RZA
N***a Please
Inspectah Deck
(Def Jam)
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Or are they? That’s the true mystery of Shaolin. Paradoxically, the mass media infestation the Wu warriors gloat over points to their underground cultishness as the reason they matter. This team of ace paranoids could write a book on how to achieve popularity by writing lyrics as easy to read as Gravity’s Rainbow. Like most hard-core rappers, the Wu consider glorifying the narcotics trade a less heinous crime than peddling dance beats, and yet they pioneered hip-hop haberdashery before Versace had even measured Puffy’s inseam. You could call this muddle of messages black entrepreneurialsm, or you could call it the real New World Order, y’all. Record label as enterprise zone, bootstrap capitalism as civil rights movement.
The RZA Hits is a collection of 18 shots, most so sharp that such concerns seem moot. You can almost convince yourself you knew what these guys were talking about all along. Well, don’t kid yourself–you didn’t. Seeing the Wu stripped down to the essentials is perverse, like one of those stunted Caddies they made in the 80s, even borderline sacrilegious, like publishing Cliff’s Notes to the Koran. After all, the collective bloat of their umpteen original releases, as a group and solo, wasn’t just a side effect–RZA has insisted all along that it’s the core of his aesthetic. His overproduction is mindfully wasteful, marked by the exhilarated desperation of those millennial wackos determined to use up the earth’s resources before the Four Horsemen roll in.
If his plaintive rambles about women and money and rants like “I wanna give a shout out to the Eskimos / I wanna give a shout out to the submarines,” aren’t as impromptu as they sound, then he’s even more of a genius than I thought. But whether he’s recommending cocaine as an antihistamine or desecrating the Billie Holiday standard “Good Morning Heartache,” his overriding compulsion is, to paraphrase Puffy, kissing women in places none of his cohorts would dare stick their faces. And his various producers contribute a sexy, funky R & B feel RZA would never countenance.
