RZA: Evil Genius or Total Fucking Psycho?

We are not quite sure what to think about the rap star and occasional Chappelle Show invitee, RZA. Sure, he occasionally munches on colloidal silver tablets, but does that make one batshit? Opinion varies. General practitioners will tell you that it turns you blue. Fuck if RZA cares, though, he's Old School like that. This excerpt from the new Wu Tang Manual is either an impassioned dithyramb, or "naught else but simple shit." We'll let you decide:



"(The Wu Tang Clan) all grew up collecting comics, just about everyone in the Wu tang Clan. I think Method Man had the most extensive collection. He had boxes and boxes of comic books he left in my house when he got kicked out. ODB's brother had a big collection. U-God had a lot of comics, and I did too.

"Growing up, I used to read comics like a movie. I'd make the music for it in my head. I'd see the cinematography, the shots, everything -- it'd take me an hour to read one, just plotting it out. I don't know if you feel comics more growing up in the projects or not, but I know you can relate to a lot of the main stories. Marvel heroes especially: they're always tragic. Something happened to these cats that made them strong but fucked them up, too. And a lot of them are about science gone wrong.

"I lived in at least ten different projects and I got to see that the projects are a science project, in the same way that a prison is a science project. If you saw it, you would swear Stapleton Projects was a prison, because you got the tiers, and to go to your house, you have to walk past everybody's door on that particular floor. And you have helicopters and cameras -- it's definitely jail. Everything around it is based on the same idea, that same science project. And in comics, when a science project goes wrong, it produces monsters. Or superheroes. In Marvel comics especially, every hero has some kind of fatal flaw, some tragic aspect to him. And everyone in the Wu Tang Clan is the same way.

"I was into Marvel mostly. For me, Silver Surfer was my dream hero. His powers were cosmic. He would bring the energy from the universe into his own body and transfer it back out -- which is a lot like Kung Fu fighting monks using chi. I used to think of myself as the Silver Surfer. Meth, he was into Johnny Blaze, the Ghost Rider. He thought Ghost Rider was tougher than Silver Surfer, but I was like, 'Come on, man.'

"The Silver Surfer actually appeared in a Fantastic Four issue. His story is, he got stuck on earth trying to save it. He fell in love with the earth in a way, but his master, Galactus made him stay on earth forever. And then, Galactus went back to the Silver Surfer's planet and ate it. So the Silver Surfer was just fucked all the way around -- even though he stayed righteous.

"But I was also a big fan of Galactus. When I started to form the Wu Tang Clan -- around the end of my comics collection -- I stopped thinking of myself as the Silver surfer and I started to think I was Galactus. Galactus, he's just bad. He's not even a villain, he's beyond that in size and scope. He's like Apocalypse in X-Men. Apocalypse -- basically, you don't want Apocalypse coming, because that's the end of the world. And in the Transformers, pretty much the same character is called unicom. What they all do is consume your whole planet. Unicom, Galactus, Apocalypse -- they're all Marvel characters. But they're all deeper than that, too. They're like Kronos, the father of Zeus."

Bullfinch, Campbell -- amateurs. RZA speaks with the final vocabulary on mythology. He's fire, kid. Although he kind of lost us with the Transformers riff. It's never a good idea to identify yourself as a Transformers fan.

So, we were thinking ... when RZA eats colloidal silver is he -- in his mind -- eating Silver Surfer?