Justin Tranter: The Music Week Interview

Justin Tranter is, quite simply, a hitmaker extraordinaire. With a CV bursting with top-level talent – from Lady Gaga, Britney Spears and Ariana Grande, to Chappell Roan, Justin Bieber, Selena Gomez and more – they are a force to be reckoned with. What’s more, Tranter also runs Facet House, a records and publishing business, with Bea Miller and Rose Gray among a growing client base. Ahead of MUSEXPO 2026, where they will collect the Global Songwriter Award and take part in a keynote interview, what follows is a riotous insight into an inimitable songwriting legend… WORDS: KAREN BLISSPHOTOS: SEQUOIA EMMANUELLE Justin Tranter is mid-flow, only to be unexpectedly interrupted. Sally (as in Bowles, named after the character from Cabaret), one of Tranter’s two rescue dogs arrives, catching the hitmaker off guard. “She never leaves the laundry room, so this is very exciting,” they say, adding that their other dog is named Izzy. “Rescuing large dogs that most people don’t want to rescue because they’re too large and too old is a huge part of my daily life.” But rescuing dogs is not the achievement that has prompted our encounter with Tranter in their Los Angeles home today. We are here to celebrate their monumental achievements as a songwriter, the latest of which is soon to arrive in the shape of MUSEXPO’s Global Songwriter Award from the prestigious A&R Worldwide institution. The news is still sinking in. “It’s wild,” says Tranter, whose songs have sold over 75 million singles and racked up more than 100 billion streams. “I feel so grateful to have had success for over a decade now. I don’t take a second of it for granted because, in the grand scheme of humanity, coming into success at 34 is very young. In music, becoming successful at 34 is very old on the creative side. So, here I am at 45 being honoured for the craft of songwriting, which I love more than anything.” Nor is this the first time honours have come their way. They have been up for multiple Grammy and Golden Globe awards, secured 16 BMI pop awards, two BMI Songwriter Of The Year titles in a row, and the 2023 SONA Warrior Award. Tranter also won last year’s International Song Of The Year at the BRITs for Chappell Roan’s Good Luck, Babe!. “I understand why straight men didn’t get Pink Pony Club because it’s not for them,” they say of Roan’s breakthrough single, which they were not a part of. “They should get it because it’s just a masterpiece. But I feel like if you’re a girl, a gay, or a they, and you hear it and don’t realise that that’s a superstar, you need to have your ears checked.” Founder of their own label and publishing company Facet House, Tranter is an outspoken advocate for both songwriters and the LGBTQ+ community, and wastes no time in sharing their take on the challenges ahead. “There is a fear, I can feel it in my daily life,” they say. “Take the government out of it, I can feel it in the music business, [a sense] of people just not giving a fuck anymore. So to see the effects of the government already fucking up the little progress we made in the music business is pretty dark.” On top of their campaigning, the list of Tranter’s hits is seemingly endless, spanning pop-culture moments such as Justin Bieber’s Sorry, DNCE’s Cake By The Ocean and this year’s Internet Girl by Katseye, as well as songs by Ariana Grande, Dua Lipa, Lady Gaga, Britney Spears, Miley Cyrus, Cardi B, Sam Smith, Kid Cudi, Janelle Monáe, Demi Lovato, Katy Perry, Reneé Rapp, The Chicks and Kim Petras. They were also the executive producer of 2025’s A Very Jonas Christmas Movie, which features seven new Jonas Brothers songs. All of which is all the more impressive given what happened to Tranter’s initial foray into music with New York rockers Semi Precious Weapons. “So much of the ethos of the band was about being young, femme and queer and broke,” they smile. “Very specifically, a lot of it was about being broke.” Now in a significantly different financial position, Tranter offers up deadpan reflections of his rock’n’roll past. “I had a really awesome, passionate fanbase, and that did include 10 really famous people, which made my band seem way more successful than it was,” they laugh. “But, as far as business was concerned, we did nothing but cost multiple record labels and publishers millions of dollars.” Fast-forward to the present day and, in addition to executive producing New Jersey singer Bea Miller’s upcoming album, Tranter is busy writing for the CoComelon animated film (due out in 2027). “Watching Ariel flip her hair and sing her face off in The Little Mermaid changed my DNA, so getting to do an entire animated musical, is something I’ve been dreaming of ever since,” they exclaim. “Obviously, CoComelon is a phenomenon based on nursery rhymes, so we are being very respectful to that, while also taking it to new heights with original songs and interpolations as well.” What’s more, for the first time in years, Tranter is working on a project of their own called The Great Thirst, with an array of guests. “It’s a progressive alternative pop one-woman show starring me – those songs are about my life,” they say.