GZA Goes to Harvard

For those who believe that hip-hop is little more than mindless drivel that caters to boys without belts and girls with thick eyeliner, prepare to be amazed. Not only is this characterization far off the mark for many hip-hop artists, it’s particularly off the mark for GZA, one of the founding members of the Wu-Tang Clan, a group known for its intellectual lyrics.

GZA—a.k.a. Gary Grice, or simply “The Genius”—has long referenced more academic subjects, such as astronomy, philosophy and chess, among other things. In December, while in Cambridge to lecture at the Harvard Black Men’s Forum, Grice went on a three-day tour to meet scientists from Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, during which time he learned about oceanography, biology and quantum physics.

On his first day of learning, Grice visited with Philip Richardson, a physicist studying how albatrosses fly without flapping their wings. After this, he had dinner with a group of young biologists from Harvard, during which conversation varied from whether it was healthy to eat wheat grass and Chia Pet seeds (it is), to what RNA was, to information about water. Grice is working on a follow-up to his classic “Liquid Swords”, so water was of particular interest to him.

After dinner, Grice visited the Broad Institute, a joint Harvard and MIT biomedical research center, where he was shown a genome sequencer and taught how DNA makes proteins. He was also shown robots that the institute uses to screen chemicals that may become new drugs.

The following morning, Grice was up bright and early to meet with Penny Chisholm, an MIT marine biologist. As he looked at a small bottle that contained a billion bacteria, Grice said, “It’s just amazing to hear how things work.” After a discussion with Chisholm about the importance of the sun in which Chisholm declared, “I think people ought to bow to the sun every day, and then bow to a plant,” Grice admitted, “I’m always touching plants and vibing with them.”

Following this visit, Grice made it a point to visit Pulitzer-winning novelist Junot Díaz; David Kaiser, author of “How the Hippies Saved Physics“; and a group of MIT’s Media Lab that is working on an “Opera of the Future”, in addition to Harvard, dughgghis presentation at the Black Men’s Forum, where he discussed rapping and how he learned to flow from nursery rhymes, along with some of the information he had learned during his educational tour.

The moral of this story is that, if you consider yourself to be a nerd, and worry that you will never be taken seriously, stop worrying. The world is in dire need of young people who are studying for their physics, marine biology, or biology degree, and RZA has shown that it’s cool to be smart again. So keep up with your studies, and if you have some downtime, get to know the Wu-Tang Clan.