A Universal Influence

Saul Williams is driven. A New York native whose life's journey has taken him to school in Brazil, where he learned Portuguese by translating Public Enemy lyrics, Williams is an accomplished student of Moorhouse University, where he earned a degree in drama and philosophy, and New York University, where he obtained a graduate degree in acting. But those accomplishments are Williams' less-public achievements.
Williams is known primarily as a poet whose voice began echoing through New York City in the early- to mid-1990s. He quickly gained notoriety as a powerful writer and speaker whose stage presence was as captivating as his words. He was a subject of the 1996 Slam poetry documentary film, Slam Nation, and had his poetry excerpted on the cover of the New York Times Sunday Magazine. With his work on the stage as both an actor and a poet, it seemed only natural that Williams began acting in front of the camera. As the co-writer and star of the 1998 feature film, Slam, filmed in a Washington D.C. jail cell, Williams gained national acclaim as a writer and actor. Slam went on to win the grand jury prize at the 1998 Sundance Film Festival.
In 1999 and 2000, Williams turned his attention back to music, a pastime he gave up on during his late teens when he stopped writing rhymes as an MC and moved into poetry. Over the last couple of years, Williams has been hard at work on Amethyst Rock Star, his album debut. The music is very urban, live hip-hop music featuring Williams' words of love and wisdom, strife and struggle. These days, says Williams, he's mostly invested in his music, personally and artistically, and though he may be primarily known as Saul Williams the poet and actor, Saul Williams the songwriter and musician is now gaining recognition for his thoughtful and emotive music.
"I don't think I get a lot of noise-makers," says the humble Williams from a hotel room in Eugene, Oregon. His live music show, which landed in Chico last week as a part of the Sno-Core Icicles Tour, is different from his upcoming spoken performance, but it seems as though fans treat each show with the same pensive interest, rather than with whistles, hoots and hollers. "The difference is that with me, people are always trying to hear the words, and I don't really do any type of like, 'everybody say ho!' so I don't know if that's the sign we get, but definitely lots of interested people."

You started out as an MC, though you're most known as Saul Williams the poet. How did that happen?
I stopped rhyming really when I was 17 or 18, so my writing evolved into writing poetry over time, over a series of six or seven years. Between the end of high school and through college, as it evolved into writing poetry, I just wasn't thinking about writing rhymes anymore. I guess after the last big moment I felt in hip-hop, I started realizing that I had to search in the underground at the time for the stuff that I really liked, like Organized Konfusion, while mainstream hip-hop was just not as integral a part of my diet as underground hip-hop was. As this search intensified, I found that I was becoming a bigger and bigger critic of hip-hop, and so my first writings in the poetry realm were pretty much to fill the void between what I was hearing and what I wished I was hearing.

How do poetry and hip-hop allow you to express yourself in different way?
The difference primarily, I find, is that poetry allows a lot more vulnerability. I think that the difference between an MC and poet for the most part is that in hip-hop, they say shit like "act like you know." There's this front of being knowledgeable, or being confident, or being the aggressor. In poetry, you don't have to front in any way. There is no "poet persona" that you put on, there is no poet name but you have an MC name. So really, the whole "keep it real" concept of hip-hop is bullshit until it becomes poetry, until MCs are willing to show themselves as vulnerable - raise questions, to not be afraid to say, "I don't know." Two of my favorite moments in hip-hop were the song that made me write, which was T La Rock, "It's Yours" in 1981, where they say, "I don't know, it's true"; and then I remember hearing De La Soul say, "if money makes the world go 'round, listen I don't know." Hearing someone saying "I don't know" in the context of a hip-hop song is rare. By the time De La Soul said it, which was on the Stakes is High album [1996] - the time between them saying it and the 1981 T La Rock song - I realized that I hadn't heard many MCs say, "I don't know." That's what was missing for me, the idea of us raising questions, being introspective and allowing ourselves to say, "I don't have all the answers, I'm searching, and we show our journey through what we do." That is what primarily distinguishes the MC from the poet to me. However, there are definitely several MCs who go that route: from Dre of Outkast, Dove and Posdenous [De La Soul], Tip sometimes, definitely Common, Mos Def, Talib Kweli…so there are people who allow themselves to show vulnerability as artists. That's primarily what I'm yearning for within the music that I'm creating - to show a vulnerable hip-hop, a hip-hop that listens as well as dictates the sound waves.

