GZA/Genius Raps & Rhyme With Neil Degrasse Tyson

First, RZA writes and directs a blockbuster Kung-Fu film, now GZA is getting into the astrophysics game. Watch below as Gary Grice discusses with the world's coolest nerd, Neil deGrasse Tyson, how certain scientific terms are more accessible in hip-hop than others.

It's a full episode, so you might have to skip around a bit.

GZA/Genius Teaching Science Today

Wu-Tang’s GZA Using Rap to Teach Science in NYC Schools

Columbia University Professor Christopher Emdin has adopted the age-old idea of meeting students where they are.

Just as “Sesame Street” and “Barney” use sing-alongs to help kids learn, the professor is applying the same logic to high schools, helping teens to remember science terms with the help of music which connects with their age and cultural demographic.
Along with Emdin, Wu-Tang member GZA and the founders of the hip-hop lyrics website Rap Genius will announce a program that utilizes hip-hop to teach science in 10 New York City public schools.
“Everything has already been tried,” said Emdin, an assistant professor of science at Columbia’s Teachers College. “We’ve already done a pilot, and it was successful.”
According to Emdin, during the project’s trial period, attendance, interest and graduation rates all rose after hip-hop was introduced into the classroom.

Science has been one of the harder subjects to teach to black and Latino students, who make up 70% of the city’s rolls, according to New York’s Independent Budget Office. The 2009 National Assessment of Education Progress said only 4% of African-American seniors were proficient in sciences, compared with 27% of whites.

All of the schools participating are predominately African-American and/or Latino, Emdin said.
While Emdin and GZA will attend a few schools on a regular basis to check progress, science teachers will learn how to incorporate hip-hop into the lesson plan.
The process is simple, Emdin said. After learning the material, students will have to create rap songs relaying the material back to the teacher. This can be done individually or in groups known as cyphers, where people stand in a circle and take turns rapping.

“A hip-hop cypher is the perfect pedagogical moment, where someone’s at the helm of a conversation, and then one person stops and another picks up,” Emdin said in an interview with The New York Times. “There’s equal turns at talking. When somebody has a great line, the whole audience makes a ‘whoo,’ which is positive reinforcement.

However, this isn’t a place for nursery school rhymes. According to Emdin, GZA says “the rhymes can’t be corny or wack.” Students will have to show that they not only know the curriculum, but also that they can create intelligible rap lyrics out of the material.
Along with other grades for the class, students will be graded on the content, lyrics, storytelling ability, flow and the complexity of their metaphors.

“The teachers will be trained on the cultural hip-hop,” Emdin said. “They’re open to anything that will help the students improve and learn the material.”
However, the project is about more than trying to teach the students science. It’s also about relating to the urban youth’s interests and keeping them engaged.

“It’s already a win-win because we know it works,” Emdin said.
As he explained, it’s not so much about grades increasing but keeping the students in school using a tool “that most of them have used all their lives.”
According to The Times, GZA will look over the students’ raps. The best ones will be posted on the Rap Genius website for the hip-hop community to see.
Rap Genius received a $15 million investment last month by Silicon Valley venture capitalists who want to see the site’s Wiki format applied to other musical genres and historic texts, including “poetry, literature, the Bible, political speeches, legal texts, science papers,” a post on Rap Genius states.
The project, which will target grades 9-12, will cover sciences ranging from biology to physics.
According to Emdin, all the boroughs of New York City will be represented with the exception of Staten Island, which is ironic because most of Wu-Tang’s members, including GZA, are from the borough.
GZA, who was born Gary Grice, also goes by the nickname “Genius” because of his deep lyrics and heavy reliance on metaphors. His band mates have referred to him as “a fountain of wisdom,” and he was invited to speak at Harvard University’s Black Men’s Forum last year.  He also spoke at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology earlier this year.
The official announcement for the program will be next month, and the program will start during the spring semester in January 2013.
More on Professor Christopher Emdin’s efforts to teach science through hip hop below. (Or watch the video here for better sound quality.)

GZA/Genius Finds His Muse in the Stars

n an early May afternoon in the offices of Neil deGrasse Tyson, the director of the Hayden Planetarium, a model of Saturn caught the eye of a 45-year-old high-school dropout, and a lyric was born.

"I thought, this is probably the longest spinning record in the world," said GZA, the hip-hop artist and founding member of the Wu-Tang Clan, referring to the ring system surrounding the planet. About a week later, the words crystallized and he offered them over a vegetarian lunch on the Upper West Side.

"God put the needle on the disc of Saturn / The record he played revealed blueprints and patterns," he rapped in his signature rhythmic baritone, offering a taste from his forthcoming album, "Dark Matter," an exploration of the cosmos filtered through the mind of a rapper known among his peers as "the Genius."

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Daniella Zalcman for The Wall Street Journal
GZA, with Neil deGrasse Tyson, the director of the Hayden Planetarium, in Mr. Tyson's office at the Museum of Natural History.

