Wu-Tang Clan’s U-God hits out at “dictator” RZA in new memoir

"It’s really years of BS catching up to RZA"

Wu-Tang Clan member U-God criticises the group’s de-facto leader RZA in his new memoir, with an extract from the book seeing the rapper portray his bandmate as a dictator.

RAW: My Journey Into the Wu-Tang is out now. Rolling Stone has published an excerpt from it in which U-God takes aim at RZA’s leadership of the hip-hop outfit.

“Right now, it just looks like the Wu brothers are not on the same page, going at each other’s throats, missing shows, and all that,” U-God writes.

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“But, to me, it’s really years of BS catching up to RZA… Don’t get me wrong, at the end of the day, my brothers and I typically work things out and still come together as the Clan, but in 25 years of being in the business, RZA has never placed the group at an A-list agency.”

“Just talking about this shit frustrates me,” he adds. “I mean here we are, the Rolling Stones of hip-hop, and we ain’t even got proper representation. Meanwhile, RZA’s always had A-list agents repping him personally. What the fuck is that all about?”

RZA

U-God continues: “RZA also started becoming a bit of a control freak around this time. He wanted to control budget, publishing, writing hooks, everything. I kept quiet and kept working, but it didn’t take a brain surgeon to see he was trying too hard to control the entire creative process.”

“Now, RZA’s undeniably talented. He’s also a good talker, smart, and a groundbreaking, genre-bending producer, but I wouldn’t go so far as to call him a hit record maker.”

Calling for “collaboration, not domination”, U-God goes on to stress that the group “can’t become a dictatorship, with everything coming from the top down”, adding: “It takes a certain kind of personality to be able to run the ship but still be open to ideas and collaboration. ”

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“Trying to exert too much control over grown-ass men leads to problems. RZA doesn’t know how to let go and let motherfuckers be grown men anymore, like he used to back in the day, when it was four or five motherfuckers touring the country in an old Mitsubishi Scorpion.”

“Somewhere along the way, he forgot to let his soldier do what he initially recruited us to do and coached us to do. He forgot that you don’t tear down your soldiers, you build your soldiers up. Because when they rise up, they bring you with them.”

Read the excerpt in full here.

NME has approached RZA’s press representative for a response.

In 2016, U-God sued his Wu-Tang bandmates for $2.5 million, claiming that he hadn’t seen royalties from the group for over half a decade. He also alleged to not receive any money from the sale of Wu-Tang Clan’s one-of-a-kind album ‘Once Upon a Time in Shaolin’, which was sold to Martin Shkreli for $2 million in 2015.

RZA recently spoke to NME about the past, present and future of Wu-Tang Clan.

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