Hip-hop legend RZA stopped by HuffPost Live to discuss his role in the new film Brick Mansions.
He touted Nas’ talent as an MC, explained his experience working alongside the late Paul Walker and hit back at Raekwon’s recent diss saying, “I’m walking hip-hop, I’m living hip-hop!”
On Nas’ talent as an MC he said “By the time I was 19, I was a master MC and very few MCs reach mastery at that age…There’s only one other MC, who I know, who beat me at that age, and that was Nas. Nas was a master MC, I would say by 15 [years old]. That’s how good he was. When I first heard him...I said, ‘wow, he’s already at that mastery level...’”
“When you become this master level MC, you have this confidence. It’s like a swordsman. You know that if you go and battle and fight somebody, you know that you’re gonna slice their head off because your sword is that sharp and your technique is that good. That’s how I felt. And there was nobody that was going to tell me any different.”
On what he learned from Paul Walker:
RZA: “He’s a very warm dude, a very special man...What I really learned from Paul was how to hold your head in this business and how to incorporate your family...when I was in New York, I stayed away from my family to be these characters. Paul, he would bring his daughter to the set...Some guys would be like, ‘yo, I’m bringing my girl into town,’ [but] he’s bringing his family into town. I thought about that and it inspired me to bring my family.”
On Raekwon’s he comments “I walking hip-hop, I’m living hip-hop. I’m taking hip-hop further. When you sit there and you go watch Brick Mansions and you see me play Tremaine Alexander… first of all, in the middle of the script, without anybody saying nothing, I end one of my lines with ‘cash rules everything around me where I come from.’ That’s taking hip-hop far, to the big screen. Where we weren’t even allowed on that big screen.”
“You could have all the all star players on one team and still lose, because the players have to rise to the occasion as well...Hip-hop is the same...You take a simple beat like, Method Man, which is basically a piano loop going over and over and over, with a few breakdowns. And yet it becomes the number one song in New York. Why is that? It’s because the beat had an intensity but the MC, had an intensity. So I would say, bring back that intensity, and we could take just a kick drum and a snare and make a hit.”
Full Interview