“I call it a post-pop, post-apocalyptic musical. Because I went to a really bad public school 40 miles outside of Chicago, I don’t think I have the education to write an actual novel, so my musical is the closest I should get to it!” Without naming any names, Tranter tells us that, “some of my favourite musicians ever are going to be on it”. “I did a couple of private workshops of the show and I’m working on the album now,” they add. “I’ll sing half the album and then other people are gonna sing, people I’ve loved for decades. I’m hoping it will be out around summer-ish.” Before that, though, there’s much to discuss, as we look back on Tranter’s incredible story so far… Let’s start with your approach to songwriting. Is there anything in particular that you do when you start working with an artist? “I follow the artist’s process. None of it is about me. I haven’t written a song about my life – that the world has heard – in 12 or 13 years. So, if they want to go for coffee or dinner first, great. If they just wanna get to work, great. I always feel like I can have a great conversation with the wall, so for me, I don’t need a pre-hang. But, if the artist wants a pre-hang, of course. A lot of the time, I find the song during that first conversation before we start writing. Once you really know the artist, you can end up hanging out longer before you start writing because now you’re friends. But in those first couple of sessions, I basically am trying to perform the most subtle interview possible [laughs].” Can you shed some more light on those relationships with people who become close collaborators and friends? “Everyone works completely differently and also exactly the same. The nuance is always different because we’re all different people. With Lady Gaga, for example, I worked on two songs on [2020’s] Chromatica, but we had already known each other for 11 years [before the album came out] and in those 11 years, she became a superstar; I became a hitmaker. You know, I never ever want to spill an artist’s tea, but if you listen to a song like 911, even though it’s up-tempo and fabulous, you can hear there’s some real conversations in there that turned into the song. So even though she’s very possibly one of the top three greatest live performers of the last 20 years, you still just write a song the same way. We all just get in a room and write a song – I always wish the stories were crazier and better.” You could always just lie to us… “I could lie! [Laughs]! If I was an artist, if the songs were about my life, I would lie like crazy.” Speaking of crazy, Internet Girl by Katseye is full of lots of eye-catching lyrics. Tell us about how that came together… “That process was actually a great one. Mattman & Robin, who I’ve worked with for a decade at this point, are dear, dear friends. During Covid, Robin started a family and they live in Sweden. We’ve been working a lot less just because of logistics, right? First there was Covid, then there was kids. So I was like, ‘Hey, I’ve been working with this girl Livvi Franc. We’re really hitting it off together. We’ve never worked this way, but do you want to just send me some tracks?’ Julia Michaels and I wrote Justin Bieber’s Sorry to a track. Most of the time I don’t write to tracks; we create from scratch in the room, but obviously Sorry did pretty darn well, so I was like, ‘Fuck it. We can write to a track, not from scratch.’ And so, they sent me one, and it already had the baby voice, ‘I’m getting out of here’ and the whole ‘eat zucchini’ part. To me, it feels like Black Eyed Peas meets Le Tigre, riot grrrl meets dance party. When it was done, we were like, ‘I don’t know who would ever, ever do this song.’ We wrote it last February and I was just obsessed with it. I thought, ‘This is so fucking weird, I don’t know who to send this to.’ Then, when Gnarly came out by Katseye, I was like, ‘I have to send it to them. [But I did wonder] Are they gonna just think we’ve lost our minds?’ And I do think that half the internet does think we’ve lost our minds [laughs], but I’m so glad that the song found a home.” Another of your recent collaborators, Rose Gray, told Music Week that you helped restore her confidence. What does it mean to hear that? “If I am thinking or feeling something, I say it. Because I am so confident in myself, I am so free with compliments. They’re not bullshit. I am going to share my excitement and my respect for someone’s artistry whenever I’m feeling it. I also think it’s so interesting how many straight men are in charge of the music business, when in pop music, famously, the average straight man is not buying tickets to see Charli XCX, Taylor Swift, Katseye, Adele, Beyoncé... The core of our business is for girls and gays and theys. So much of the business is for us, yet so many decision-makers are people who would never even buy a ticket to a Chappell Roan show. Who are you to say Pink Pony Club isn’t a masterpiece? This isn’t for you. So, when I work with people like Rose or Bea, or even Selena, the list goes on, this music is for me and for my community. So, when I heard Rose’s cool as fuck, late-’90s-inspired dance music four years ago, I was like, ‘Oh, all of my friends would die for this. You’re amazing!’ Whereas for the average hitmaker or executive, that music’s not for them [laughs], so that will erode your confidence. Because Rose is looking at her friend group and going, ‘I’m so confused, my friends think this is dope, are they lying to me?’ No, they’re not lying, they’re right. It’s just that the gatekeepers shouldn’t be keeping these gates [laughs].” You must be happy Rose was shortlisted for the BRITs Critics’ Choice award? “We signed Rose to publishing three years ago and to see her nominated was one of the coolest things. When she told me, it was such a cool moment. I’ve been giving her thoughts on her music, co-writing with her, championing her, posting about her, and telling every label person they better get in the conversation quick because she is fucking special. To see the world slowly but surely starting to agree with what I saw three, four years ago is really cool.” In terms of following early exposure with actual hits, does commercial recognition for a song matter to you? “No, especially in a post-Covid, TikTok world. I used to be able to know in my heart while I was writing a song, ‘This is a hit.’ If it was an artist that was big enough and the label didn’t fuck it up, I knew a hit song, even if it took six months to break. When I wrote DNCE’s Cake By The Ocean I had one hit, Fall Out Boy’s Centuries, but I was like, ‘This is a fucking smash, if everyone involved is brave enough to make a song called Cake By The Ocean a single.’ And it took months to break. It got put in a cell-phone commercial [for mobile game Just Dance 2017] and it found its way because, back then, everyone could do their job and get a great song to the masses. Now, you have to just pray that seven seconds gets a viral trend behind it. Unless it’s something like Good Luck, Babe!, which was not viral – but writing a song as good as that is rare [laughs]. That’s a double A+! But I used to be able to look at an A and go, ‘That’s a hit. Hope the label figures it out.’ Now that’s not the case, so I really don’t get disappointed when something doesn’t go the distance. No one can guess what kids are going to want to make videos to; there’s no way to plan that. I can’t be upset any more.” You have your own label and publishing company. When you are in such high demand as a songwriter, why do that too? “[Laughs] The label side is really, really, really hard. The publishing side is definitely hard, but what’s great is that I can sign people and write with them enough to the point where I’m either mentoring them or opening doors they deserve to have opened – I’m just going to be the person who does it, listens to a song they wrote, and gives them feedback. As a publisher, because of the work that I’ve already done and because of having a degree in songwriting and learning from co-writing with other greats, that’s a very easy job for me to take on. The label side, I’m still learning and I feel like I’ve learned a lot. I just get to do a kind of partnership. I created a partnership with Bea Miller, who is one of my favourite artists I’ve ever written with. She and I have a really special connection. If you listen to songs like Feel Something [you can tell that] there’s something really special between us. We invented a new kind of deal where we’re doing a creative partnership. So, on the label side, I’m learning and I’m determined to break somebody. I’m going to fucking do it. As a publisher, I feel like I already know what I’m doing; I’ve already been able to help some people have some real hits.” When it comes to the value of the songwriter, are you seeing a significant shift in how the industry remunerates creatives? “What I’m feeling positive about is that we’ve reached the breaking point. And if the business doesn’t start taking care of us, and very specifically the next generation of songwriters, they’re going to start to feel serious repercussions. To make the money that all these labels want to make, greatness is required. And new generations of greatness are required. If people can’t afford to pay their rent, they can’t afford to be great. They have to do something else and the labels are not getting the greatness they want. The only reason I am feeling positive is because it is so negative that, if it doesn’t change, lots of people are fucked.” Last summer, UK major labels committed to giving per diems to writers. What did you make of that change? “It’s a great idea. When I talk to people who don’t work in the music business, whether they work a very traditional job or even people that work in