During a new interview, RZA shared his thoughts about the death toll in hip-hop.
“We’ve lost more hip-hop artists in the last few years than ever before,” the Wu-Tang Clan legend told the Financial Times. “Growing up in the golden age of hip-hop, we lost maybe like a couple of artists, but not a dozen artists or more.”
RZA pointed out topics the genre glorifies. “Sometimes hip-hop music glamorizes certain things. It glamorizes prison life, it glamorizes gangsters and thugs. I understand that, because I grew out of that,” he said. “But it doesn’t give you the total tragedy of what that can end up being, nor are we being represented with a lot of alternatives.”
On the music side of things, RZA is preparing to drop his new collaborative album with DJ Scratch, Saturday Afternoon Kung Fu Theater. Due March 4, the album is available to pre-order here.
“Lyrically the hip-hop part of me had a chance to re-emerge during quarantine. Giving Scratch the reins as a producer and me taking the reins as an MC, that’s what frees me up creatively and lets me play more with lyrical gags and lyrical flows because I don’t have to be focused on everything,” RZA said of the album. “He delivered tracks that resonated and brought me back to a sound that I felt was missing. For me it was really natural for me to flow and write to these songs.”
Check out the music video for Saturday Afternoon Kung Fu Theater’s title track below.
