all encompassing thing. [Science] can kind of turn people off, but it’s the most interesting thing ever.



GZA: It’s also the way you deliver the message. It’s boring to some because of how it is taught and how it is delivered. In most sciences, they don’t have ways of getting the message across, like how some artists have a way of getting it across.

SB: My dad was a scientist and made telescopes, and quite often he would try to explain things to me, and my head would just really hurt. I guess one of the last scientific conversations I had with him was about the parallel alternative universes, and it was just amazing, how excited he got about it. It’s kind of cool, like the things that were a bit too far-fetched in the comic books are now fact.

GZA: They have a saying, what was science fiction years ago is now science fact now.

SB: Getting back to the music, I have been listening to your music for a long time, and you’ve bridged loads of eras of hip-hop, from right from the very start to right now. Do you want to tell us a bit about how you first heard hip-hop music, or first heard people rap – what inspired you to do it yourself?

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Wu-Tang Clan: from left, Ghostface Killah, Masta Killa, Raekwon, RZA, Ol’ Dirty Bastard, GZA, U-God and Method Man in New York, 1997. Photograph: Bob Berg/Getty Images

GZA: Writing for me really started in the 70s as a young child. I used to read a lot of nursery rhymes, and I learned a lot of those rhymes word for word. I would go to an aunt’s house, and she would let me play music, and she had The Last Poets album. At that time, albums didn’t have explicit stickers on them, so some of the songs had profanity on them, and I was moved by that. I would listen to those songs, to the flow, and I’d balance it back and forth with the nursery stuff I had. A year later I moved to Staten Island [from Brooklyn]. I had a few DJs in my neighbourhood that would play music in the streets. There was no hip-hop yet, there were just DJs that were playing disco, funk and pop music, and we would gather round, go to the parks and dance and enjoy ourselves. I would often take trips from Staten Island to the south Bronx, which is originally the first place of hip-hop. I was only around 11 years old, and sometimes RZA would come with me. The DJs and MCs there were way more advanced than the neighbourhood I was coming from. It was just a culture that I was moved by, and I knew that was my calling.

SB: When you first started making this music, did it feel completely natural? Did you get the sense at the time that this was a really important new culture that was going to define your whole life and mainstream music?



GZA: No I couldn’t see that. For us, it was just a passion and a hobby; it was something that is so much a part of my makeup. It was something I loved so much, we didn’t know it was going to change or revolutionise the world as a music genre. But if you think about it, [hip-hop is] something that children are attracted to immediately: even a lullaby – “Hush little baby don’t say a word / Papa’s gonna buy you a mockingbird” – that’s rhyming. When children hear that, they gravitate towards that faster than they would R&B or rock and pop, because it’s spoken word. It’s all art when you look at it – it’s a way of expressing yourself. Kids started doing hip-hop and rhyming and break dancing, and stopped being in gangs, so it was a powerful tool to get kids off the street and stop them from hurting each other.

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SB: On Paper Plates, you really took 50 Cent apart in a really methodical way, saying he wasn’t actually representing anything. You have said that a lot of modern mainstream hip-hop really regresses the themes, it tends to be very materialistic and moves away from lyricism. It’s an important view, because it isn’t said enough.

GZA: I think at some point, there was a shift in music, and it changed the dynamics. I think he loves hip-hop and hip-hop was in him, just like it is in me. It was probably different when he started rhyming, because he is like nine years younger than me. He caught it from the beginning when it was all about clever raps, it was about who can write the most intellectual, wittiest, clever, thought-provoking rap.

I think a lot of kids that are rhyming now, they are rhyming about violence, and that was never us. When we were talking about killing someone, we were talking about murdering someone with a rhyme. Back in the day, a lot of MCs had a lot of intellectual names. This name was given to me by RZA, I was called the Genius, RZA was the Scientist and Dirty [Ol’ Dirty Bastard] was the Professor. These were the names that we had when we were teenagers that represented good things and positive things, it didn’t represent killing. Now it’s about rapping about your car or your house, or about all the shit you can get, and it was never that years ago.

It’s not me getting on a track saying, the earth is the third planet and it’s 93m miles from the sun. I am not teaching in that sense. It’s about making sure everything is cohesive and fits together, and the story is amazing and compelling and keeps moving and motivating. I shouldn’t have to sit down and listen to a song, and after three lines know I will hear something about a car. You should be more interested in the mind that made the car, and not the car itself.

SB: The record of yours that most people would refer to is probably Liquid Swords. Tell me a little bit about making that record. What was writing it like?

GZA: It was a great experience. It was a comeback for me because I already had a deal and an album [Words From the Genius] prior to putting out Wu-Tang. I was striking back at Cold Chillin’ [Warner’s subsidiary label, who he claims did not treat his album as a priority at the time]. It was personal when I was writing that, and I didn’t want to use it, but I was like, I am done with them.

Then, when I got to release a solo album again [Liquid Swords], I was on a major label again, and I was getting all the push from them. I was probably one of the first rappers to be signed to the label; I was getting so much support because of the popularity from Wu-Tang. Making an album was a great feeling, and there were many hours in RZA’s house, in his basement, and hours of beat playing. We were still in our early stage, so there was so much support from everyone. I was doing the album, and every now and then a Clan member would come through, Rae would be there one day or Ghost another. It was just fun.

SB: Did you use a live band on it, or was it all sampling?

GZA: For the first album it was a lot of sampling, I don’t think we were bringing in musicians at that time. From what I know, it was all just samples, hip-hop and rock music, which is what hip-hop is: it’s a combination of all of them.

SB: People talk about originality in art, but so much music is made from other music, everything is connected, and I love amazing pieces of music that originally come from different sources. One thing goes through someone’s mind and comes out the other side.

GZA: Everything is always coming from something else. Even if you create something, it has to be inspired by something else. If you think of Apple and Steve Jobs, he had to be inspired by something that launched the ideas in his head. Our music came from these old songs, rock, pop and funk, and that’s why people were able to take a sample from a song that’s only half a second or a second long, and chop it up. It’s an art in itself. It’s a great thing.

