Wu Tang - Once Upon a Time in Shaolin

THE WU-ALBUM FANS BEEN WAITING FOR!! UNLESS YOU HAVE $5 MILLION DOLLARS..THIS IS THE CLOSEST YOU'RE GONNA GET TO HEARING THE SECRET DOUBLE ALBUM!! "ONCE UPON A TIME IN SHAOLIN".. ALBUM SNIPPITS!! (PRODUCED BY CILVARINGZ..RZA & 4TH DISCIPLE)...VERSES BY U-GOD..REDMAN..METH..GHOSTFACE KILLAH..RZA..INSPECTAH DECK...CAPPADONNA..RAEKWON..GZA..KILLARM

­Y..GRYM REAPER(R.I.P) SHABAZZ..SUNZ OF MAN..KILLAH PRIEST..KILLAH SIN.. AND MORE! PLUS RAW BEAT SAMPLER FROM THE ALBUM! RZA explains why his recently announced Wu-Tang Clan album, Wu -- Once Upon A time In Shaolin deserves to command a multimillion-dollar price.

In an exclusive conversation with HipHopDX during the press junket for his upcoming film, Brick Mansions (April 3), RZA says that the secretive project produced largely by Morocco-based producer Tarik "Cilvaringz" Azzougarh is as "rare as the Mona Lisa."

"I kept it a secret because I want it to be what I want it to be which was, 'Yo, this is a piece of art,'" he says. "It belongs in an art setting, venue, a museum, or a gallery. It's as rare as any Picasso, any Van Gogh. It's as rare—as I said in my article—as finding an Egyptian scepter. It's as rare as the Mona Lisa. It's rare, yo. It's only one. We commissioned a great artist to design the box around it. It looks like a holy book might be in that box. [Laughs] That's the idea, yo. This is art. It should be toured and looked upon as that. That's the first and primary thing.

"As far as the value of it, the value could go from wherever," RZA continues. "It may be worth $20 million. It may be worth $100 million. Who knows? That's the value that a person puts upon it. That's what art is about. When you see a piece of art, somebody goes, 'What is that? It's just a painting of a woman.' Yeah, but that painting of that woman is worth $100 million based on the person that appreciates it to his heart like that and based on how the world is gonna view it. That's important to me."


RZA also clarifies the timing of his decision to release one copy of an unheard Wu-Tang album. While news around two Wu-Tang Clan albums overlap, he affirms that Wu -- Once Upon A Time In Shaolin is in no way connected to the group's stalled sixth studio album, A Better Tomorrow.

"This idea to release [Wu -- Once Upon A Time In Shaolin] was since September [2013], he says. "And then we rediscussed it in December. I made the decision January 20. I made the decision on how I was going to deal with this particular piece of art. Then I made the announcement a few months later. It has nothing to do with A Better Tomorrow. I let everybody know in the office that works on A Better Tomorrow—the staff and everybody—that I'm gonna do something different. I wouldn't tell nobody what it was.

"A Better Tomorrow—I'll say it briefly—is healthy," RZA continues. "That's for the fans more than anything because that's what we need. If you're having a good day today, you need a better tomorrow. If you're having a bad day today, you definitely need a better tomorrow. When I first came up with that concept, it was my idea looking at the world, looking at my crew, and looking at myself. Looking at myself, I'm like, 'Wow, everything is working for me. But everything ain't working for everybody on my team. Everybody ain't working for everybody in my family. I got my cousin, he just got laid off at the airport. My brother, he thought that [President Obama] would come and give people all these jobs. He had to go to Ohio to look for a job and then come back. He needs a better tomorrow. I was trying to write songs of inspiration and hope, which is the theme of this album. I'm having a hard time keeping it together because of creative differences we always have in Wu. Maybe brothers would rather see me walk around like [my character in Brick Mansions] Tremaine Alexander. 'Strap up, Brick Mansion gangsters!' That's the energy, but that won't make a better tomorrow."

Brick Mansions stars RZA, Paul Walker, and Parkour creator, David Belle and is in theaters April 25.

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Questlove: How Hip Hop Failed Black America

This is the first in a weekly series of six essays looking at hip-hop's recent past, thinking about its distant past, and wondering about the possibility of a future.
 

"There are three famous quotes that haunt me and guide me though my days. The first is from John Bradford, the 16th-century English reformer. In prison for inciting a mob, Bradford saw a parade of prisoners on their way to being executed and said, “There but for the grace of God go I.” (Actually, he said “There but for the grace of God goes John Bradford,” but the switch to the pronoun makes it work for the rest of us.) The second comes from Albert Einstein, who disparagingly referred to quantum entanglement as “spooky action at a distance.” And for the third, I go to Ice Cube, the chief lyricist of N.W.A., who delivered this manifesto in “Gangsta Gangsta” back in 1988: “Life ain’t nothing but bitches and money.”

Those three ideas may seem distant from one another, but if you set them up and draw lines between them, that’s triangulation. Bradford’s idea, of course, is about providence, about luck and gratitude: You only have your life because you don’t have someone else’s. At the simplest level, I think about that often. I could be where others are, and by extension, they could be where I am. You don’t want to be insensible to that. You don’t want to be an ingrate. (By the by, Bradford’s quote has come to be used to celebrate good fortune — when people say it, they’re comforting themselves with the fact that things could be worse — but in fact, his own good fortune lasted only a few years before he was burned at the stake.)

Einstein was talking about physics, of course, but to me, he’s talking about something closer to home — the way that other people affect you, the way that your life is entangled in theirs whether or not there’s a clear line of connection. Just because something is happening to a street kid in Seattle or a small-time outlaw in Pittsburgh doesn’t mean that it’s not also happening, in some sense, to you. Human civilization is founded on a social contract, but all too often that gets reduced to a kind of charity: Help those who are less fortunate, think of those who are different. But there’s a subtler form of contract, which is the connection between us all.

And then there’s Ice Cube, who seems to be talking about life’s basic appetites — what’s under the lid of the id — but is in fact proposing a world where that social contract is destroyed, where everyone aspires to improve themselves and only themselves, thoughts of others be damned. What kind of world does that create?"

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Breakdancing "Buddhist Monks"

via gothamist