October
15, 2012
“The people
who made these movies didn’t know how much one sentence could inspire.”
-RZA
The first lines on the seminal rap album Enter the Wu-Tang (36-Chambers) aren’t
spoken by RZA, GZA, Ghostface Killah, Inspectah Deck, U-God, Raekwon the Chef,
Method Man, Ol’ Dirty Bastard, or any other member of the sprawling stable of
hip hop artists known collectively as the Wu-Tang Clan. The first lines of the
opening track “Bring da Ruckus” are instead reserved for Master Liu, sampled
from the 1983 Hong Kong Kung-Fu film Shao
Lin yu Wu Dang. The album opens with the lines, “Shaolin shadowboxing and
the Wu-Tang sword style. If what you say is true, the Shaolin and the Wu-Tang
could be dangerous. Do you think your Wu-Tang sword can defeat me? En garde,
I'll let you try my Wu-Tang style” (Wu-Tang Clan 1993). This sample sets the
tone for a rap album unlike any heard before that seamlessly blends Asian kung
fu imagery with the black hip hop aesthetic to create a unique cross cultural
product. By applying the work of racial and cultural theorists to the Wu-Tang
Clan’s unique brand of entertainment Enter
the Wu-Tang (36-Chambers) can be read as a groundbreaking example of cross-racial
appropriation in popular culture. In this essay I will be examining how the
Wu-Tang Clan’s use of Asian symbolic imagery works as an example of racial
appropriation and cultural exchange of popular culture across diasporas.
The first relevant question that
comes to mind when discussing the use of Asian imagery by a group of black hip
hop artists from New York is why? Why did the Wu-Tang Clan choose to blend kung
fu movies and hip hop? As RZA, the producer and creative force of the group
most directly responsible for utilizing Asian culture, said of the 1983 film The 8 Diagram Pole Fighter, “This movie
inspired me to form the Clan. It's about brotherhood. Beyond our fly name and
shit, that's what Wu-Tang is all about” (Leckart 7). Clearly there is a
connection felt between black hip hop culture and Asian martial arts culture.
This connection goes deeper than just an aesthetic imagery, I would argue that
the two cultures are linked by difference. Hip hop culture and kung fu culture
both have the distinction of being non-white, non-colonial discourses, and
through their respective marginalization and fight against oppression they find
common ground.
Stuart Hall aims to define the
foundations of black popular culture in his essay “What is this ‘Black’ in
Black Popular Culture?” He writes, “…we must bear in mind postmodernism’s deep
and ambivalent fascination with difference—sexual difference, cultural
difference, racial difference, and above all, ethnic difference… there’s
nothing that global postmodernism loves better than a certain kind of difference:
a touch of ethnicity, a taste of the exotic, as we say in England, ‘a bit of
the other’” (Hall 286). While he speaking of the difference between black
culture and traditional European culture, the same sentence could easily be
used to describe Asian culture. The Asian is just another type of other, linked
to black culture through a shared difference. Black and Asian cultures both
play a role in “the displacement of European models of high culture” (Hall
285), they both act as “the voicing of the margins” (Hall 287). This is where
the commonalities lie that makes the blending of cultures work in such an
interesting way, both hip hop and kung fu offer a form of cultural capital that
is distinctly non-white and non-European while both also are seen as confrontational
and combative forces. The political confrontation of the oppressed minority
culture in hip hop is in a dialogue with the physical confrontation expressed
in kung fu films in the music of the Wu-Tang Clan.
Stuart Hall also describes black popular
culture as a product of synchronization across cultural boundaries. He writes,
“Always these forms are the product of partial synchronization, of engagement
across cultural boundaries, of the confluence of more than one cultural
tradition, of the negotiation of dominant and subordinate positions, of the
subterranean strategies of recording and transcoding, of critical
signification, of signifying. Always these forms are impure, to some degree
hybridized from a vernacular base” (Hall 290).
In this section Hall is discussing the hybridization of black popular
culture with the dominant white culture. I argue, however, that there can also
be hybridization present between two subordinate cultures. In the case of the
Wu-Tang Clan, they are linking the Asian and African diasporas to create a
hybridization of culture through their music and aesthetic.
On a much more literal level, the
Wu-Tang Clan is using kung fu as metaphor to add to the boastfulness of their
style of rap. By appropriating the symbolism of the Asian kung fu movie, the
Wu-Tang Clan is positioning themselves as the warriors and assassins of rap
music. By referring to their New York inner city roots as “The slums of
Shaolin” they are equating their origin stories and struggles with those of the
heroes of Kung Fu cinema. When the kung fu film dialogue is reduced to simple
audio through sampling, there becomes no difference between the shaolin masters
and the emcees of the Wu-Tang Clan, they have become equals on the track. This
style of using sampling to equate the rappers on a track with heroic fictional
characters that began on Enter The
Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) has also been tremendously influential in hip hop
culture. MF DOOM, the masked hip hop emcee and producer who rose to prominence
in the underground rap world after the success of the Wu-Tang Clan uses samples
of old Justice League cartoons to establish that his persona is the
supervillain of rap, much like Wu-Tang used sampling to establish their
personas as the kung fu masters of the hip hop game.
