The Staten Island Problem - Part 4: Wu-Tang vs. Shaolin

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0:43The third way. I'm Jake Brennan, and on my podcast, Hollywoodland, I revisit some of the biggest stories from Hollywood history, separating the myths people want to believe from the reality underneath them. Hollywoodland is part of the Exactly Right Network. Listen to new episodes every Monday on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

1:11Pushkin.

1:16One of my favorite books is Middlemarch by George Eliot. It's about the life and manners of a small English town in the 19th century. It's also a cautionary tale for the kind of person I am. There's a character in the book named Edward Cazabon A dreary middle-aged man Who's engaged in a decades-long writing project Cazabon collects facts he writes on little sheets of paper That he stores in the pigeonholes of his library shelves He claims that someday he's going to use these facts To prove that all the myths of the world are really one myth He's obsessed He calls it the key to all mythologies And he sees it everywhere I'm not middle-aged, and I am fairly upbeat, but I fear that last bit is me.

2:04I see the Staten Island secession movement everywhere in our world today. I've carried my facts about the Staten Island secession movement around with me for quite a while now. They burn a hole in my pocket. I go to parties, and inevitably I wind up in the corner with the Staten Islander who has suddenly revealed themselves. They look interested and then mildly concerned as I pull from memory the facts that I have stored in the pigeonholes of a document I have titled, Excellent Staten Island Facts. Did you know the towers of the Verrazano Narrows Bridge are so far apart that they had to take into account the curvature of the earth when they built them?

2:38Did you know that Staten Island claims to have been home to the true and forgotten inventor of the telephone? Am I Kazapon? God, I hope not. I cautioned myself against seeing my project everywhere. Don't be the hammer to whom everything looks like a nail. Don't try to write the key to all mythologies. And then I learned something like this. Wu-Tang Clan, arguably the most important group in hip-hop history, is from Staten Island. They made their first album, Enter the Wu-Tang, 36 chambers, entirely during the height of the Secession Movement. and it came out in 1993, just one week after the island was going to vote on secession.

3:31I began to listen to this record every day I worked on this project, on the ferry to the archives, on the subway to work. Shaolin, what they called Staten Island, is all over it.

3:47Their music is all about their lives, what they witnessed on the island at the time. Like, listen to this from the song Wu-Tang, Seventh Chamber. They bring up the projects in northern Staten Island where Wu-Tang formed, nicknamed Killahill.

4:13It's all about their lives in New York City in the early 1990s, who they were becoming and what it all had to do with being from the rugged lands of Shaolin.

4:27I considered putting this on my list of excellent Staten Island facts and leaving it at that. But I had no choice. I put on my headphones. I picked up the phone. I opened my notebook. Kazaban rides again.

4:47You're listening to Revisionist History. I'm Ben Nadeff-Haffery, and this is The Staten Island Problem, a series about the movement that threatened to bring down the greatest city in the country. In this episode, I bring you the story of the rise of one of the greatest rap groups in history that happened all while the secession movement unfolded in the background. We're going to zero in on an entirely different experience taking place on the island at the same time, One that reveals just how entrenched the Staten Island problem really is, but one that also, I think, might show us a way to solve it.

5:27This is Episode 4, Wu-Tang vs. the Shaolin.

5:39I should say off the bat that I was unable to reach the Wu-Tang Clan. For a brief moment, the manager of a lesser-known member of the group considered giving me an interview. Then he stopped taking my calls. Domingo, if you hear this, I'm ready when you are. But luckily, I was able to track someone else down. I was actually one of the first journalists to ever deal with Wu-Tang because their record label, Loud, called me up. Skiz Fernando was a hip-hop journalist in the 80s and 90s. He covered Wu-Tang from the beginning. Had he ever considered the crucial overlap of Wu-Tang's formation and Staten Island's secession?

6:16He had not. I had no idea any of that stuff was going on at the time. I don't even know if they did. It was the biggest story on Staten Island. What was it going to be? Just like Staten Island was just going to be a city? Yeah. When the Wu-Tang Clan first formed, their label called Skiz to write their bio. So he connected with the group's de facto leader, a guy named Bobby Diggs, who went by the name RZA. And I was immediately struck by this guy. Like, I could detect, like, some serious intelligence in this guy. RZA was a former drug dealer with no professional prospects, living out on Staten Island.

6:57That alone was strange. In the pantheon of hip-hop, Brooklyn and the Bronx reign supreme. Nobody is from Staten Island. All of the five boroughs in New York were pretty represented in hip-hop in the 90s. You had the, you know, you had like the Boogie Down Bronx.