As a graduate of the New York University graduate acting program, you also express yourself on stage and film, and seems that it's a skill that would transfer to poetry and music as well.
I think that one of the greatest lessons that I learned from that has been just knowing what it feels like to actually lose yourself to something. Like, when you play a character, you cannot play that character without first raising for yourself whatever questions the character raises. And if we're talking about really, really good acting, we're definitely talking about raising these questions for yourself, because you can't come to an understanding about another character without aiming to come to an understanding within yourself. So acting has served as a great balancing force in my life because it's allowed me to challenge myself on certain ideas and ideals throughout the process of growing; it's challenged me to grow. But then, with the level of performance that you aim to achieve through acting, it's that idea of just losing yourself on stage and becoming this other thing, and what it means to have a presence on stage - which is not something you fight for and move around crazily to get, but a presence knowing that you can just come on stage and stand still and demand mad attention. Those are the lessons that I've brought with me to the parts of performance that I deal with, as far as reciting poems in public or especially now with the band.

What's at the root of the sociopolitical bent on your music and poetry? Does that come from your parents and your upbringing?
I would say that it definitely started there. I was raised in a household where we were encouraged to analyze all the things that were handed to us, and to think in terms that were, one, our spirits and, two, our people and our community or what have you, and the uplifting of that community. But for me as an artist, it's not something that I try to do, like, 'Oh, let me remember to throw in something about Mumia Abu Jamal,' or something like that. It's a part of the everyday life factor, it's a part of what we believe in. There is no particular agenda other than the fact that, as I express myself, I think that the deepest aspects of self are community and being aware of the time in which we live. Granted, I think that I've gone through a lot of phases, from Black Nationalism on up and beyond to this day and age. I think that my perspectives of politics are perhaps a bit different from those who may romanticize ideas of revolution, as you may hear in a lot of poets, but I think that I've begun a slow journey of detangling myself from all the knots that I've been introduced to through my rising political consciousness, and have stepped a bit more clearly into a state of just wanting to understand and going towards a place of just learning how to defuse anger within myself and not operate in a reactionary mode.

Is that something that's come with age and family, or has it been a natural progression?
It's just a natural progression. This is something that I was working on before I had children. I always saw it as a natural progression.

But while your work is largely socio-politically charged, it also seems to contain a very universal element, as in influenced by the universe.
Exactly. I mean, just to go back to what we were talking about a second ago, for instance. A lot of us who grow to a point of being aware of what it means to be black, and grow to be Afro-centric and all these other things - we reach a point where we get introduced to these universal concepts of love and truth and understanding, and if we truly aim to embody those, then we have reach a point where we say, "Shit. Well, okay, am I going to reverse the prejudice that I have felt in my life from whites and others, put that on them and operate off a level of 'they'll never understand me,' or am I going to allow myself to raise my consciousness to a point beyond the norms of what it means to be black and nationalistic?" That's a scary thing for many people because all of a sudden, you've gone from being the person who's seen as highly politicized to something else. When you lose your anger as a black political figure, it could be seen as a dangerous thing, as a sell-out, socialized type of thing if you're not careful about expressing why you are defusing that anger.

Is that a symptom of the society we live in?
Oh yeah. We have socialized ideas of what it means to be conscious; we have a certain way that we expect these people to look and behave, certain things we expect them to say. I normally just tend to remember who Al-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz was, versus who Malcolm X was, and I try to remember the transitions like that in people's lives. A lot of people are walking around screaming about Malcolm X, but if Malcolm X was still alive, he'd be Al-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz and he'd be on some total other shit than the people who think they're practicing what they think Malcom X would be doing…you know what I'm saying? So it's important to honor those transitions in ourselves, and I speak of the universe and the universal aspects of truth and understanding because that's what we're aiming for. That is the goal. If at the end of the day I'm just a great black poet, then something has been missed.

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