Hollywood, meaning film and TV, and they hear that even someone at my level goes to work for free every day, they are shocked. They are flabbergasted. They can’t fucking believe it. So, what is happening in the UK is really great because the next generation of songwriters, thanks to that per diem, will be able to keep writing songs that the labels fucking need.” How do you look back on what it has taken to get to this point in the remuneration debate? “In the days before iTunes and streaming, one album cut on a medium-selling album could pay your mortgage for a year or two. An album cut on a massive album could change your life. A single would obviously be even crazier. Now, I can have an album cut on an album that is three-times platinum and maybe that album cut, if I am so lucky, makes me, like, 30 grand. A song on the biggest album of the year is $30,000. That’s a problem, when that album cut on the biggest album of the year used to be $3 million and now it’s $30,000 [laughs]. So, having everyone go to work for free, that’s crazy. Back in the day, in the 1970s, ’80s, ’90s, I get why it didn’t fucking matter, because if you’re in there and you’re in the right sessions and your publisher’s doing the job, you’re going to get an album cut a year.” Yours was the first US label to give your songwriters three percentage points on the masters… “That’s on anything that my label releases. I have major label partners on all of the releases, so out of the Facet House side of the money, we are setting aside points for anyone who’s a non-producing, non-performing songwriter. We’ve had those agreements on things released by Jake Wesley Rogers, things released by YDE.” Finally, AI is also dominating the news agenda – where do you stand on that subject? “Listen, I pray every day that AI just shuts the whole planet down and we can start over [laughs]! I’m very worried about AI watering down the already eroding attention spans. I’m already worried about AI watering down the already questionable taste levels of humanity. And I’m included in this; I’m not above any of this. My attention span is atrocious now. I don’t even know what a taste level is any more, so we are all victims to this! But, overall, yeah,I hope AI ends the world, but if it doesn’t and if a sci-fi apocalypse doesn’t happen, then I’m very worried about AI stealing from songwriters that are already struggling.”

Wu-Tang Clan's RZA on taking their legacy, business empire & global touring to a whole new level

As a group that forever altered the sound of hip-hop and rewrote the rules of the music business to suit their own needs, the Wu-Tang Clan have long been venerated for the myriad ways in which they changed the game. But in recent years, the Staten Island collective’s architect, RZA, has masterminded a series of power moves – each one escalating in ambition – not only to enhance their legacy, but also to culminate in their epic The Final Chamber global tour. Here, alongside CAA’s Cameron Kaiser, the Wu’s “Abbott” tells Music Week how they grouped together to take their live business to a whole new level more than 30 years into their storied career… WORDS: GEORGE GARNER COVER PHOTO: BRYAN DERBALLA/CONTOUR GETTY It wasn’t a normal concert. Then again, they rarely were back in the day. “Yo, Dirty was shooting the fucking ceiling,” laughs RZA from the hills of Los Angeles as he regales Music Week with the story of one of the Wu-Tang Clan’s craziest live performances. And to think, their much-missed member Ol’Dirty Bastard putting bullet holes into the roof of the Culture Club one night wasn’t even the whole story… “That was a wild night, bro,” he continues. “Listen, so many bottles and chairs [were thrown]. I don’t talk about it totally in full detail… I mean, I was fighting. And then after the big fight, we still performed – that’s the gag of it! But we were kids, not knowing. It wasn’t organised in a way that hip-hop has been blessed to be now.” This is one of many memories coming into sharper focus as the group that changed hip-hop forever with their iconic 1993 debut, Enter The Wu-Tang (36 Chambers), continue on their ominously titled “The Final Chamber” global tour. “It’s a conundrum because Wu-Tang is forever, right?” muses RZA. That is, indeed, what the group – completed by GZA, Method Man, Raekwon, Ghostface Killah, Inspectah Deck, U-God, Masta Killa, Cappadonna and, on tour, ODB’s son Young Dirty Bastard – promised us with the title of their 1997 double album. No matter how dicey things occasionally looked along the way, the Wu stayed true to their word as they sold 40 million albums, spawned multi-platinum solo careers and branched out into everything from Wu-Wear clothing to video games, comics, books, films, soundtracks and documentaries. And all of this while weathering tragedies – including ODB’s passing in 2004 and, after our interview with RZA, the death of close affiliate Oliver ‘Power’ Grant in February 2026 – plus a host of private and not-so-private