A.K.A. RZA: At 9:30, Rapper Trips Over His Crew of Alter Egos

Wu-Tang Clan headmaster Robert "RZA" Diggs is an outstanding businessman who was instrumental in transforming that sprawling New York rap collective into a cottage industry in the 1990s.

Tuesday at the 9:30 club, though, he missed a potentially lucrative opportunity by neglecting to sell programs at the merch booth.

After all, you can't always tell the players without a scorecard at one of his solo shows. Not with Diggs toggling among his various personas to confusing, story-muddling effect.

The film-scoring, chess-playing, movie-acting hip-hop hyphenate was introduced at the outset of the 70-minute performance as RZA (pronounced Rizza), which is his best-known alias -- the one he first began using as the chief architect of the sinister, cinematic sound that launched the Wu-Tang Clan empire.

But Diggs immediately ditched RZA for Bobby Digital, the hypersexualized, swashbuckling superhero thug who stars in an album trilogy that recently concluded with "Digi Snacks."

It was a concept concert, then, with Diggs telling the Bobby Digital story -- which itself involved a vast company of characters, from the Raven, the Vulture and the Eagle to the Hulk.

Think hip-hop graphic novel unfolding 16 bars at a time over a blaxploitation soundtrack performed live by a six-piece soul-funk band and a trio of cooing female singers, as well as a handful of guest vocalists, most notably -- and weirdly -- Thea van Seijen, whose eerie, Billie Holiday-like vocals made "Good Night" one of the show's standouts.

Dense and completely nonlinear, though, the Bobby Digital story was difficult to follow, particularly since the music often swallowed the lyrics whole.

Diggs confused matters even more by introducing various "a.k.a."-style interlopers, including yet another of his alter egos, RZArecta, during the 1995 Gravediggaz single, "1-800-SUICIDE," a horror-core song with no apparent link to the Bobby Digital yarn.

There was also, of course, RZA himself, appearing mostly on vintage Wu-Tang Clan songs, which seemed perfunctory. (They also sounded toothless, thanks to a keyboardist who turned RZA's trademark minor chords into something bordering on Muzak.)

Then, at one point, late in the concert, RZA rapped just like the late Wu-Tang member Ol' Dirty Bastard during a brief medley that included "Shimmy Shimmy Ya."

It was ADD-style storytelling, suggesting that perhaps Diggs erred in enlisting the vodka producer Belvedere as a tour sponsor, when Adderall might have made more sense. Indeed, Diggs didn't bring the pain so much as he brought the befuddlement.

Aside from his turn channeling ODB, he didn't sound appreciably different as the various characters, his stentorian delivery remaining more or less the same, for better or for worse.

For as a rapper, RZA has always been an excellent producer. Or was, anyway, before the release of last year's Wu-Tang album, "8 Diagrams," the production work on which was criticized by some of the group's own members for being too far afield, with too much piano, guitar and orchestral flourishes. "He's like a hip-hop hippie right now," Raekwon famously declared.

Measured against the dazzling, deeply analytical likes of Rae, GZA and, especially, Ghostface Killah, Diggs just doesn't compare as a lyricist, no matter what name he's using.