How Robert De Niro inspired RZA’s Bobby Digital alter ego
In 1998, RZA, the mastermind behind the Wu-Tang Clan, revealed a new side of himself to the world. Bobby Digital in Stereo was his first ever solo album, but, as the title suggests, he released it under a new name. This wasn’t quite the RZA. This was Bobby Digital.
RZA is known to the world by many names. Born Robert Fitzgerald Diggs, he has acquired a whole range of different nicknames through the years, be it Prince Rakeem, the Scientist, the Abbott or the RZArector, as he was known in the group Gravediggaz. The RZA is just one of many alter egos.
RZA has also developed several Bobby characters, the most well-known of which is probably Bobby Digital. But there is also Bobby Dynamite and Bobby Boulders, which he has adopted at various points.
In 2014, RZA spoke with Vibe about the creation of Bobby Digital for that Bobby Digital in Stereo album in ’98. This was a period in hip-hop, he explained, in which sampling was dominant, but he wanted to experiment with other techniques.
“Hip-hop was so sample-heavy at the time,” he said, “and I wanted to make my music have more of an orchestra sound. I started making music off synths without a lot of samples and breakbeats.”
So that accounts for the sound of the album, which, indeed, was notable for its keyboard-driven quality. But as for the character of Bobby Digital, RZA was inspired by something else. “But more than anything,” he said, “Bobby Digital came to me after one of those long nights of inspiration. Smoking on your leaves and your brain starts seeing the future.”
RZA got high, and, in that state, Bobby Digital seemed to coalesce inside his head. But there was more to the character than a stoned fever dream, as he went on to explain. He wanted to achieve what one of Hollywood’s great actors had achieved before him.
“I think people knew it was just a character because I strove to make it clear,” RZA said of Bobby Digital. “Just like Robert De Niro plays all these different characters, Bobby Digital was just a character. That’s how I felt about it. I guess at the time, my acting bug was generating inside of me.”
RZA’s involvement in the world of filmmaking did, indeed, increase after the Bobby Digital album came out in ’98. Since then he has acted in multiple films and TV shows, scored many of them, too, and he’s also become a full-fledged director in his own right.