7:18It's obviously Brooklyn.

7:25The Money Make in Manhattan.

7:34I celebrate it with a rhyme. You know, Queens, you had Queensbridge Projects, produced so many amazing artists like Nas, Mobb Deep. Teens, every day I deal with the pressure and mixed up is how I feel. And like Staten Island, you know, who was from Staten Island? There was not a lot of acts coming out of Staten Island. You know, you had, oh geez, I'm blanking. This is all to say Skiz was surprised. Here was this relatively unknown MC from the island with an encyclopedic knowledge of kung fu movies. And a crew of eight other MCs who'd named themselves after a form of martial arts invented by a Taoist hermit.

8:18Skiz was like, what? Wow, this guy is something else.

8:27So Skiz, journalist that he is, began a decades-long process of figuring out how exactly the Wu-Tang Clan came to be. RZA decided what he wanted to do with his life on America's 200th birthday. He was in the Park Hill projects of Staten Island. It was July 1976, and there was a party in the courtyard. A DJ was spinning records and rapping over them. he dipped, dipped, dived and socialized. I think those are the exact words that RZA remembered. And that kind of just just that energy and just the excitement of that whole thing of seeing this free party happening in this environment. You know, all these kids running around and adults and people just enjoying the music and enjoying each other's company.

9:16This was how this was how hip hop started. RZA was seven at the time. And when you're a young kid exposed to this, and this is like the excitement that's happening in your neighborhood, you want to be a part of it. And he wanted to be a part of it. He stayed up late into the night, transfixed. So immediately he goes home and he starts writing rhymes, you know. And then as soon as he could, he starts DJing.

9:50Rizzo moved around a lot as a kid. He was born in Brooklyn, spent some of his childhood in North Carolina, but he landed in the Park Hill projects on the North Shore of Staten Island. The buildings were built in 1965, around the same time as the bridge and the expressway that split the island down the middle into North and South Shore. North was where the Black people lived. South was where the white people lived. Several Staten Islanders told me the expressway was their equivalent of the Mason-Dixon line. People are like, where are you from? And I'm like, so I used to say, if I tell you, I have to kill you.

10:23And they're like, why? And then I'm like, Staten Island. One day, when I was listing excellent Staten Island facts to a friend, she told me, you should meet Daphne McWilliams. She's a filmmaker from Staten Island. There were only three houses on my parents' block. And then across from the lake was Park Hill projects. Her parents were from Trinidad and Jamaica and didn't really know the intricate racial codes of Staten Island. Her family moved to the white area across from the Park Hill projects back in the 1970s. But when my mother found that house, she got a threatening, I guess, call or something where they were like, oh, something like, you better hope that you don't see your kids floating in the pond.

11:07By one estimate, there were fewer than a thousand people of color south of the expressway. Daphne stuck out. She told me a story from when she was a kid about having a crush on an Italian-American boy named Billy. One day, she called his house. And his mother picked up, and she was like, don't ever call this house again. So I went to school the next day. I was upset, and I went and speak to this priest. I don't know what I did wrong. I don't know what I did wrong. And I'm telling you, the guy goes, Well, you see, he says something to like, almost like there's a little heaven for white kids and there's like a little heaven for black kids.

11:46Heaven is segregated? I was like, oh my God, like I had no idea. When I look back and think about it, we always stood out because we were always the black family. My parents didn't raise us in a segregated mindset. set. We just never, it was the community that made us feel different, especially as you get older. But the truth is, all of New York City was segregated then. It seemed like there was a defining race riot every year. Very do the right thing. The reality that Mayor Dinkins' vision of a beautiful mosaic obscured is that if one bit of colored glass from the mosaic crossed another, someone might end up shot or run over.

12:35And then the riots would begin again. But southern Staten Island was a particularly dramatic case. It may as well have been the Deep South. When one Wu-Tang member went to Daphne's area, he remembered getting chased out by white kids with motorcycles. They spray-painted KKK on the rocks to warn the black kids away. This was the Staten Island RZA grew up on. But he had a way of escaping that reality. Hip-hop.

13:06By the time RZA was in his early 20s, hip-hop had gone stratospheric from the courtyards and rec rooms of the New York City projects to the top of the billboard charts. The labels were grabbing at any artist they could. RZA got a deal. He brought his new label a bunch of songs, and they said, we think girls will like you. So he wound up releasing an EP called Ooh, We Love You, Rakim, a record that presented him as a sweet ladies' man named Prince Rakim.

