Wu Wednesday
Today marks the season 3 premiere of Hulu’s Wu-Tang: An American Saga. This is a special day because that television show made the existence of Beautiful Idiots LLC possible. I’d like to talk about this at length one day and explain in detail how grateful I am and will all always be for this opportunity but I am very busy these days. Here’s the short version.
In early 2019 I got a chance to sit down with RZA and explain to him my vision for The New Hippies, the band I started with Zane in college. I had just quit my job and we had big plans to make a lot of music, but I needed money. Having said that I had just finished a degree in Screenwriting at Chapman and that I had an interest in filmmaking, RZA offered Understanding and myself a chance to learn his process and help out with the music on a new show he was making. That show was Wu-Tang: An American Saga. Over the next four years Understanding and I spent lots of late nights in his home studios recording, interpreting, and arranging the ideas RZA wrote for the score, and also were able to witness a television show get made. We even got a chance to be in it! (Season 2 Episode 6 if you’re curious. Un has a couple lines.) Then when we started the third and final season RZA gave us a chance to write original songs and try to get them placed in the show. We had a lot of success with this, placing eight songs in the show over three episodes. The licenses and publishing advance we got from those songs became the seed for this company.
We compiled a bunch of the songs we wrote for the show (whether they made it in or not) and we’ll be releasing an album by The New Hippies in April, and there are even a couple songs by Roe’s Garden in the show too, which will be coming out this month and next. So I just wanted to say thank you to the RZA for giving us a chance, and I hope you guys watch and enjoy the show on Hulu. The first three episodes premiere today. Wu-Tang is forever, and Wu-Tang gave us a chance to build something that lasts forever too. So in the words of RZA… “It ain’t safe no more! Peace!”
-J.P.