Informed by meetings with top physicists and cosmologists at MIT and Cornell University, "Dark Matter" is intended to be the first in a series of albums that GZA—born Gary Grice in Brooklyn in 1966—will put out in the next few years, several of which are designed to get a wide audience hooked on science.

"Dark Matter" is scheduled for a fall release. Another album will focus on the life aquatic, a subject he's fleshing out with visits to the labs of marine biologists and researchers, as well as meetings with the likes of Philippe Cousteau.

"After 'Dark Matter,' he said, "we'll be back on earth, but in the ocean."

In between will come "Liquid Swords 1.5," for which GZA will re-record the lyrics to his beloved 1995 album "Liquid Swords," backed by live bands.

Composer and producer Marco Vitali, a Juilliard-trained violinist, is helping to score "Dark Matter." He recalled a recent meeting in which GZA explained the images that the music should convey.

"We talked about frenetic energy, outer space, molecules crashing into each other, organized chaos," Mr. Vitali said. "The grandeur of the fact that the universe was born in a millionth of a second, in this explosion that created billions of stars, these overpowering ideas that are bigger than we can conceive. How do we make the record feel like that?"

In other words, how does one score the majesty of the entire universe?

"We don't have the answers yet," conceded Mr. Vitali. One thing he does know is that the score will utilize "the power of an entire orchestra," likely one from a smaller European country, to keep costs down.

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Scott Gries/ImageDirect/Getty Images
The rapper performs with the Wu-Tang Clan in 2001.

For GZA, a major challenge is convincing skeptics for whom hip-hop and an academic subject like physics seem incompatible.

"It's gonna sound so boring to most people," the rapper said. "There have been times when I've been told, 'Oh, you're doing an album about physics? I hope it's not boring.' They don't get the idea. Because rappers are so one-dimensional, so narrow-minded, it comes off corny."

Still, he believes that "Dark Matter" will tap into the innate curiosity of listeners—even those with no outward interest in science.

"I don't think people have ever really been in touch with science," he said. "They're drawn to it, but they don't know why they're drawn to it. For example, you may be blown away by the structure of something, like a soccer ball or a geodesic dome, with its hexagonal shapes. Or how you can take a strand of hair and can get someone's whole drug history. They're different forms of science, but it's still science."

He plans to package "Dark Matter" with a short illustrated book that may also include the album's lyrics and a glossary, "like an epic textbook," he said.

Penny Chisholm, a professor of environmental science at MIT, said she'd welcome the chance to use a GZA album as a teaching tool. She met with him last December when he came to visit her lab, where she researches the ocean phytoplankton Prochlorococcus, the most abundant photosynthetic cell on the planet.

"He'd been doing his homework on the oceans," Ms. Chisholm said. "I was struck by his appreciation of the complexity of ecology and physics, and his views on life. I think he's now on a new mission, and he could play an important role in getting various messages out through his art form—about the earth, and science. That's why I've become a fan."

It's that kind of academic inspiration that a young Gary Grice could have used growing up in Brooklyn in the 1970s. He was always smart: Before he was the GZA, he could recite nursery rhymes backward and forward.

"He was the Genius, and we called him genius because we knew that he was a genius," said Raekwon, another founding member of the Wu-Tang Clan, the legendary Staten Island hip-hop crew formed in the early '90s.

But as he came of age, the city's blossoming hip-hop scene exerted its own gravitational pull, drawing him away from the classroom. He cut class most days, staying home to write lyrics or hang out with friends and make demos.

"I thought I knew more than what they were teaching in school," he said. "When you look back on it now, it's foolish to be cutting because we had so much more opportunity than now. When I look back at high school, or even junior high, we had all the things that kids don't have now: woodshop, ceramics, metal class, electric class, graphic arts, graphic design."

Instead he poured his efforts into music. A first album, "Words From the Genius," failed to make a splash in 1991. Two years later, he and eight friends—including two cousins, who would become the RZA and Ol' Dirty Bastard—released "Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers)," a critical entry in the hip-hop canon. His solo follow-up, "Liquid Swords," went gold, winning acclaim for its sophisticated lyrics.

Despite have left school in the 10th grade, GZA nurtured his affection for science as he developed his skills as a lyricist.

"There were certain things that grabbed my interest, such as photosynthesis, such as us living off plants and plants living off us," he said. "You look at everything in that light—so if I'm looking at ice cubes, I might start thinking about absolute zero, or Fahrenheit and Celsius. There's so much that can make me think about science."

In 1995, when he released "Liquid Swords," GZA solidified his stature as the Wu-Tang Clan's most recognizable lyricist with lines like "I be the body dropper, the heartbeat stopper / child educator plus head amputator." Nearly two decades later, "Dark Matter," with its rejection of the braggadocio and violence often found in hip-hop and its embrace of poetry and natural imagery, could finally enable this father of two to seize that mantle of "child educator."

"There's no parental advisory, no profanity, no nudity," he said. "The only thing that's going to be stripped bare is the planets."