Few groups have had more impact on the shape and evolution of hip-hop than Wu-Tang Clan, the Staten Island supergroup that helped define the sound of 1990s New York rap and transform the industry.
And yet seeing Wu-Tang Clan perform a full-length concert in the flesh — all of the members onstage together — is a privilege not many have experienced. Even in its golden era, the Wu-Tang Clan was never a reliable touring unit. Its smaller shows were often unruly, and by the time the group graduated to bigger stages, performances were often undone by competing egos and unreliable artist attendance, to say nothing of the limits on the opportunities available to rough-edged rap stars in the 1990s and 2000s.
“There’s so many places we really haven’t been,” RZA, the chief architect of the Wu-Tang Clan, said in an interview on Popcast, The New York Times’s music podcast. “We had some successful touring, right? But not at the level of what the brand is.”
He’s aiming to fix that with Wu-Tang Forever: The Final Chamber, billed as the group’s last tour, and the biggest road show it has undertaken as the headlining act, which will begin in June. All of the surviving original members — RZA, GZA, Raekwon, Ghostface Killah, Method Man, Inspectah Deck, U-God and Masta Killa — are slated to participate, as well as Cappadonna and Young Dirty Bastard, who will perform in place of his father, Ol’ Dirty Bastard, who died in 2004.
The tour, RZA told Jon Caramanica and Joe Coscarelli, is the culmination of a five-plus-year plan of legacy-building for the Clan, including a multipart documentary series, a dramatized mini-series, several individual biographies and a Las Vegas residency, the first for a hip-hop act.
On Popcast, RZA spoke about what it took to get the whole Clan on the same page; the opportunities that slipped through their fingers over the years; and inventing pathways for hip-hop acts that later became the norm. “Jay-Z was like, Yo, I got the blueprint from you,” RZA recalled.
These are edited excerpts from the conversation.
JOE COSCARELLI You’re always creating, making new stuff, but you’ve spent some time over the last five or six years really thinking about the legacy of what you built with Wu-Tang and making sure it is reflected correctly in the public record. When did you know it was time to glance in the rearview?
RZA It was when other outlets started showing hip-hop and started looking back. There was a TV show on Netflix, “Hip-Hop Evolution.” I was like, hold on, they’re kind of skipping some [expletive], you know what I mean? If you miss a layer or a pillar of something, then the foundation is going to fall. When I realized that part of what was being skipped was our story — the Wu-Tang story and what we helped bring the culture of hip-hop and even pop culture — it was important for me to take charge and be sure to tell the story, and tell it the way I thought was best.
COSCARELLI As you started to move the chess pieces of this nostalgia moment for Wu-Tang, were you already imagining the next steps — the Vegas residency and now this tour — as you did 25 or 30 years ago when you started with a very deliberate map?
RZA It all was part of a plan. In the beginning there was a five-year plan. This time, there was two five-year plans. You have to start the first plan — the documentary to get to the series — and then that’s going to build up to the first tour, New York State of Mind, with Nas. That’s going to build up to the residency — a test run, at first — and that’s going to lead to a final tour.
And then, after you complete that, if you’ve succeeded in all those steps, you can potentially sit still at a residency and ride it out. We’ve been blessed to be on course.
COSCARELLI Does it start to become more successful because the guys see there’s a regular check here and it’s a bigger check than they’re now going to make from recording music or touring solo? Is it driven by money or is it driven by the fact that it was clicking creatively?
RZA I think both. It’s business, so you’ve got to be able to have some cheese on it. But I also think that for the Wu-Tang, the spirit gotta be right. If the spirit ain’t right, you can’t pay GZA to show up, straight up. You can’t pay me to show up. And I think our spirits are right.
JON CARAMANICA Everybody’s going to be on every date?
RZA Everybody has agreed.
CARAMANICA That’s not nothing. [Laughs]
RZA No, seriously. Everybody has agreed to do this. Everybody’s agreed on the name. So we may come to your city, you’ll see all of us together and that may be the last time you see us all together in the physical. You might watch us on TV, but we’re not coming to your city again. We want you to come break bread with us.
COSCARELLI So what were the hurdles? Was there a holdout?
RZA You never know who — that’s the point. You’ll be like, I got everybo … — oh, [expletive] — this guy! [Laughs]
The thing you can do, though, is just simply ask everybody what do they want, what do they need, how does it work for you, time-wise, dollar-wise, comfortability-wise? Somebody might be like, yo, listen, I don’t want more than two people in the dressing room with me. OK, we can work that out.
I’ll take this to myself. I can be very — I’m a film director, showrunner …
CARAMANICA You’re used to having things your way.
RZA That’s a personality that you gotta have humility with.
COSCARELLI A control freak, some might call it.
RZA Some might call it! The know-it-all. That’s an issue sometimes. Method Man said to me one day, “You always talk at me.” I just listened. I always ask my wife. She’s like, you can be that way. So then I said let me ask him what he wants. The last brother I had to call is my teacher: the GZA. He can do almost anything he wants and I can’t say nothing.
CARAMANICA You were prepared for a no?
