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?
If Charlie Parker were a Gunslinger, There'd be a Whole Lot of Dead Copycats
The arts make vivid the fact that words do not, in their literal form or number, exhaust what we can know. The limits of our language do not define the limits of our cognition.
When I'm stuck for a closing to a lyric, I will drag out my last resort: overwhelming illogic.
Fiction, poetry, music...these are the places (for me) where loneliness is countenanced, stared down, transfigured, treated.
What I've learned how to do as I've gotten older is to take all of the information that I have, and push it aside, and try to distill each song into an emotional theme. The hardest thing that I've ever had to learn how to do in playing music is use the sound of my instrument to create an emotional effect.
Photography doesn't teach you to express your emotions; it teaches you how to see.
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