RZA Recalls JAY-Z Revealing ‘The Blueprint’ Was Inspired By Him
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RZA revealed JAY-Z once told him he was the blueprint for The Blueprint. During an interview with Rolling Stone, the Wu-Tang Clan leader spoke about his legacy and whether or not he would live out his career differently. RZA bluntly stated that everything he did was “necessary” and then shared a compliment Hov gave him as proof.
“Not too many things. I think that what I did was necessary. I think that it was ordained. One day, JAY-Z told me, ‘Yo, I got [the idea for] The Blueprint from you,'” he recalled. “At that time, I was headed to Hollywood already. Now, here’s a path; here’s a way it can work. And it continued to work in different regions of the country and with different crews.”
As he continued, “The Abbot” talked about his Hip-Hop peers showing that the genre isn’t a young man’s sport. He pointed to his bandmate Method Man, who exemplifies that “strength and vitality is [still] there.”
“People thought Hip-Hop was just youth culture. We had no examples like rock & roll, where you have the Rolling Stones playing into their seventies, or the Eagles or Earth, Wind, and Fire. The brothers you just named, Nas, JAY-Z, Wu-Tang, Busta, Joey Cracks, Outkast, pioneered this global success. Not taking nothing from Run-D.M.C. or Rakim and all of them, who also [pioneered hip-hop in the Eighties], but it was the Nineties when the constant multi-platinums just kept coming,” he insisted.
“Now, here we are, living different lifestyles than our parents. At 50 years old, my grandfather was already looking at a wheelchair. You look at Method Man, he got more muscles than ever. He’s on some Hercules sh*t at 50. Our strength and our vitality is there.”
Recently Meth sat down to talk about the mentioned vitality in an interview with Men’s Health. During the conversation, Johnny Blaze spoke about his fitness and health journey and how it got kickstarted.
“It went from this childhood joy to this euphoric feeling of celebrity, to feeling inadequate and not good enough,” he recalled. “That’s where the depression and stuff came in. I didn’t even know I had been depressed since I was a youngster before I started doing music and moved to Staten Island. A lot of PTSD I had never dealt with before started resurfacing, but I didn’t know what it was then.”
“My insomnia was pretty bad. I’m talking a year and a half, maybe, not having great sleeping habits. Trying to find stuff to do in the middle of the night is crazy, especially when you have all this stuff within your reach. PlayStations, books, and all that stuff, and none of that is satisfying anymore. You just find yourself up with all this energy. I didn’t know what to do with myself. So after the eighth game of Call of Duty, I said, ‘Let me see if the gym is open. I need to find something. I need to break this cycle, break this pattern.'”
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