Often considered the most cerebral member of the platinum recording group The Wu-Tang Clan, Gary Grice — more popularly known as the Genius or the GZA, as named by his younger cousins the RZA (then "The Scientist") and Ol' Dirty Bastard (once "The Specialist" for his beat boxing) — has always had a mind to broach topics in a different way than most rappers ("A lotta MCs think they lyrical … Something will happen, everybody will be like that certain event. Like Oklahoma bombing, world trade, 'I get free like OJ.' You ain't never heard none of that sh** from me. My sh** is more pure. You can see it on different levels"), sometimes saving lines for years before using them in a verse. His geek credentials were nearly unimpeachable, contracting legendary comics artist Denys Cowan to craft the imagery for his groundbreaking album Liquid Swords.
Now, the GZA is aiming higher with a new project that will achieve new heights.
If you like the ambience of rap music, but prefer contemplating space-time and stars over money and cars, a record tailored to your tastes is in the making. The hip-hop artist GZA, a founding member of the renowned Wu-Tang Clan rap group, will wax lyrical about the magnificence of the cosmos in a forthcoming album called Dark Matter, slated for release this fall.
The 45-year-old high school dropout is doing his science homework right. According to The Wall Street Journal, GZA, born Gary Grice and nicknamed "the Genius" by his fellow artists, has been sitting down with top physicists and cosmologists at MIT, Cornell University and elsewhere over the past few months for primers on the universe. Now, he's turning the lessons into lyrics.
A recent meeting with astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York, spawned a line about Saturn's alluring rings: "God put the needle on the disc of Saturn / The record he played revealed blueprints and patterns."
GZA is teaming up with Marco Vitali, a composer, producer and Juilliard-trained violinist, on the score. They're aiming for a cosmic atmosphere. "We talked about frenetic energy, outer space, molecules crashing into each other, organized chaos," Vitali said. "The grandeur of the fact that the universe was born in a millionth of a second, in this explosion that created billions of stars, these overpowering ideas that are bigger than we can conceive."
Although GZA said he foresees fans of the rap genre being wary of his academic subject matter at first, he thinks Dark Matter will tap into the innate curiosity of listeners — even those who are unaware of their own interest in science.
"I don't think people have ever really been in touch with science," he told the Wall Street Journal. "They're drawn to it, but they don't know why they're drawn to it. For example, you may be blown away by the structure of something, like a soccer ball or a geodesic dome, with its hexagonal shapes. Or how you can take a strand of hair and can get someone's whole drug history.They're different forms of science, but it's still science."
After this, expect an album based in marine biology, as the GZA has already started studying with MIT ocean phytoplankton specialist Penny Chisolm. Nerdcore is about to get a whole lot of street cred.
[Source: Space.com, Rappers Doing Normal S***, The Operative Network]
