The real meaning behind RZA’s Gravediggaz group
Even as he tried to get the Wu-Tang Clan off the ground in the early ’90s, the RZA was also experimenting with sounds in another group entirely. Gravediggaz, while never reaching the same heights as Wu-Tang, were also pioneers in their own way.
Formed in 1991, two years before Wu-Tang found fame with 36 Chambers, Gravediggaz wasn’t actually RZA’s creation, which, given his dominant role within the Clan, is perhaps a surprise. But he wasn’t the driving force for the group. That was left to Prince Paul, a producer who’d already made a name for himself by this point for his work with De La Soul and Stetsasonic.
It was Paul who formed Gravediggaz, bringing the RZA, then still known as Prince Rakeem, together with the late rapper Poetic and Stetsasonic member Frukwan. Together, these four men helped to pioneer an entirely new sound that came to be known as horrorcore.
To hear Prince Paul discuss the early days of Gravediggaz, as he did in 2012 for a piece on HipHopSite.com, one gets the impression that the darkness at the core of the project wasn’t necessarily a conscious decision. From Paul’s perspective, it was just what felt natural at the time.
“I had so much music and a lot of the music I was making back then was really dark,” he recalled. “I think I was going through some type of weird depression or something so it kinda worked out that the name of the group was Gravediggaz and I had a whole bunch of music that was dark and it was just a track that fit the vibe at the time.”
Paul explained that Gravediggaz “was like a reinvention for everybody,” allowing each of its members to experiment with different approaches and personas. Hence they each adopted new nicknames. Prince Paul became the Undertaker, Frukwan the Gatekeeper, Poetic the Grym Reaper, and RZA, or Prince Rakeem as he was still known, the RZArector.
“Prince Rakeem didn’t wanna come out like Prince Rakeem,” Paul recalled, “and I’ll remind you when we were there putting the group together he didn’t even have the name the RZA then. He made up the name at my house, because we were all thinking of names, okay, I’m the Undertaker you know, the Gatekeeper, Grym Reaper. He said I’m the Resurrector but I spell it RZA-rector, you can just call me RZA for RZA-rector.”
The music that these men created as Gravediggaz was extremely violent, but almost cartoonishly so. It dealt with horribly bleak themes, and it did so in an often over-the-top, seemingly gratuitous way that frequently veered into outright comedy. But the group’s music wasn’t just violent and absurd for the sake of it. There was a point.
The violence and madness that played such a key role within Gravediggaz’s music and stories were, on the one hand, ridiculous. But they also spoke to the conditions that young, working-class Black men lived under in the United States. Poverty, police violence and mental health issues were all features of life for these men growing up, and this music addressed that. They weren’t offering a realistic critique of American inequality, but, in their dark, unique way, they caricatured it.