If you keep eating McDonald's, you gonna get sick. You need a real home-cooked meal. And I knew that that would be healthier. And that's what Wu-Tang was: It was a home-cooked meal of hip-hop. Of the real people.
Interpretation
The quote compares the superficiality of mainstream hip-hop to the nourishment of authentic music, represented by Wu-Tang's work.
In this quote, Rza uses the metaphor of fast food versus home-cooked meals to highlight the difference between commercial, mass-produced music and authentic, grassroots hip-hop. He suggests that just like consuming unhealthy fast food can make one sick, relying on mainstream music can leave listeners unfulfilled. Wu-Tang Clan, in this analogy, represents a 'home-cooked meal' that is richer and more nourishing for the soul, embodying the essence of real people and their stories.
In practice
During a discussion about the quality of mainstream versus independent music, this quote can emphasize the need for authenticity.
I invested in the album. Look, if I never did anything again in music, it wouldn’t affect my life materially. I live a very satisfying life. Not because I’ve made a few dollars, but because I have a wife who loves me and children who wait for me to come home. And that is beautiful. I think that’s the American dream: to be at peace at home.
I think most of my approach to life has been like that, to find order in chaos, to be in the middle of a bunch of things happening at the same time, but find focus. I strive to be like the sun sitting in the middle of the solar system with all the planets spinning around it - millions of things going on. It's just sitting there being the sun, but exerting gravitational effect on everything. I think man should look at himself that way.
I thought that Wu-Tang was the best sword style - the best sword-style of martial arts. And the tongue is like a sword. And so I say that we have the best lyrics, so, therefore, we are the Wu-Tang Clan.
To me, Wu-Tang is beyond Wu-Tang Clan... It's just like, hip-hop is beyond Grandmaster Flash, but Grandmaster Flash was one of the first guys to hit those turntables like that. The same thing with Wu-Tang. You'll see the difference in hip-hop from the moment we came in to before we came in. We changed it. We changed the whole structure.
I will say, for Wu-Tang, money wasn't the motivation, it was artistic domination.
I could never be a control freak. If Wu-Tang is a dictatorship, how does every Wu-Tang member have their own contract, their own career, and have put out more albums without me than they've done with me?
I just had a crazy, wild imagination all my life, and science fiction is the greatest outlet for me.
Writing a book has about it some of the anxiety of telling a joke and having to wait several years to know whether or not it was funny.
In the theater, while you recognized that you were looking at a house, it was a house in quotation marks. On screen, the quotation marks tend to be blotted out by the camera.
I met, not long ago, a young man who aspired to become a novelist. Knowing that I was in the profession, he asked me to tell him how he should set to work to realize his ambition. I did my best to explain. 'The first thing,' I said, 'is to buy quite a lot of paper, a bottle of ink, and a pen. After that you merely have to write.'
I write what feels real. I write things that are informed both by my own experience and by actual history.
The funniest thing is that all the things every director goes through, I thought I could shortcut, but there was no getting around those issues.
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