In Lori Burns and Alyssa Woods chapter on Rap Gods and Monsters, Justin A. Williams (2013, 1) has suggested, “The fundamental element of hip-­ hop culture and aesthetics is the overt use of preexisting material to new ends”(Burns, L and Woods, 2018 p. 215). The process of creating a beat in RZAs production style kept drawing me back to this quote that emphasises the use of pre-existing material. In my group with Yasmin and Sarah we started by researching action scenes from Enter the Dragon. As we haven’t watched the movie we discovered quite early on that blindly searching for a scene to use for the akai sampler was proving to be quite difficult. We eventually ended up going with Bruce Lee and O’haras fight scene from Enter the Dragon and proceeded to attempt to capture a punch to sample as potentially a kick topper. This took multiple attempts which none resulted with the punch being captured as the akai unfortunately only records 1 second of audio and with the group turnovers being every 20 mins we ended up running out of time. This made me consider how much technology with music has progressed over the years and how time consuming and technically agile someone like RZA must’ve been in the studios, let alone the amount of patience required to sit in front of the machine and perform endless takes. After we had transferred the audio recording to logic we set about selecting a soul/R&B track to sample just as RZA does – for example in my last blog post where I studied ‘Tearz’ he sampled Wendy Renes ‘after laughter comes tears’. We ended up choosing Nina Simone’s I put a spell on you as we felt that the first 4 bars would provide an interesting hook to loop. Unfortunately we didn’t manage to get much further with the task as we were struggling to get the sample from I put a spell on you in tempo with the metronome in logic. I think that this production process makes you think consciously about where you source your samples from and how you use them. It is clear that RZA chooses to make mindful decisions when sourcing the media and music he uses to tell a moral or a story that provides us with a plethora of material when researching his use of intertextuality.

Burns, L., and Woods, A., (2018) “Rap Gods and Monsters: Words, Music, and Images in the Hip-Hop Intertexts of Eminem, Jay-Z, and Kanye West”, in Burns, L., and Lacasse, S., The Pop Palimpsest: Intertextuality in Recorded Popular Music, Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, pp. 215