But regardless of who’s on the mic, every Wu-Tang joint is designed to be the sonic equivalent of a film.
As often as critics hail Quentin Tarantino for making movies about movies, the Wu-Tang Clan deserves credit for mainstreaming Asian action cinema. Today, you can find exhaustive lists of Asian martial arts classics that are either sampled on their albums or referenced within their lyrics. YouTube has playlists dedicated to that task that could keep you couch-bound for days.
But even if you never attended any Asian film festivals or other events, you have likely benefited from the larger market exposure the group helped to inspire.
“I maintain that RZA was single-handedly responsible for the world’s renewed interest in kung fu movies,” writes “The Baddest Bitch in the Room” author Sophia Chang in a 2012 essay for the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. “Without Wu-Tang, ‘Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’ and ‘Hero’ would not have met with the success they did.
We take it for granted that these films hold prized placement in American popular culture, along with hip-hop’s influence across Asia. But that wasn’t always true. Long before RZA and the GZA became musical legends – when their friends called them Robert Diggs and Gary Grice – martial arts cinema was relegated to cinematic margins.
Jeff Chang, author of “Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation” (and of no relation to Sophia), puts it more bluntly in a 2023 podcast episode for KEXP-FM.
The reason the RZA or any non-white American fans of these movies were exposed to them was because of racism, he said. Films from the Shaw Brothers’ catalog and other Hong Kong-based studios were segregated into run-down theaters, often in the inner city, where tickets cost around a buck and anyone could hang out and enjoy some air conditioning.
“So the folks who are fans of Black exploitation movies go to the kung fu movies, and they see the same types of connections between . . . these Confucian, Taoist and Zen-like principles and values, and these ideas of loyalty and brotherhood,” he explained.
Thus, in the discriminatory early marketing of a cinematic genre, we eventually reap the benefits of two non-white cultures meeting and mixing concepts. Hip-hop prowess is established and honed through lyrical battles. Martial arts films portray competition as a means of pushing your opponent to do better, to go further. Then the Wu-Tang Clan’s first album, “Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers)” comes out, and as Jeff Chang describes it, “competition gets turned into this beautiful cultural building type of thing.”
(Kevin Winter/Getty Images for Live Nation) Megan Thee Stallion performs onstage during the Hot Girl Summer Tour at Crypto.com Arena on June 21, 2024 in Los Angeles, California.
Part of that building inspired the next generation of rappers to incorporate their love of other aspects of Asian pop culture, such as anime, into their prose and performance style. Hip-hop’s biggest anime ambassador these days may be Megan Thee Stallion, who built a whole alter ego, Todoroki Tina, around her favorite character from “My Hero Academia.” And her explanation of why she loves anime is very similar to the philosophies that drew RZA to kung fu movies and, eventually, Asian philosophies and martial arts.
“I like how you grow with the character, and you see all the trials and tribulations he’s got to go through, and then you see him meet new people along the line that’s really helping him become the hero that he’s meant to be,” she told Crunchyroll. “So, I feel like I apply that to my life a lot.”
These connections made anime and martial arts cinema’s incorporation into hip-hop, an art form built on collaboration and sonic collage, somewhat inevitable. Whether in the films beloved by the Wu-Tang or the animated sagas Megan favors, characters battle not simply for survival but to achieve mastery. “It was through these films that I was able to see and feel from a non-Western point of view,” RZA once said. “Some of the dialogue struck a chord with me. It was Buddhism and psychology. ‘Without wisdom, there is no gain.’ There’s beauty in that.”
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from Salon’s Culture newsletter, The Swell