Saul Williams opens a portal between politics and possibility
It's hard to imagine Saul Williams as anything other than the galaxy-hopping amethyst rock star who arrived on the planet fully formed at the tail end of the last millennium.Had to be a hellified glitch in the matrix.
There's no other way to explain how a modern-day mystic broke through, spitting the gift while channeling something sacred and deftly sociocritical.My first time seeing him perform live was in a small Atlanta cafe.Probably around 1999.
Slam, the indie flick he'd co-written and starred in, had just racked up both Sundance's Grand Jury Prize and the Caméra d'Or at Cannes the year before.When he took the stage that night, he immediately asked for all the lights to be shut off, his silhouette barely discernible in the pitch blackness.
The only thing left to illuminate his visage, while sha-clack-clackin' his way through the post-apocalypse, was the annoying flash from the camera of this student photographer kneeling down front.I must've shot through five rolls of film that night.But nothing captured the coming of Saul Williams better than his own prophetic flows.Now, nearly 30 years later, Williams is turning his focus toward the process of becoming — both his and, potentially, ours.
Following his recent onscreen role in the Oscar-winning blockbuster Sinners and his Grammy-nominated spoken word LP Saul Williams Meets Carlos Niño & Friends At Treepeople, the multidisciplinary poet, actor and musician is releasing an album, Leap Life, and book, Songs My Mother Taught Me: Why the Artist Must Take Sides, this fall.Both came as a result of Williams making "a conscious decision that it was time to shift gears," he tells me via Zoom.
After using social media to vocally advocate for Palestinian freedom in recent years, "I was tired of putting all of my thoughts into captions.I'm not an influencer.
My strong point is actually music, poetry, performance.That's my bag."The resulting book is the simplest, most straightforward prose of his career.
A demy...