RZA Yeah. I called him directly, no manager to manager. He didn’t make the Vegas shows. I don’t need an explanation from him. He’s my teacher. I revere him, to be quite frank. But I said, here’s the time, here’s the flow, here’s the business potential. Are you in? And he said, yeah, I’m ready. That’s a blessing.
COSCARELLI It’s an impolite question, but does anyone pick up the phone and say, “Yeah, well, how much is so-and-so making?”
RZA That could be happening on the managerial level.
COSCARELLI Because there is a hierarchy, I assume.
RZA Oh, there is a hierarchy.
COSCARELLI Have people accepted where they sit on that hierarchy after all these years? Do people know where they are in the power rankings?
RZA I don’t have the answer to that. What I will say is that I think everyone can measure their own equations as they go out and face the world alone and see their value. And then if they come back to Wu and that value is at least that or better, you can measure that. If that value is less? Then you’re going to have a problem.
CARAMANICA There were a number of things that we now take for granted in hip-hop that you did first. In a way, you were too early for the biggest era of hip-hop touring, but that kind of forced you into unconventional strategies. Can you talk about stepping into the breach in the ’90s and being like, well, damn, there isn’t a way for us to do a big tour unless we go with Rage Against the Machine.
RZA You had your club dates and college shows. That’s fun. And you can make some change like that. But you’re not going to make it to the top of the food chain. And so my idea, along with Steve Rifkind and Rich Isaacson [of Loud Records], was like, yo, Wu-Tang with Rage. Go out to the world.
Around then, I was in Manhattan by a pay phone and I hear this kid on the phone. Little white kid. I guess he’s talking to his parents. I overheard him say, you know, “New York is good, Mom. The best thing I saw, there’s a big Wu-Tang sign in Times Square.” That was his most exciting moment of his trip. And here’s a Wu-Tang guy five feet away from him, but he didn’t know. And so when it came time to go for the Rage tour, it was like, there’s a lot of white fans out there that are ready for us.
COSCARELLI And that was a lightbulb moment.
RZA That was more like a convincing moment for me. And so my case to the team was we go here first, in the summer. And then at the fall homecomings, we go back and get the Blacks. Some people took to it and some people did not take to it. We actually walked off the tour. A lot of us weren’t prepared or engaged in what it was. I think the foresight wasn’t there for some of us. And, you know, it was counter to what some of us was feeling.
I didn’t think it was a great idea to leave. It ended up being just me and Zack [de la Rocha] onstage one night. After we dropped out, they put the Roots on the tour. I had a talk with Questlove. He said that’s what ended up buying his first house. It changed his life.
COSCARELLI 1997 was also the year you were banned from the New York radio station Hot 97, after members of the group said “[expletive] Hot 97” onstage at the concert they sponsored. I think younger listeners don’t realize how much power rap radio had at the time. Talk about the fork in the road of that moment. What happens to Wu-Tang if you don’t get banned from Hot 97?
RZA Between that and the sister stations and even a few other stations that followed their trend, it’s almost like “Wu-Tang Forever” could have been diamond. Finally, someone apologized to me, like, two years ago. Funk Flex sat down with me and apologized. That was a kick in the nuts, and in hindsight, it was a kick in the nuts to the culture.
CARAMANICA 1997 was a huge year with “Wu-Tang Forever,” Biggie’s second album, his death. Then there was the beginning of the real rise of the South, and all of the cultural power reorganized around Cash Money Records, No Limit Records, scenes in Texas, Florida, Atlanta. I remember with No Limit in the late ’90s, there wasn’t one umbrella group, but the family energy felt very Wu-Tang. Do you think that Wu-Tang being stymied created oxygen for other people and scenes?
RZA First of all, hats off to them because their destiny is theirs. The model of Wu-Tang has been emulated everywhere. We showed that you could come in collectively and spread your culture. But if you go back and look at the Wu-Tang empire, with the Wu-Tang Clan and all the solo members having a potential to continue the rawness of hip-hop — it gets stopped. And then another wave comes in, and they come in to New York radio. In one degree it’s great because the South culture gets a chance to rise and those families get a chance. But the Wu getting stopped opened up for others — and that’s also the blessing of the Wu.
CARAMANICA You live in Los Angeles, and you just had the fires — people lost their homes, all their work, their collections. Madlib lost his library of music. You very famously had a flood in the early years of Wu-Tang where a lot of stuff was lost.
RZA I had two floods, actually. The first one is in ’93 after “Enter the Wu-Tang” is out already and I’m making Meth’s album, then Deck’s album and the GZA album. All those albums was already premade and then the flood washed all that away and I had to recreate. But there was something cool about that. Beats was made on floppy disk back then. The floppy disks all got damaged in the flood. I put them inside the machine — no read. But I still have the floppy disks. On this tour. I’m going to take these floppy disks — it’s at least about 80 disks — I’m going to put them in a time capsule, and maybe somebody in the future can figure it out.
COSCARELLI Did the fires bring this all back to mind?
RZA You know, I was out there during the fires and we almost had to evacuate as well. But the only thing I grabbed was my hard drives. Our laptops and our hard drives. That’s kind of weird that I thought of that.
COSCARELLI It took you back to 30 years ago.
RZA To be quite frank, brothers, I’ve lost way more than I’ve shared. That’s just how life is.
