Today in Hip-Hop — August 22: GZA Turns 60, The Genius Still Runs the Board

August 22, 1966. Brooklyn. Gary Eldridge Grice — GZA, The Genius, Wu-Tang’s literary-minded elder brother — turns 60 today. Most heads know Liquid Swords cold. Fewer know his real solo debut dropped four years earlier: 1991’s Words from the Genius on Cold Chillin’, an album he later publicly wrote off because the label handed him bargain-bin production while saving the good beats for Big Daddy Kane. That failure is exactly why Wu-Tang happened.

The Older Brother Who Taught Everybody Chess

Rewind: after Cold Chillin’ fumbled him, GZA linked back with his cousins RZA and Ol’ Dirty Bastard, and the three of them cooked up the plot that became Wu-Tang Clan. GZA is a huge part of why the group’s early architecture worked — he was the older, more literary voice, the one who taught younger MCs that a bar is a chess move: setup, sacrifice, checkmate two lines later. Listen back to his verse on “Duel of the Iron Mic” against Inspectah Deck and Masta Killa on Liquid Swords. The whole track is a boardroom, and he’s the one moving pieces you don’t see land until three songs later.

Liquid Swords (1995) is the album that made Wu-Tang’s solo run untouchable. Fully produced by RZA. Cold, dusty, obsessed with dialogue samples from the 1980 cult film Shogun Assassin bleeding between tracks. Certified platinum. It’s arguably RZA’s tightest full-length production run and it belongs entirely to GZA. What followed made the case that he was the most album-focused Wu solo artist not named Ghostface: Beneath the Surface (1999), Legend of the Liquid Sword (2002), the DJ Muggs collaboration GrandMasters (2005), and Pro Tools (2008). Then the mythical Dark Matter — announced, delayed, teased, still unfinished for over a decade because GZA refuses to ship until every astrophysics bar lands right.

The last decade has been the professor era. He’s lectured on hip-hop and quantum mechanics at MIT, Harvard, Cornell, and the University of Michigan. He’s built a science-education program called Science Genius BATTLES that has NYC public-school students writing rap verses about photosynthesis and Newtonian physics. Same brain that wrote “Cold World” is now teaching ninth-graders the difference between mass and weight. Sixty is not slowing down for the Genius. It’s the year the students catch up.

Also Today in Hip-Hop — August 22

• J Dilla — The Shining, 20 years today (Aug 22, 2006). Dilla’s posthumous studio LP, finished by Karriem Riggins after James Yancey passed in February that year. “So Far to Go” with Common and D’Angelo still doesn’t sound like anything anyone else has made since.
• OutKast — Idlewild, 20 years today (Aug 22, 2006). Their sixth and final studio album, tied to the Bryan Barber-directed film. Underrated at drop, aged into a cult favorite — “Mighty O” and “Morris Brown” still hit.
• Wyclef Jean — The Ecleftic: 2 Sides II a Book, 26 years today (Aug 22, 2000). “It Doesn’t Matter” with a pre-Hollywood Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and “911” with Mary J. Blige. Platinum. Also the Clef’s cleanest post-Fugees solo work.
• Beenie Man turns 53 (b. Aug 22, 1973). Dancehall’s King of the Dancehall, hip-hop’s permanent crossover collaborator — from Foxy Brown’s “BK Anthem” to Janet Jackson’s “Feel It Boy.”
• Living Single premieres on Fox — 33 years today (Aug 22, 1993). Queen Latifah’s Brooklyn-brownstone sitcom, five-season run, the show Friends quietly borrowed the entire premise from a year later.

Stay creative — The Custom Creative Team

Jon Jones