Aloha Namaste and welcome to Impolitic with John Heilman, a puck and audacity

earlier this week, we dropped the first part of this special two-part episode with my

longtime pal and occasional collaborator, the acclaimed producer, composer, actor, filmmaker, best known as the prime mover behind and de facto leader of the Seminole hip-hop collective Wu-Tang Clan, Rizza.

Because Riz's new movie, One Spoon of Chocolate, which he both wrote and directed, just opened in theaters across the country last week, and because the

film, 15 years in the making, marks the latest stage in Riz's artistic evolution away from music

making and towards movie making, those were the topics that we focused on in the first installment

of this double header. And if you haven't listened to that one yet, please do. Probably

make sense to go back and listen to that one before you listen to this one.

Anyway, whatever the future holds for Riza as a cinematic progenitor,

the place where his impact and influence to date have been greatest,

extending way beyond the confines of entertainment and into the culture at large,

has been in the realm of music.

As the producer and Sonic Spengali behind Wu-Tang's Out of Nowhere,

rap world-changing, record industry upending,

1993 debut album Enter the Wutang, 36 Chambers,

Riza fashioned something that was more than a sound and more than a soundscape,

but a fully realized, utterly distinctive,

and instantly recognizable aesthetic system. Resolutely lo-fi, gritty, dusty, skeletal,

claustrophobic, and relentlessly rhythm forward, filled with clip drums, hard, dry kicks,

and snares, huge amounts of negative space shot through with samples

lifted from sources ranging from obscure stacks b-sides to Shaw Brothers Kung Fu movies to

black exploitation staples such as Superfly and shaft and then sliced into jagged piercing fragments.

...