RZA Breaks Down the Evolution of Hip-Hop | Joe Rogan

Maybe for the last few months since we started the Hulu, the American Saga series, people have been pushing me to do a podcast. They would love to listen to you. I end up not doing one, but we have one for the show of course that kind of does, you know, like after the show go on you can go and listen and hear more inside details of the story. But still during that process, they were like, you need to do a podcast because just the way you think, you just need more people with that kind of thinking. So he just said that he talked to us, you know, he don't talk to herself, but then after he was finished talking to himself for 44 minutes, he felt a weight come off him. I was, but there's a scripture on that, bro. What is it? The scripture is in the Bhagavad Gita. Is that the Quran? No. I don't know. I know the Quran is the Quran. All right. I just need to know. So the Bhagavad Gita means the song of God. Just pick G-I-T-A. Gita. The Gita, right? It's actually the words of Krishna. And he says contemplation with yourself, which is talking with yourself, will take you further than praying. Ooh. Okay. And if a man is not contemplating, right? If you're not, whether you're doing it verbally, like right now we're talking out loud. We all got that voice in our head. You have that voice. He was like, yo, I put the condom on and not. I don't think that's gonna get loud no more. We been there. You have that voice. And you know, if you listen to it or you don't listen to it, right? But the bottom line is that according to Krishna, it's that contemplation that makes us better. It's that reflection of what we did, what we're gonna do. And you verbalize it even out loud. You know what I mean? The spoken word. It's even more powerful. You get it out. That's how I felt. That's good. But I'm telling you, part of it was like I was not letting Joe talk shit to me. I was like, fuck that, man. He not doing that. But I'm glad I did it, man. The Bhagavad Gita did not reach him. Yeah. Yeah, you gotta do a podcast, son. He should. I think, look. Son, son, son, son, son, son. Son, son, son. Because I tell people. Son, they getting mad money too, son. You can make money. What? The most important thing is that you have a voice. Yeah. Like, you're an interesting guy. If you did a podcast, it would be interesting. There's a lot of people. It's good to have a bunch of different people doing it from all different styles of art, different walks of life. If a person has already been interested, people want to keep getting different pieces of you. How can you give it to them? Dude, they'd love to hear you just talk about life. Come on, man. That's a fucking... Easy. That's a no-brainer. You hear a quote from the Bhagavad Gita. It's you and Duncan Trussell, the only people who quote the Bhagavad Gita. That's hilarious. I love that book. Oh, that's an amazing book, man. That's what Oppenheimer quoted when he watched the first atomic bomb blow off. Said, I am become death, destroyer of worlds. But quote right from the Bhagavad Gita. Yeah. That's crazy shit. That's a... Yeah. That is a fascinating book, man. There's all sorts of allusions to UFOs and shit. I was about to say that you talk about, well, the Maharata, which is the longer version. Yes. So the Bhagavad Gita is about 700 verses that's taken out of the Maharata, which is one of the longest... It's not the longest poem, but it's in the top 10. How do you say it? Is it Mahabharata? How do you say it? Yeah. You might have... That B is in there. I don't know if that B is silent. Yeah, that's the one with all the... I already know where it's gonna sound like B. Mahabharata. That's... That's crazy stories. What word has the silent B? I never even know that was where it existed. Mahabharata. A silent B? No. There's something like that. That's gotta be in there. That B makes noise. Right? But there's Vimanas in that, right? Where there's flying crafts. There's a bunch of weird shit that people throughout history have tried to figure out. What the fuck are they talking about? Yeah. And that ancient civilization was measuring what they call coppers every 35,000 years. And they were saying, you know... Measuring coppers? Yeah, no. Like, that's like K-A-P-P-A. Like, Capodana, copper. Oh. I got a tendency to... I just wanna make a disclaimer real quick. I have a tendency to pronounce words the way I pronounce them. I have a tendency to understand the words where you pronounce them. Words and everything I love, my nigga. Yo, what's up? Yo, wait a minute. Can I say this real quick? I forgot this one. I did my show earlier, right, son? What? Joe said you never spit a 16, son. Oh, you never spit a 16? No, I didn't. I'm very white. Eight? No. No, man. I didn't even know what he was talking about. I had to, like, go over it with him. Tell him the bars you said you spit. I said hip-hop. He was in a classic. I thought he was in a classic. Sorry, he went happy. He was asking me about Sugar Hill, and I said, yeah, I remember that. And then I started singing it. I don't think I was actually about Sugar Hill, son. I think we talked about it. No, no, no. I wish I could remember exactly. Didn't we? I think you did. We went to Sugar Hill after a period of time. Yeah, you asked me if I knew. No, no. This is what I said. You ever spit a 16? You was like, this is what you told me, Joe. You said, I don't have time to spit a 16. No, I don't have any time to rap. This is what you said. I don't. You said, I have much better things. I said, enjoy it? You said, Joe, you said. I enjoy listening to it. I don't have time to do it. That's what, Joe, you said, I have much better things to do with my time to spit a 16. I don't think that's what I said. I'm pretty sure that's what you said. What I said was, I'm too busy to do one more thing. And I like rap, but I don't like to do it. Maybe I would love it, but I'm not going to. I don't have any time. That's all it means. That's not your thing, Joe. Yeah, that's all it means. Don't try to twist it. I didn't twist it. It takes me to itself. How dare you? I am the producer of your show. I know. I'm the whole outfit. And you are treating me like a terrible man. I'm fired