Last year Robert Diggs, a 31-year-old Staten Island, N.Y., native, made what he called a pilgrimage to China. After being forced from Tiananmen Square for displaying a self-promoting billboard, Diggs took to the hills. To be specific, he ascended Wu-Tang Mountain, where according to legend (his), he was received by kung fu masters at several monasteries. As Diggs exited a Shaolin temple, he says, a crowd of several hundred children awaited him. He proceeded to communicate the only way he knew--by rapping. "They didn't speak English, but I blew their minds and they all came asking for autographs and pictures," says Diggs, who, under the pseudonym RZA, is the leader of rap's Wu-Tang Clan. "That's how it goes in China. They may not sell our records in Beijing, but kids in the remote areas have our discs bootlegged before they're released in the States."
That's how it goes with Wu-Tang Clan--part music sensation, part myth. And this is its paradox. It is a branded marketing juggernaut, instantly recognizable in remote corners of the globe but not quite able to convert its wide appeal to the mainstream. With its latest album, The W (see review), RZA hopes to harness the band's market power to better management in order to restage the Wu brand and set the Clan on a new growth phase.
RZA (pronounced rizzuh) is the driving force behind the group's eight-year rise from Staten Island's housing projects to a mini-entertainment conglomerate. He and his brother Mitchell Diggs, a.k.a. Divine, form a New York street answer to Richard Branson. RZA is the potty-mouthed artistic visionary who speaks in streams of consciousness about his plans for global corporate domination. Divine, who keeps to the business side, is the soft-spoken older brother who is constantly trying to bring order and professionalism to the company.
The Wu brand was born in 1992, when the group became an underground sensation by developing an urban-gangster-as-warrior persona based on old kung fu movies (RZA's passion). Wu-Tang has since evolved into a hybrid of Pokemon and Dungeons and Dragons, prepackaged for suburban teens and complete with video games, comics and, coming soon, animated films. It's all embodied in Wu-Tang's stamp of approval, a Batman-like chubby W.
Early in the game, RZA convinced his fellow rappers that if they put their solo careers on hold, they'd share in a giant pot of gold via the vagaries of corporate synergy. He was right. The Wu-Tang brand blossomed under an unprecedented 1993 contract the band signed with Loud Records (Sony owns a 49% stake) that allowed each member to branch into solo projects on other labels. Every few years the group pulls together for an album, thus raising each member's visibility and bolstering the branding strength of Wu-Tang, Inc. It then launches a new crop of Wu-branded products. The cycle repeats. It resembles a concept called the virtual corporation, in which a company maintains just a small core and outsources everything else. During a three-year hiatus after their 1997 record-setting double album Wu-Tang Forever, the group's Wu-Wear clothing line hit $15 million in annual sales, a new Wu comic-book line briefly nudged out X-Men for the top spot in the country, and its first kung fu video game sold 600,000 units for Sony PlayStation. Six Clan members recorded successful solo albums.