And Finally Artist News

RZA responds to accusations in U-God’s autobiography

By Andy Malt | Published on Thursday 5 April 2018

Wu-Tang Clan leader RZA has responded to claims that he’s failing the group and stifling their success. The accusations were made by Wu-Tang rapper U-God in his newly published autobiography.

Speaking to Rolling Stone, RZA said that he wasn’t sure if “this book falls totally in non-fiction”. Although he did agree that the group’s live shows currently rely too heavily on old material.

One of U-God’s accusations was that RZA had particularly let his bandmates down by putting his brother, Mitchell ‘Divine’ Diggs, in charge of the Wu-Tang company. Divine, he said, had failed to best serve the interests of the group over the last two decades, most notably by failing to sign them to a major booking agency for live activity. But RZA refutes that this is his or his brother’s fault.

“Agents solicit you”, he says. “You don’t solicit them. I got my agent because I wanted to score movies – I did ‘Ghost Dog’ – and my manager thought it would be smart to get an agent. I signed with UTA and I ended up becoming a good piece of business for Hollywood, and I grew. That is that”.

That does seem to be him saying that the rest of the Wu-Tang Clan aren’t “a good piece of business”. Although maybe if they put on better live shows that could change.

“I do think that when we do our tours, we definitely seem to be stuck in a certain chamber of music”, he says. “First of all, you can’t resist them. Some of those songs work. The crowd loves them. That’s what they came to see at some point”.

“But I think it’s also because they’re the most familiar and easy for us to display without even rehearsing them”, he adds. “They’re our DNA songs. But I agree with U-God. We definitely should expand our performance roster because if it gets boring to us, it’s going to eventually be boring to the audience”.

Read the full interview here.