wars of words with each other. What, then, does “The Final Chamber” really mean? “What we mean by this is to get every Wu member together and go back and touch our fans,” says RZA. “That’s always been a difficult task and we know that the chance of getting all of us together… We doubt that it can happen again. We’ve all agreed that we will make our schedule available to go back out and hit the globe together one more time. Not RZA with four guys, or Meth with five guys: the entire Clan will reassemble like Voltron. Everybody agreed that this is what we were doing. We put this plan in motion close to seven years ago. We talked about it and now we’re all living it.” Yet this grandstanding global tour offers more than the chance to hear, say, RZA deliver some of the greatest lyrics in hip-hop history live, such as ‘You couldn’t punch your way out of a wet paper bag with scissors in your hands’. “One of my uncles used to say, ‘You so weak, you couldn’t bench press a Q-tip,’” RZA laughs of the inspiration behind that particular line. Instead, it is the sum total of one of the most complex, multifaceted plans concocted in recent music business history. Not that this should have come as a surprise. Wu-Tang was conceived according to a five-year plan devised by RZA. After suffering the ignominy of being dropped by Tommy Boy after his debut EP as Prince Rakeem flopped, he assembled the Clan and promised its members that if they trusted his vision for that duration, he would change their lives. Throughout Wu-Tang’s career, his business acumen has repeatedly proven game-changing, perhaps most notably in parlaying their initial success as a group into a host of solo deals, with each member on a different label. The result? Every major label, while competing with each other, were all united in one regard: promoting the Wu brand. In conversation, RZA is every bit the engaging mind you expect – at times he’ll punctuate his sentences with an emphatic “BONG!” for effect; at others, he’ll go into such depth he’ll charmingly chide himself (“Forgive my long answer!”). Yet rarely does he get so animated as when he talks about how and why Wu-Tang decided they needed to ratchet things up in recent years. We have Netflix to inadvertently thank for it, the 2016 series Hip-Hop Evolution specifically… “Watching Hip-Hop Evolution, not only was it like we weren’t given our flowers, it’s almost like they tried to skip over us for whatever reason,” he reflects. “I don’t know what the hell was going on, but I was like, ‘Yo, they had LL Cool J and Biggie but not Wu?’. Hold on, yo, no disrespect, but if Wu don’t come, you don’t get B.I.G., you don’t get Nas, you don’t get the energy of the East Coast having a say in the trajectory of hip-hop because [at that point] it had already made a left turn to West Coast success. It went pop, too. We wasn’t getting that five borough, New York foundation energy. So, when they tried to skip us, I was like, ‘Well, if you want something done, you got to do it yourself.’ And I got on a mission.” RZA’s reaction was a “relay parallel plan”. “We’re in the middle of two five-year plans,” he explains. “One five-year plan is already completed, which was the documentary [Showtime’s 2019 series Wu-Tang Clan: Of Mics And Men], the TV show [Hulu’s drama series Wu-Tang: An American Saga], and the re-establishment of Wu as a prominent pillar of hip-hop culture – not just a member, a pillar.” All were very successful in their own right, but the missing piece of the puzzle was the Wu-Tang live experience. In truth, it had never quite been taken to the level that RZA always dreamed of. Not that they hadn’t come a long way, regardless… "Our first paid gig was in Brooklyn,” RZA smiles of their somewhat inauspicious start as a live act. “It was like some fucking community centre shit. Bro, they paid us $200 for the entire Wu-Tang Clan. The show ended with a shootout. We gave the entire 200 bucks to ODB because he was the only one who had a child at the time and he needed milk and Pampers.” Even when big-paying touring opportunities eventually came knocking, the Wu couldn’t always keep things on the rails. Burgeoning solo careers, extracurricular activities, internal beefs and more would all play a part in leading to some high-profile combustible moments, none more so than pulling off a huge tour with Rage Against The Machine in 1997. Since then, Wu-Tang have done successful tours, just not at the level they were capable of. In, say, 2015, it wasn’t unusual to see Wu-Tang playing in theatres. Nothing to be ashamed of, but perhaps not where you’d expect to see one of the biggest-selling hip-hop groups of all time. Playing a big part in rectifying that was CAA. Enter: their agent Cameron Kaiser. “I don’t necessarily know, prior to us coming on board, what was wrong,” he reflects. “I think perhaps it lacked a vision of what it could become. The first thing I ever did with them, which really started this resurgence, was take them to