Track 3 from The Pick, the Sickle, and the Shovel with Gravediggaz (1997)

Tracks 4, 5, 6, and 7 from Bobby Digital In Stereo (1998)

Track 8 from Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai - The Album (1999)

Tracks 9 and 10 from Digital Bullet (2001)

RZA is the primary producer of the Wu-Tang's group albums and most of the earliest and best solo albums, and the mastermind of the whole group's sound and concept. His leadership and his beatmaking has been questioned at times, but there's no denying that he, more than any other individual, is responsible for the whole movement, regardless of who became a bigger name as a rapper. In the early '90s, Bobby Diggs signed to Tommy Boy as Prince Rakeem, and his goofy-lighthearted single "Ooh I Love You Rakeem" (De La Soul producer Prince Paul helped with) was never successful enough to lead to an album, although there was an EP with two additional songs, and several remixes. One of those tracks on that EP is titled "Sexcapades (Wu-Tang Mix)," so he was planting the seeds of the Wu-Tang Clan early. He used another kung fu movie, Five Deadly Venoms, as the inspiration for both the song "Deadly Venoms" and, later, the Wu-Tang-affiliated girl group Deadly Venoms. 

Before Wu-Tang blew up, RZA formed another group with a few Tommy Boy refugees, Prince Paul and his Stetsasonic bandmate Frukwan, and another guy named Poetic, taking morbid death-related aliases as Gravediggaz (RZA became 'The RZArector). By that point plenty of groups like Geto Boys and Three 6 Mafia dabbled in what would be come to be known as 'horrorcore,' but Gravediggaz rode a wave of industry hype that it could be the next big thing, an escalation of the violence and shock value of multiplatinum gangsta rap. That never quite happened, but the 1994 Gravediggaz debut 6 Feet Deep was still a pretty big deal, charting higher than the first Wu-Tang album had, spinning off three singles, and hitting stores before Method Man or anyone else from Wu-Tang had a solo album (GZA's pre-Wu debut aside). 

By the time RZA finally released a proper solo album, he's already produced the lion's share of 7 or 8 albums, and had been kind of a minor presence as a rapper on most of those albums. My older brother had a few Wu albums in the late '90s, including Wu-Tang Forever and Bobby Digital In Stereo, which I didn't think much of at the time, but it sounds alright now. I'm kind of surprised it actually went gold. Apparently RZA and GZA wrote most of Ol' Dirty Bastard's verses back in the day, and that makes sense in retrospect, RZA's mushmouth flow is kind of like a less electric version of how ODB rapped. "N.Y.C. Everything" might have the best RZA verse I've ever heard, a Ghostface-level barrage of surreal imagery. 

At the beginning of Bobby Digital In Stereo, RZA sneers about other producers overusing samples popularized by the Ultimate Breaks & Beats series: "Ultimate breakbeats and shit, right? N____s still making money off of those shits, looping the same shits for a thousand years and shit, right?" He was alluding to the new style he was pivoting to, with less of those dusty drums from '70s soul records and more dry programmed drum machine beats, often unquantized with snare drums and cymbals jutting out at odd, counterintuitive moments. There's a Guitar Center promotional video that's been going viral every few months for years, or RZA programming a drum machine on-camera and just making one of the most awkward beats you've ever heard. People laugh at that video partly because RZA produced so many classic songs and that video seems atypical or evidence of how far he's fallen off. But the beats on Bobby Digital In Stereo, and some of the albums he's made since then, don't sound too different from that. That kind of beat generally sounds better once someone's rapped on them, though, they don't make a lot of sense as instrumentals. That's a testament to how the other members of Wu-Tang saw his vision and rapped over those tracks and made them feel complete. 

RZA's only made four proper solo albums, three of them in the 'Bobby Digital' persona, and the other one, Birth of a Prince, is probably his best. It was pretty entertaining to find that Digital Bullet actually has a song called "Bong Bong" that I guess is the genesis of that becoming RZA's most famous catchphrase. But I also wanted to make room for some of the other stuff he's done, the Prince Rakeem era and the first two Gravediggaz albums he was on, and some of the film score soundtrack work that's become a bigger and bigger part of out his output, including his own directorial debut The Man With The Iron Fists. He made The World According to RZA, an album full of collaborations with European rappers, and he also made an album with Interpol frontman Paul Banks under the name 'Banks & Steelz,' which I either never heard of or completely forgot about. Apparently he also has a group with the bassist from System Of A Down but the record they made never got released. His reach exceeds his grasp sometimes, but imagine all the great music we would've missed out on if RZA didn't have the confidence to put his weird ideas out there.