RZA’s Bobby Digital treads a more enlightened path

By Naila Francis
Published: June 18th, 2008 | 2:00pm

It’s a new day for Bobby Digital.

With the return of RZA’s larger-than-life superhero character on Digi Snacks, the new album out on Koch Records June 24, fans can still expect a raucous journey through a world of sex, drugs, alcohol, and guns. Yet Digital, an ordinary man transformed into a powerful being by drinking a special elixir, seems to be growing weary of that lifestyle. It’s an evolution for the character first introduced in 1998 with Bobby Digital in Stereo and then tempered with a greater disillusionment on 2001’s Digital Bullet.

“At least 30 percent I see in myself, another 30 percent would be martial arts and sci-fi, another 30 would be the hip-hop culture and that testosterone mentality. And you’ve still got 10 percent that’s based on the old black exploitation films,” says RZA of the character, who has always wrestled with the good and evil inside of him.

“He’s striving to save the lives of others. Even if he doesn’t win the war, he’s still giving other people the power to win that war. He’s not in heaven, he’s not in hell — he’s stuck in limbo. He has to do certain deeds to win back the grace of God, the grace of his Maker, and really the grace of RZA. It’s almost like the story of Hercules.”

Heavy with industrial-strength funk rhythms — largely courtesy of Stone Mecca, the soul-funk band with whom RZA will be touring through much of the summer — hard-hitting drums, and spacey and atmospheric textures, Digi Snacks bears an element of reproach. With a cast of characters that includes the Raven, the Vulture, the Hawk, and other birds of prey bent on destroying Digital, and a host of collaborators such as Shavo Odadjian (System of a Down), Thea, Black Knights, and Wu-Tang’s Inspectah Deck spinning their tales of hustling the streets, RZA’s Digital is a voice, albeit faltering at times, for a more enlightened way.

“I’ve definitely toned it down to a lower level of violence,” he says of the album whose first single “You Can’t Stop Me Now” bounces with an urban-cowboy swagger and features a sample from “Message from a Black Man,” a Barrett Strong-Norman Whitfield composition. “The character has developed what we call a digital bullet. Instead of killing you, the bullet will uplift you.”

And so amid the sheer braggadocio of tracks like “Tray Ya Ya” and “Straight Up the Block,” the lyrical loopiness of “Good Night” and the pure fun of “O Day,” RZA points to grimmer realities, such as the ignorance that promotes violence as a solution to anything that can’t be understood.

“Growing up in the American ghettos, you’re going to have a lot of problems. But only a man is going to grow up and get out of there,” he says. “They say in our community, you’re lucky if you live to be 26. So maybe I’m lucky that I grew up to be a man.”

These days, the 38-year-old Wu-Tang Clan mastermind — a longtime student of martial arts — is also a student of the world’s religions.

“It’s so beautiful to be conscious,” he says. “I’ve found a well of water, and instead of keeping it to myself, I’m sharing it. Take up your Bible and your Koran and your Bhagavad-Gita and all the books of wisdom. That’s how I’m able to get a more complete picture, by me having an open heart and an open mind about knowledge.”

He has been particularly moved by the work of Gandhi.

“He understood we all are one. And that’s spiritual freedom, when you realize we all are one,” RZA says. “With all our traditions, it’s just our perception that makes things different.

“I already had mental and physical freedom but economic and spiritual freedom has come to me in the last 10 to 12 years through the success of Wu-Tang Clan and being a writer and a composer and an actor …. By having spiritual freedom, I’ve learned not to abuse economic freedom. I’m not wasting time and spending money on things I don’t need.

“I’m learning to get along with men of all colors, creeds and walks of life,” RZA says. “One moment I’m on a movie set with Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe [his co-stars in Ridley Scott’s American Gangster], and two days later I’m in the projects of Brownsville [Brooklyn] with some of the hoodiest people in the world. I grew up in Brownsville, too, but I don’t have to be a hood.”

He hopes to inspire others to escape that mentality.

“That’s why I developed WuChess,” says RZA of his recently launched Web site, WuChess.com, a hip-hop community where users can play live chess with people from around the world, improve their skills with online chess masters and computer training, and watch exhibition matches with Wu-Tang’s members and other celebrities. “Chess is a game where you have to think before you move; you have to think twice sometimes before you move ahead.

“If people in the community did that, if they thought twice instead of always reaching for an easy way out, there wouldn’t be so much crime. There wouldn’t be so many young women pregnant,” RZA says.

Despite Bobby Digital’s own vices, he hopes to use the character to help empower change through video games, comic books, and several films, including the completed film Bobby Did It, and still-in-progress films Digital Bullet and Black Shampoo.

Yet with so much on his plate, and despite rumors of a Wu-Tang rift due to dissatisfaction with his direction on 8 Diagrams, he maintains his role as the group’s Abbott.

“I’m still on the Wu-Tang mountain. It’s where I reside. For me to leave is to deny myself,” says RZA. “I’ll always be part of that, as far as the group doing something of a positive nature. But if they’re going to do something of a negative nature, I’m not going to be part of it. I’ve got to protect the Wu-Tang legacy for the future.”

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