RZA - Bobby Digital in Stereo (1998)

Just to get it out of the way, I vaguely recall the Analog Brothers - featuring Ice-T, Kool Keith and others - as having been some sort of response to the RZA's Bobby Digital, although there doesn't seem to be any obvious reference to anything Wu-Tang on the Analog's Pimp to Eat. In any case, if the Analog name truly flips the bird at the RZA as something lacking - off the top of my head - authenticity or warmth, it seems peculiarly misjudged. Bobby Digital is simply a pun on Robert Diggs yielding a whole set of associations upon which to hang images - the RZA's superhero identity for the duration of the record rather than any sort of technological manifesto set forth as a challenge; and besides, regardless of how it was recorded, the RZA's work seems defiantly organic in composition, making a virtue of all the dirt, the awkward pauses, the mistakes, and the crackle of the old Motown sound back when it was something noisy and dangerous.

The retrofuturism of Bobby Digital in Stereo makes for a strange record, even by Wu standards. It's minimal and understated with the feel of having been recorded on a Playstation in someone's attic, possibly due to the personal, autobiographical, and occasionally nostalgic ambience of the RZA excavating aspects of his own childhood. It's low on hooks, being mostly subdued grooves heard through a haze of either dope or memory, the sort of sound which imprints itself on you during childhood illness, tucked up in bed with a fever. So - if this is making any sense to anyone whatsoever - it's as though the whole record occurs as something not quite seen out of the corner of an eye, or I suppose an ear. Typically it was greeted with a certain quota of indifference when it appeared back in the nineties, which I suppose is inevitable for something so personal. Myself, I'd say it's one of the best things ever to come out of the Wu, right up there with Supreme Clientele, Liquid Swords and so on. I've been listening to it for the last twenty years, and it still does something different every time.