Out Of The Rap Trap - Saul Williams - Brief Article

On his daring new record, poet and rapper Saul Williams instills new urgency and vitality into hip-hop, a musical genre that for many has become formulaic. Call him a no-holds bard

Star of 1998's Sundance-acclaimed film drama Slam, Saul Williams is more than just your average flipper of performance-poetry script. He's a self-styled visionary, prophet of a new age of hip-hop radicalism, street-tough humanism, and multimedia marketing. Attracted to theater and rhyme-dropping from an early age, Williams took his MFA in Drama from New York University to the slam-poetry circus of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe and emerged a clear winner. MTV Pocket Books published William's [SHE.sup.HE] last year, and this spring Rick Rubin's American Recordings releases his The Tao Is Now, a rock- and club-influenced album that he hopes will infuse hip-hop with a thoughtful new vitality.

ED MORALES: When I compare your book with your CD, I see a dichotomy there between the literary canon and the oral tradition thing.

SAUL WILLIAMS: Well, there is definitely a balance that I strive for. My background has as much street credibility as it does academic. I grew up in Newburgh, New York. My mother is a schoolteacher, my father is a minister, and so I guess we could be middle class. But as a kid, you want to fit in. I started studying Shakespeare intensely when I was eight, but at the same time I decided that I wanted to be an MC, so I started writing rhymes. It was always as important to me to be that kid who could rock the party as well as rock the English professor's mind.

EM: How much influence does your father's religious background have on you?

SW: My father's influence was just realizing the importance of having a calling. I am not a Christian, because Christianity wouldn't allow you to be Christ. It would only allow you to be Christlike. So to me, that is the flaw. With Buddhism, at least you can be Buddha, you know? I am not Buddhist either, but I spent four years carrying the Tao in my back pocket and it was very influential for those four years.

EM: What's the subject of your poetry?

SW: Literally, it's about making things matter. Making those invisible, intangible ideas and dreams things that you can touch, that you can feel. Making them real. I am just playing my part in determining the future. I reconfigure my history so I come out as a victor as opposed to a victim. When you choose to look at your history in a way that empowers you instead of in a way that just makes you feel like, well, shit, that is the power of language.

EM: Your book [SHE.sup.HE] seems to be partially about the shift between matriarchy and patriarchy--of course, maybe it could be a synthesis.

SW: Matriarchy leaves room for that because matriarchy is a receptive thing. I see matriarchy and patriarchy like there is this mountain and there's a cloud in front of it and the cloud in front of this mountain is patriarchal ideas and standards. When that cloud dissipates, you see the mountain and that's the matriarchal stuff that's been there from day one. [SHE.sup.HE] is a very personal book that had to do with my finding myself and my feelings within a relationship where we were both growing at different paces and in different ways. I looked at this word "she" and saw that there was a "he" within that. I realized the blame that I was placing. And thus I put "he" as a square root above the "she" in the title. Because I was really the root of what I was feeling, but I was placing blame outside of that.

EM: I have always been ambivalent about slam poetry. How do you feel about it?

SW: All these kids, myself included, are tired of being spoon-fed all the fucking ... the entertainment industry in America has just been aligned with escapism. [Slam poetry is] kids saying, "Stop telling me what you think I should like! I can think for myself." I did it for ambitious reasons because I wanted to get published. I'm not into the competitive aspects, but I am all for getting people to become poets or poetry critics. Having competitive poetry readings gets people judging, booing, and yea-ing poems like they do at a football game. Before you know it, you have a generation of kids who are critiquing poems. Awesome.

EM: On this new album, you're doing hip-hop with rock elements?

SW: To me, it's about an evolution of hip-hop. There are a lot of people fusing rock with hip-hop now--Limp Bizkit, Korn, that stuff. But usually the hip-hop aspect of it suffers. It's just been a natural progression for me to start including more rock elements. My band consists of a viola, cello, drums, a DJ with sampling equipment, electric guitar, bass. And with all that we can go anywhere from some hard-hitting drum and bass, electronica, trip-hoppy stuff to a chamber orchestra feel.

EM: What's going on with your acting?

SW: I just finished working on two films. In King of LA, I play this homeless schizophrenic man who swears that he's in a movie because the world is illusion. I also worked on Origin of Cotton, which Jean-Michel Basquiat starred in when he was nineteen, along with Deborah Harry and Fab Five Freddy. The sound was lost, so the entire film had to be overdubbed. I was asked to be the voice of Basquiat.