Australia to do exclusive nights at the Sydney Opera House [in 2018].I believe we were one of the first hip-hop acts to do that and they sold them out. It was about being very strategic and not going into any other market – just doing Sydney, just doing the Opera House. It was a great way to start it off, and then from that point, the rest is history.” The 2019 Gods Of Rap tour was another crucial milestone, with Wu-Tang headlining multiple arenas on a bill with Public Enemy and De La Soul – including a show at Wembley Arena. “Chris Wareing, who is still a promoter today, was at SJM at the time and it was our idea to figure out how we get these guys into arenas: let’s package them up, let’s create a brand, and that’s where we were so successful,” reflects Kaiser. “Positioning them as a headliner of Gods Of Rap put them in that light as a main attraction.” From there came the 2022/2023 co-headliner with Nas, the NY State Of Mind tour, which put them in even bigger arenas, including a phenomenal display at The O2. “RZA then came to us and said, ‘Hey, we’ve never done a Vegas residency, let’s go do a Vegas residency,’” remembers Kaiser of what followed. “And that’s not your typical Vegas attraction, right? But we went and we pulled it off – it was the first hip-hop residency.” Having started in 2025 with American dates, The Final Chamber will see Wu-Tang return to the UK with one night at The O2 – this time as solo headliners, with Havoc from Mobb Deep supporting – and one at Manchester’s Co-op Live. The full Clan are in. That much was non-negotiable. Every week, RZA says, they hold a “Wu Wednesday” business meeting. He had long held to a business principle that he calls the “Rule Of Four”. In a group as big as theirs, he wrote in the 2004 book The Wu-Tang Manual, if four members are against something, “then it’s serious” and you need to change your plan. He still generally abides by it, but for The Final Chamber tour, everyone needed to be in. “For this one, if two guys don’t want to do it, we don’t do it, right?” RZA says. “Because this is serious, this has to be real. I remember there was a few years I wouldn’t tour with Wu-Tang myself. I wasn’t even busy, I was in a different mindset. We had fell out a little bit, and I needed some time to figure out things and I didn’t go on tour, and it was really diminishing at the time. And then I decided to try to rekindle my relationship, and we rekindled the energy. If you miss one ingredient, it ain’t that motherfucking stew. A cheeseburger isn’t a cheeseburger without that slice of cheese. Put that slice of cheese on? Now it’s a fucking cheeseburger!” The success of the tour also makes for an interesting counter-narrative to headlines widely shared last year when it was reported that no rap songs had made the Top 40 on the US Hot 100 charts for the first time since 1990. “It goes in peaks and troughs, right?” Kaiser says. “A few years ago, every single festival had a hip-hop headliner, but look at what rock is doing – rock is back in a major way. And a lot of nostalgia is doing really well across every genre – rock, R&B, especially hip-hop, too. It’s amazing to see what Clipse is doing, what Wu is doing, and Public Enemy.” The odd thing is, for a group supposedly on their “Final Chamber”, there is precious little evidence of the Wu brand slowing down. Just as they challenged norms with their one-off, single copy album/art piece Once Upon A Time In Shaolin selling at auction to controversial businessman Martin Shkreli for £2 million in 2015, last year they released the Wu project, Black Samson, The Bastard Swordsman, with 5,000 individual bespoke covers. Repeat: 5,000. Individual. Bespoke. Covers. Given this vaulting ambition, it all makes the words “Final Chamber” seem that bit more peculiar. “We don’t feel our time has passed, but we are getting older,” says RZA of the decision. “GZA’s three or four years older than most of us. He basically was like, ‘Yeah, I think I could run around one more time.’ Sitting down at 60 is pragmatic in America. Of course, we see some of our great rock bands go into their 70s, and I seen BB King when he was in his 80s. He played The Thrill Is Gone and the crowd went bananas. But about 30 minutes later in the set, you know what he did? He played The Thrill Is Gone. He actually realised that he played it earlier and said, ‘Well, we’re gonna do it again.’ The crowd loved to see it twice, but you wouldn’t do that in your 30s or 40s [laughs].” That said, RZA says The Final Chamber could still take three years to wrap. “There are a lot of markets we haven’t hit yet,” adds CAA’s Kaiser of the tour. “We just confirmed what I believe is their first-ever show in Japan, which is amazing because of how much Wu-Tang, as the group and brand, speaks to Japanese culture, right? It was a long, long time coming and we just announced we’re gonna go play a 20,000 cap arena.” But whatever you do, just don’t call it a farewell tour… “Farewell? No, not farewell,” corrects RZA. “We don’t want to say it like somebody’s going to pass away. But we do know that the fans, let’s be honest, have never really seen us at this level, this magnitude. With the production, the vibe, the set list, the musicality… It’s all matured. This will be what we always wanted to give you, but didn’t have the ability.” Here, RZA aka Robert Diggs aka The Abbott aka Prince Rakeem aka The Scientist aka Bobby Digital aka Ruler Zig-Zag-Zig Allah aka Bobby Boulders aka RZArector reveals more about the past, present and future of the Wu… So many people would have been broken or dejected by being dropped after their first EP. What did you take away from that Prince Rakeem experience, not just as an artist but also as a businessman? “Well, of course, I was shattered. I was shattered professionally, personally and maybe even artistically, at the failure. What hurt me even more was when I was locked up [RZA was accused of shooting a man in 1991 and claimed it was self-defence – he was acquitted of all charges on April 23, 1992], I needed $10,000 bail. I reached out to my manager to reach out to the label, and the news was, ‘No, we’re not going to continue with him.’ My sister took her life savings and put the money up and I got out and, I don’t know if I shared this part of the story before but I’ll share it with you, because it’s important: when I bailed out, I went sober, bro. I didn’t smoke, drink, or do any type of criminal shit. I turned a leaf and I started making the tracks that you hear on 36 Chambers. Before I’d had a lot of blunts and all types of fucking shit. This was like, ‘No.’ I started making shit sober. One thing I realised is that I was on my own professionally and artistically. I realised, ‘Yo, the only way that I’m going to makeit is to rely upon myself.’” From there, Wu-Tang Clan changed the way hip-hop artists negotiated their contracts – how do you see that legacy panning out for the artists that followed in your wake? “A couple of things happened, good and bad. On the good side, artists and labels realised that you could band together and use one element to spark another – to have a brand and a crew and use it to sell multiple products. We went into fashion, skateboards, comic culture, kung fu movies. It enlightened the industry, like, ‘Wait a minute, we could actually take this guy – not just his music, but what he likes – and package that along with it.’ On the negative side, though, the 360 deal comes out – and that means, ‘We’re going to pay for your album, but we want to control your touring, your merchandise’ and all the other ancillary businesses that Wu was flourishing with. There was a generation of artists that didn’t get to flourish with that because the 360 deal came along. The 360 deal to me, I call that the ‘Counter Wu’ deal. But that counter attack, which I inspired – I never had to suffer it.” You’ve always found a unique way to balance the demands of art and business. There was a lot of controversy about the Once Upon A Time In Shaolin project, but the intention behind it, that art should be worth something, seemed remarkably pure. Where do you think we are as a business with the value of music? “The pendulum goes both ways. At one point, it was beneficial to the artist, and a lot of artists grew. Then at one point it became detrimental, and less of us grew when music became devalued. I’m just using numbers as an analogy here: it’s not back to feeding 1,000 people, but it’s back to feeding 500-600 people. I think that it’s going to grow, but the true growth is in live. If an artist is able to build their fanbase, they won’t get money properly from the record sales and from the label, as we did; they’ll have to get their money from the fans themselves. In the early phases of Wu, we were able to get off the Rage Against The Machine tour and still succeed economically. Now, the money remains on the streets, and if an artist understands that and uses IG, TikTok or X or whatever to grow a fanbase, they can build up enough people to sustain themselves as a musician through live. It’s going to be very difficult to do it just through units, as we did.” With the Black Samson project, it was fascinating to do a unique cover for every single album. Do you think there’s a future that’s more about making music a bespoke experience for the individual? “Definitely. I mean, Once Upon A Time… was the foundation of that idea. The devaluation of music was something that I was fighting against, but I didn’t have an answer. One of my students, Cilvaringz, from Amsterdam, was into thinking of the art commissioning idea, which came because we travelled Europe and Egypt together. I had one idea, which was, ‘What if the artist took the music and put it into a physical form?’ At the time, I was thinking of a piece of jewellery, like a bracelet that you wear on your wrist, and you could connect it to your phone or Bluetooth and it’s personalised. I still think that’s a strong idea. But once you mass produce it, it becomes assembly line – the value goes down if you make it twice. If it’s only one and you can’t have it, now you have a different type of value – it’s a psychological value, which is better, sometimes, than a physical value. I decided to go with the psychological value. Now, of course, people got mad at that etcetera, but I was like, ‘I don’t mind you being mad at me, but think about what you’re doing to the artist.’” On the subject of thinking big, Rosalía’s album Lux was widely – and rightly – celebrated for being recorded in multiple languages. Way back in 2003, you did something similar in scope with your World According To RZA project where you worked with rappers from many different countries. It seems you were way ahead of the industry on embracing global crossovers… “First of all, Rosalía’s album is dope and beautiful, and it’s such a breath of fresh air. I actually have this conversation with my wife, sometimes I say, ‘If I’m blessed as an artist to be a little bit ahead, then that’s my blessing.’ When I thought of the World According To RZA, that was an artistic action of something that I already had done physically when Wu-Tang first came to Europe in ’97/’98. I was writing cheques to fans backstage. I’d give a kid $5,000 and say, ‘Yo, hip-hop needs to be here, y’all make your own hip-hop, we want to hear your voices.’ And I’ve done that to maybe 10 locations. I did it because I was saying to myself, ‘If somebody would have given me $5,000 back when I needed it, it wouldn’t have took this long for me to be here.’ I thought that maybe I could spawn some energy in the world, and then eventually, by the time we get to World According To RZA, it’s like, ‘Okay, now let’s go back and check and see what is there.’” We saw a lot of headlines last year about hip-hop’s decline in the charts in the States. Is that a concern for you, or is that just normal before culture resets itself? “It’s definitely normal. Music is something that stimulates you and gets you excited, like a good bag of weed. But after you’re smoking so much, you don’t feel it no more. You need something else. You got to mix it with something. But I also believe that even if it’s not showing up in the Billboard Top 40, it’s showing up in every other form of culture. Who are the No.1 artists on Billboard right now? I bet you’ll find hip-hop infused into their music, right? And if it’s not in their music, it’s in their image, their video dancing. You may not find it as the No.1 music seller at this moment, but I bet you the person who is No.1 has hip-hop in their DNA. And if you now go to fashion, right, it’s being run by hip-hop, like with Pharrell. I do have a strong feeling that it will find its way back again when an artist from hip-hop, of the culture, finds a way to translate it in a way that we haven’t seen.” Last year, Mass Appeal did an incredible job with legacy-enhancing albums from Big L, De La Soul and Mobb Deep. If we turn for a moment to ODB, is there anything remaining to be done with his legacy? “Wu-Tang had a TV series, but to me, ODB deserves a movie. I think a movie about ODB will re-energise his legacy, his contribution to the culture. I don’t have the dominant control to make this happen or not happen – I’ve made some trek into it, but I don’t know if it’s going to happen. You don’t get Missy Elliott if you don’t got ODB. Busta Rhymes said ODB freed his mind – you don’t have to fucking be just two turntables and a DJ, you could be [makes wild ODB-impersonating sound] instead.” Finally, what’s been required of you as a leader to make sure the Wu didn’t fall apart when there’s been so many challenges and words exchanged over the years, even recently in some of the Wu autobiographies? “Well, there’s a Biblical prayer that says, ‘Give us this day our daily bread’ and ‘Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.’ I think that’s a beautiful four bars right there from the book. As long as one of us believes, there’s a chance for all of us. And I’ve never lost it. I don’t know who has, if you speak to other members you may hear another member say, ‘I never lost it.’ You may hear them say, ‘I did lose it.’ I’ve never lost it. I never lost what Wu means. I said to Raekwon once, ‘If it was like in the kung fu movies where Wu is like when they hunt down the Shaolin warriors and kill them all, they’re not going to let you go, bro – they’re going to say you’re one of us.’ This is what we accepted. This is that tattoo that’s on my body, the only tattoo on my body. I don’t even believe in tattoos. I will never let it go, as long as I’ve got oxygen in my lungs. Being blessed as The Abbott means that I can always go and rekindle that flame in someone else. There’s always a flame. You just go ahead and light another wick. For me, it continues to burn. The future now is us trying to touch as many places, see as many fans as we can, and share The Final Chamber with them.”

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