Wu-Tang Clan's RZA and DJ Scratch talk new music with Ed Lover
New York rap icon RZA and DJ Scratch are far from falling back from the music-making scene. The hip-hop pair chopped it up on Audacy’s 94.7 ‘The Block’ with the legendary Ed Lover to dish on everything from new music to the Big Apple’s rap game.
Check out some of the interview highlights and peep the entire chop up session toward the bottom.
[1:06] – DJ Scratch on collaboration with RZA for new album. “RZA had reached out to me in the beginning of the pandemic, back in March 2020 to check on my health and my family, and he was like, ‘I’ve been going through my hard drives, do you still have that Wu-Tang joint? I want to emcee again, but I don’t want to wear both hats. Want to do an album together?’, I’m like, ‘Absolutely.’ I’ve got a whole stash of Wu [songs]…I went and got the heavy pen, the ones that drip the ink, you know what I mean, and carved out some dope lyrics…The foundation of Hip Hop is the DJ and the emcee. I’ve been blessed to do a lot of things in art, but going back to the foundation, I just wanted to do that.”
[4:05] – RZA on why he didn’t want to wear two hats on the new project. “I just wanted to touch the microphone…It just gave me that freedom. Sometimes when you do both, you need eight arms. At this particular phase, I was like, I don’t have to bust my brain like that…My pen just kept flowing…We wanted to take it back to that feeling – People that’s in New York, every Saturday back in the days, channel 5, 3:00 pm the whole hood went in the house and watched ‘Kung Fu Theater’, and when we came outside we were jumping off the benches and fences trying to do those moves – We just wanted to bring back that sonic feeling of Saturday Afternoon Kung Fu…We got our name from a Kung Fu movie.”
[6:56] – Brooklyn and Staten Island, Hip Hop in New York. “The most important thing was, it seemed like when the Wu came through, the whole Roc came through…Hip Hop is New York. Staten Island is one of the last boroughs to get stuck on the map, but now we are on that map forever.”
[9:58] – “With this album, when we started working on it, I was like, let’s keep it at seven. Seven is the god number. Seven is the number of completion. Let’s keep it like that…I’ve got a whole album of unreleased EPMD records.”
[11:42] – RZA on bringing back Wu-Tang: An American Saga on Hulu. “We in the writers room right now, with a great team, putting something crazy together for season three. I can’t wait to share that.”
[14:00] – DJ Scratch on producing the album. “It’s an honor for RZA to allow me to actually produce him. Produce the beats, and produce his vocals as well. I was excited. I was like, who gets to produce a Wu-Tang artist? A full album…This album, hopefully it’s spark our peers to put out new music, because they still got it.”
[16:06] – RZA on inspiring others. “I didn’t go to Hollywood and start scoring films, so I’m the only guy doing it. I wanted people to realize [they] can do it too. Instead of a hip hop movie, or musician movie, I made a musician T.V. show. [There’s] going to be a lot more of those…It’s generational, hip hop is one of the few music that is generational.”
