Written by Noah Goodbaum | Photography by Philip Litevsky

I wasn’t really looking forward to The RZA’s show at the Phoenix last night. It was gonna be freezing cold out there and I didn’t want to have to traipse all the way down to the Phoenix Concert Theatre and deal with its martinet security guards and its wack-ass sound system if my only reward was gonna be the Wu-Tang mastermind dicking around. Not to suggest that I don’t love and venerate The RZA; he’s crafted some of the most delicate and artful beats in hip-hop. But his emceeing style is bizarre — he’s 100% gung-ho about being completely demented, taking the themes that Wu-Tang’s hyper-esoteric rap style introduced and mixing them all in a blender that whirs at 100 mph.

Recently I’ve come to dearly, dearly love his steez, partly because practically no one else would have the courage to be so unselfconsciously wacko. Even when his experiments don’t work, he puts his heart and soul into all of ‘em. But traditionally they hasn’t resulted in a great number of especially good solo songs, and I knew next to nothing about the Bobby Digital persona he was gonna be trotting out. So my expectations were low.

Oh man, was I ever off the mark. The show knocked me flat– I barely knew any of the songs he performed, but he was dynamite on stage, drunk as fuck, blitzed out of his mind and absolutely electrifying. I had always pictured RZA as amiable and intelligent, but I never figured he could be this much of a showman. But he had us eating out of his hands– hundreds of us throwing our Ws up, hands crisscrossed in the air, shrieking with delight, as he leaped around the stage like a jackrabbit, sloshing the front row with champagne, getting a capella chants going with choruses for “Clan In Da Front” and “M.E.T.H.O.D. Man”, and howling through an impromptu mass sing-along to one of my favourite songs of his, the child-poverty story “Grits” from Birth of A Prince.

We got “Bring Da Ruckus”, we got “Wu Tang Clan Ain’t Nuthin’ Ta Fuck Wit’”. The “Reunited” beat came on, and he blacked out; the “South Bronx” beat came on, and he paid moving tribute to KRS-ONE, away rocking another crowd in Montréal; the “1-800-Suicide” beat came on, and we all roared with joyous surprise and burst into macabre lyrics about he took an axe to his head and he chopped it. It was incredible.

And we got off-the-cuff statesmanship too: “I know ain’t too many of your Canadian artists make it big yet, but just keep supportin’ ‘em! Y’all been down with hip-hop from way back! Soon you’ll show the world that Canada don’t fuck around!” Then, “The Black, the brown, the red, the yellow, the white. Five fingers make one fist. Five races make one family.” And, of course, the obligatory but always hearfelt phat phat shoutout to world peace.

It was a genuinely captivating experience; the hour or so felt like ten minutes, and every moment seemed to yield something new and awesome to go insane about. He turned dapper into low-down-dirty and back again, at once impeccably unruffled and freakishly unhinged. He mixed the consummate panache of a born entertainer with the loony-bin craziness that makes him such a treasure to our culture, and it was really something to behold.Peep all the shots

here.