13:40It was an attempt to do something extremely commercial, totally inoffensive and upbeat, and also fundamentally false and corny. And maybe for that reason, it bombed. RZA got dropped from his label, and he was back to zero. That's when he started dealing drugs, and almost went to prison for attempted murder. He argued self-defense and beat the charges in the end. And he had$10 ,000 left. It was enough to buy some drugs and sell them. But he had a kid on the way. He had to make a choice. And this choice became so legendary that he's still talking about it. Here he is on a recent episode of a podcast called Flagrant.

14:24I had 10K and the gag was, the plan was to get a brick. So we figured, yo, if we flip this 20, we could at least get 80. The thing was, yo, I had a baby in the oven, or maybe just born, right? So life was like, what are you going to do? But then I was like, nah, I have a second chance. That's when he started calling himself RZA, R-Z-A. He would later say it was short for Rakeem Zigzag Zigala. While everyone else zigged, it was time for him to zag. And so living on a Staten Island that was in the middle of its own very big zag, he began to make a bold plan for an independence movement of his own.

15:14Something called Wu-Tang Clan.

15:31After he beat his charges, Bobby Diggs, a.k.a. The RZA, began to walk around Staten Island. And he started to take these long, drawn-out walks day after day. So I'm walking and I'm thinking, yo. And I'm walking all steps. I'm walking through Staten Island. People thought there was—I learned this. People thought I was losing my mind. Because I'm walking and I'm talking to myself.

15:58He would walk the island and think. Staten Island was more than twice the size of Manhattan, and RZA could just walk and walk. He would start at the projects on the North Shore, then maybe journey along the coastline, through the suburban streets.

16:17RZA was ready to make music again. But the first time out, with his Prince Rakeem project, had gone badly. but the idea he was coming up with now was going to be different. And I want to argue here that it has everything to do with Staten Island. Let me share with you some writing from Riz's book, The Tao of Wu. I spent my formative years on an island, Staten Island, which is a blessing I've taken with me through life. In Staten Island, Wu-Tang were set apart from all the influences and fads that were happening in the other four boroughs. A nine-man hip-hop crew based on mathematics, chess, comics, and kung fu flicks wasn't springing up in the middle of a Manhattan art scene.

17:01Only on a remote island can something like King Kong grow to his full capacity.

17:10But the projects in Staten Island were a difficult place to live. A few of the Wu-Tang members have written books, and reading them, it's clear that it wasn't just the remoteness of Staten Island that led them to the Wu-Tang Clan. It was also what they experienced there, especially in the projects. One Wu-Tang member, Yu God, wrote about the first time he saw somebody die. He was five years old, sitting with his mom, listening to Loving You by Minnie Riperton play on the radio outside. When he heard a crowd forming in the courtyard, he ran out to look. A woman was standing on the roof screaming.

17:46He watched so long, his neck went stiff. Then she jumped or fell. Ugod wrote in his book called Raw, I was a toddler. The sound of her hitting the concrete steps would resonate with me forever. So when RZA walked Staten Island, it wasn't just this utopian vision of the isolated island where you can dream big. It was also the deeply segregated place where kids living on their own little island watched adults fall to their death. A kind of paradox. And my theory is, that paradox was expressed in the word Shaolin.

18:28When RZA was a kid, he and his cousin used to go to a Times Square porno theater. Sometimes, it showed kung fu. And one movie that they loved in particular, The 36th Chamber of Shaolin. But sir, all the men choose are well-armed. What can we do?

18:48Most people came to that Times Square movie theater to jerk off, sniff glue, or shoot heroin. But RZA would later say in interviews that he and his cousin were locked in on this poorly dubbed movie about a small village in China that was being oppressed by a distant government. The hero of the movie is a villager who journeys to the Shaolin Temple in China to learn to fight back. RZA saw this movie over 300 times. He hadn't realized that kind of oppression happened to people who weren't black. This is from the 36th Chamber, when our hero learns what Shaolin is. Shaolin school is restricted. Only monks are taught that.

19:31If Shaolin techniques could be taught here, and the people could use it to fight the Manchu troops, that would be good. At some point, Riza started to call Staten Island Shaolin, the place he learned his secret weapon to fighting oppression, hip-hop. But Staten Island was also a version of that distant oppressive government he saw in the films. And as he walked the island trying to come up with his next play, he didn't decide to start a group called the Shaolin Clan. He came up with an idea for something called the Wu-Tang Clan, named after Shaolin's rival. This is from another kung fu movie they loved called Shaolin vs.

20:10Wu-Tang.