already. Mist quoting. Edit it. You're going to edit it out. Let's edit this. We were talking about how few white rappers ever actually make it, like the tiny percentage in comparison to the ones who try it. Like how many of them try it? You got to think this must be millions and millions that have tried it. This is like a small handful of guys. Well, in all reality, it's a small handful period for me. Period. That's true too. So, if you look at the ratio, I'm a ratio guy. As we talk, you'll see I'm always pulling some numbers into things. But if you look at the ratio, let's say one million white guys tried. Five made it. Let's say 50 million blacks tried. You see what I mean? It's usually the ratio. Many more doing. I see what you're saying. Yeah. Makes sense. But hip hop, let me just say something about hip hop because I can say that, right? Is that? No. I feel like you're making me nervous. I'm just checking. I was like, you killed it. I get to cause you tried to kill it, but go ahead. No, the beautiful thing is that hip hop is really one of those. No, you did. Okay, I'm sorry. No, not so good. I like this energy here. For hip hop, it's a pure American culture. People try to trace it. Nah, man. Trace it right here. And when it was formed, it's definitely a lot of young black men to go back to Krew Hulk and Grandmaster Flash and Meli Mel and Spoonie G. You could go back to the classes, Grandmaster Kaz. But then Grandmaster Kaz, Krew, the co-crust brother, you got Charlie Chase, right? So you got the Spanish brothers there. Within our first hip hop songs that we love, you know, LL Cool J, Rock the Bells. Oh, that's who produced that. Rick Rubin. You got the White Brother there. Oh yeah, we was talking about that. So the youth culture of America at that time, right? Even with Fab Five Freddy going down, you know, town to the CBGB crowd and all that and Blondie and all these, all these things was melding from our culture. Now, whereas, of course, it's a dominantly a black expression, right? We could say we dominated the culture, but it took angles from every other part of New York to make it exist. And that means it took our Spanish brothers and their culture, it took our White Brothers and their culture to all form it. And then, of course, when Wu-Tang came, we brought the Asian culture in, you know what I mean? Wu-Tang, when you say that, it's like it came in like a thunderstorm. You're like, whoa! You know what I mean? So we should be proud to know that it's like an inclusive American art form. It is. You know what I mean? And look, Bruce Lee, who was an American, right? People who got, you know, he represented the Asian culture, but he was born in America, went back, made it big in Hong Kong, and then came back to America and took it to the next level again. And when you look at some of those break dance moves and some of the philosophies that he brought to mixing more styles together, you know, Jeet Kondo, which means the way of the intercepting fists, or also the way of he combined boxing with fencing with Wing Chung. Yes. Right? He put all those MMA's together before it was even that, right? When it was taboo. Exactly. Hip-hop also is that same type of product. You do have the soul of James Brown, the jazz of the loneliest monk. You know what I mean? The rock beat of Billy Squire. I got a big beat, or Honky Tonk, Wompy Mop, Rolling Stones. Those are break beats. But yet you also got the Latin feeling of the Mambo Kings and songs like Apache and the Mexican. Do you think hip-hop is evolving and not just... Is it evolving in the sense of the creativity of it? I think it's definitely evolving. Because people, they got a situation now where it don't have to evolve. People have found a way to make money off of something that people may not agree with. There's like hot, but do you think hip-hop is evolving? Yes. It always evolves, right? So it's part of the evolution we're seeing now is whereas we, in my generation, we've relied on music that was created before us because we came into time when it took music programs out of school. So you didn't learn how to play a guitar, a piano. And your music equipment or your instrument became your turntables. It became your drum machine. It eventually became our sampler. And then we sampled a lot of songs, a lot of breaks from old records that already existed. But this generation, they're not actually forced to sample. They actually could take their keyboard, their drum machine, their laptop and just create... And on their phone too. Yeah. And on their phone and just create the beat. And so now the beat has no historical reference to it in the sense of, oh, that was a James Brown sample. That was a Marvin Gaye sample. No. That's just that kid who, whether he did fruity loops and threw some chords, progressions together or whether he sat there on his garage band on his phone and hit the guitar program that comes with it or whatever, the creativity of it is now having this form of originality. Right. Now, of course, once something like that happens, there's a formula. So we keep hearing that same formula exists like that. But I think one of the greatest evolution of hip hop is... And I'm going to use the word evolution loosely because when I think about the Coakrust brothers and the four some Ds, they did this anyway in the beginning. But hip hop has become more melodic now than it did in the 90s in the early 2000s. Right. So what I mean by that, rappers now, you know, I'm just so D, yeah, na na na na na na na na na na na na na. It's all melody. It's all chanting. You know, it's all chanting, right? It has the reggae chant vibe to it when we was doing it. I smoke on the mic like smoking Joe Frazier, the L-Lisa. It was all aggressive chop rap. You know what I mean? So to see that it evolves to this melodic form and then look at Kanye, he's now took it to gospel. It's melodic as hell right now. Snoop took it to the Snoop Lion. But Snoop Lion, Snoop was really successful. The Snoop Lion thing wasn't that successful. But the one he won the gospel album, I think he was getting awards and nominated and like and stayed on top of Billboard for a while. Yeah. And now Kanye is in that world. So it's evolving, right?