2/29/2024 0 Comments Rza kill bill![]() He had a print of a rare movie and was like 'You want to come check it out?' I said 'Sure, why not?' We just became friends like that and after about 8-9 months I wound up gettin' on the project with him." At first RZA's role in Kill Bill was a little blurry. The next time I was in LA he invited me up to check out some movies. "And then Quentin was like 'You know, the one where you…man, you don't even know your own movies!' Then Quentin and I just started talkin' about movies and next thing I was like 'Did you see…?' And he'd say 'No, but did you see…?' And it started being like a little baseball card flip-off and we wound up promising to get each other copies of the films we'd been talkin' about. So I was tellin' Donnie Yen 'Aw, man, when you did that movie and the Fist of Fury series in China …' so many movies and he didn't even know what the hell I was talkin' about," RZA laughs at the memory. He's the best out, but he doesn't know his own movies. "They wanted to get a picture of us together, so we got a picture together. ![]() "I was hired by Miramax to promote Iron Monkey and we were at a press junket," he says of how he first met Tarantino. And he made sure that he made the right connections to get himself into the celluloid spectrum. You know what I mean?" RZA is one of those forward thinking individuals who see past the turntables and into the revolving reels of film. Some don't see past the beat machine, they don't see ahead. "Also a lot of hip-hop artists and talent never look past the turntables. "Well I think what happens is that really there's no connection between the people, you know what I'm sayin'?" muses RZA. But for the most part the urban sound collagists who have made rap music such a vital art form have stayed away from Hollywood, often not of their own choice, however. Hank and Keith Shocklee, the nucleus of the infamous Bomb Squad, have dabbled in film scores. Yet, historically speaking, very few rap producers/DJs have made the leap into film composition. RZA's diverse aural mayhem is perfectly suited to the world of cinema. Maybe I'll get like more operatic with my ideas.'" The correlation made sense, of course. "But to me, it made me think 'Well then maybe it will fit movies. "The Bobby Digital album proved to me that…I like it, but people were like 'It's not RZA hip-hop,' you know what I'm sayin'" says RZA almost rhetorically. And while RZA laced up all of the Wu's material, as well as each member's various solo efforts, he also cultivated his own alter ego, that of Bobby Digital, a super-hero who worked somewhat outside of the Wu's influence, creating more edgy, experimental electronic haberdashery that has thus far filled up two albums- RZA As Bobby Digital: In Stereo and Digital Bullet. Luis Bacalov's “The Grand Duel (Parte Prima)” is fittingly melodramatic for this story, as is Zamfir’s campy panflute cover of James Last’s “The Lonely Shepherd,” which sounds like the theme song to The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.As the sonic brainchild behind the Wu, RZA took the collective's love of kung fu and samurai films to the next level, filling his beats with atonal noize and decidedly Eastern sounding elements, ranging from strange, exotic strings to the wailing dissonance you often heard swelling in the background of the climactic kung fu showdowns featured in Shaw Brothers films. Where Tarantino’s past soundtracks abounded with twangy surf guitar songs, here he leans harder on the Ennio Morricone–inspired spaghetti western instrumentals to capture a classic gunfighter vibe. Similarly, Charlie Feathers' rockabilly boot-stomper “That Certain Female” perfectly taps into the cocksure swagger of antagonist Bill (played by David Carradine). And there’s really no better way to set the tone than by opening with Nancy Sinatra’s torch song “Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down).” Sinatra’s haunting version of Sonny Bono's song might lead the listener to believe that Tarantino based the plight of his protagonist bride (played by Uma Thurman) on this song’s riveting narrative. But it’s his carefully curated soundtracks that tell a story within the story. The moral of the story in Quentin Tarantino’s film Kill Bill is simple: there’s nothing like revenge.
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