The Wu-Tang Clan’s fascination with
kung fu cinema and culture wasn’t an anomaly in black culture. In fact, as Amy
Abugo Ongiri writes in her article “He Wanted To Be Just like Bruce Lee:
African Americans, Kung Fu Theater and Cultural Exchange at the Margins”, in
the Journal of Asian American Studies,
there is a long standing tradition of black cultural interest in traditionally
Asian cultural products such as kung fu films and the martial arts. Ongiri
writes, “Almost all of these films focus narratively on either the triumph of
the ‘little guy’ or ‘underdog’ or the nobility of the struggle to recognize
humanity and virtue in all people, or some combination of both” (Ongiri 35).
Ongiri is positing here that it is the thematic elements of the oppressed and
inequality present in kung fu cinema that attracts the black audience to kung
fu cinema. Ongiri goes on to describe the plot of Lau Ker Lung’s 1978 film The Master Killer or the Thirty Six Chambers
of Shaolin, a film that was highly influential in the formation of the
aesthetic philosophy of the Wu-Tang Clan and inspired the name of their first
album. Of the film Ongiri writes, “The narrative contains some of the stock
characteristics of the genre including a focus on virtue lost and found,
individual determination, righteous vengeance, and community struggle against
all odds. This familiar formula helped to create the martial arts as the ultimate tool of the righteous but
wronged ‘little guy’ and goes a long way towards explaining an African American
interest in martial arts culture… particularly amongst those African Americans
who were searching for alternatives to contemporary western morals and mores”
(Ongiri 35). Ongiri here is confirming the notion that it is the struggle of
the oppressed that that unites black popular culture forms as represented in
hip hop with Asian popular culture forms as represented in kung fu cinema. It
is this formula of the “little guy” rising up righteously through struggle against
oppressors that the African diaspora shares in common with the Asian diaspora.
As George Lipsitz discusses in his
essay “Diasporic Noise: History, Hip Hop, and the Post-Colonial Politics of
Sound”, the social message of hip hop has long been defined by opposition
against oppressors. He writes, “Oppositional practices among diasporic
populations emerge from painful experiences of labor migration, cultural
imperialism, and political subordination. Yet they are distinguished by an
ability to work within these systems. In contemporary culture, artists from
aggrieved communities often subvert or invert the very instruments of
domination necessary for the creation of the new global economy—its consumer
goods, technologies, and images” (Lipsitz 510). The African and Asian diasporas
are linked through the painful experiences of subordination as Lipsitz outlines
in this section. One thing that hip hop and kung fu films share in common is
the fact that their heroes rise against the instruments of domination from within,
taking on the system instead of becoming outcast communities. Hip hop as a
social movement is confrontational and direct, much like the fighting style of
the kung fu master. Lipsitz continues, “Post-colonial literature, Third Cinema,
and hip hop music all protest against conditions created by the oligopolies who
distribute them as commodities for profit. They express painful recognition of
cultural displacements, displacements that their very existence accelerates.
Yet it is their desire to work through
rather than outside of existing
structures that defines their utility as a model for contemporary global
politics” (Lipsitz 510). Again it is the oppositional nature of hip hop working
within and against preexisting systems of cultural displacement that makes it
so politically relevant. It is easy to see, then, how the Wu-Tang Clan has
appropriated the struggles of the heroes of kung fu film that fight for justice
and against oppression into their musical and political aesthetic. It is this
melding of two subordinated cultures that makes the marriage between hip hop
and kung fu films so culturally relevant.
“The toad style is immensely strong
and immune to nearly any weapon. When it's properly used, it's almost
invincible”
-Five
Deadly Venoms, 1978. Sampled on “Da Mystery of Chessboxin’”
“It was perfect for what I was trying
to say about my crew. That's how I felt Wu was—almost invincible”
-RZA
RZA and the rest of the Wu-Tang Clan
were probably not entirely aware of the cultural phenomenon they had created
when they released Enter the Wu Tang (36
Chambers) in 1993. The album, which mixed biting lyricism and crisp
production with kung fu movie clips and an Asian aesthetic would go on to reach
platinum certification and be regarded as one of the seminal hip hop albums of
the 1990’s. Along with commercial success, the album also brought with it a
rich source of cultural material for the scholarly examination of cross
cultural appropriation and cultural exchange in popular media. After examining
the album through the analytical lens of Hall, Lipsitz and others, I have
determined that the strongest bond between hip hop and kung fu cultures comes
through a shared history of oppression. Both the African and Asian diaspora
have been defined through their opposition to traditional white European
culture. The Wu-Tang Clan has appropriated the kung fu attitude in their
aesthetic in order to create a new culturally hybrid text that is rich with
political meaning.
Works Cited
Hall,
Stuart. "'What Is This "Black" in Black Popular
Culture'" Popular Culture A Reader. Ed. Raiford Guins.
Thousand Oaks: SAGE, 2005. 285-93. Print.
Leckart,
Steven. "Wu-Tang Clan's RZA Breaks Down His Kung Fu Samples by Film and
Song." Wired.com. Conde Nast Digital, n.d. Web. 15 Oct. 2012.
<http://www.wired.com/entertainment/music/magazine/15-11/pl_music>.
Lipsitz,
George. "Diasporic Noise: History, Hip Hop, and the Post-Colonial Politics
of Sound." Popular Culture A Reader. Ed. Raiford Guins.
Thousand Oaks: SAGE, 2005. 504-17. Print.
Ongiri,
Amy Abugo. ""He Wanted to Be Just like Bruce Lee": African
Americans, Kung Fu Theater and Cultural Exchange at the Margins." Journal
of Asian American Studies 5.1 (2002): 31-40. Print.
