Real Change News | Speaking verse to power

September 1, 2010
Vol: 17 No: 35

Arts & Entertainment

Speaking verse to power

by: Helen Kiernan , Guest Writer

Poet and hiphop musician Saul Williams on politics, race, homelessness and the conclusion of the “Niggy Tardust” tour

Saul Williams, aka “Niggy Tardust,” believes infusing hiphop with more imagination may break down barriers of race, gender and class. Here, he performs in Chicago. Photo courtesy StreetWise

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At the Double Door, the crowd screams as Niggy Tardust, a starman adorned with blue feathers, a “frohawk,” and glittery paint streaming down his face like two rivers, climbs on top of the speakers.

“When I say Niggy, you say nothing,” he commands. “’Niggy.’”

“Nothing!” the audience responds.

“Shut up.”

Niggy Tardust is an alter ego of poet, actor, and hip-hop musician Saul Williams. After receiving his bachelor’s degree in acting and philosophy from Morehouse College in Atlanta, he moved to New York City and earned his master’s in acting at New York University. It was there that he began to perform poetry at the Nuyorican Cafe, winning the title of Grand Slam Champion in 1996. Williams performed in Chicago in 2008 at Lollapalooza and in New York at that year’s Afro-Punk Festival, a free celebration of the coming together of countercultures across racial, sexual and gender boundaries. The Afro-Punk Festival was also the sponsor of the recent Niggy Tardust tour.

“Niggy Tardust is a hybrid,” Williams says of the character on his NiggyTV podcast, available on iTunes. “He’s a nickname that I give to the up-and-coming revolving perspective of . . . people that realize that we are one, that everything that is this land and of this land is in us.

“In the same way, the music defies genre . . . I don’t believe that we as individuals should be beholden to stick within the boundaries of whatever society tells us we are . . . Niggy Tardust is the one who stands up and says, ‘You know what, f—- all that —I’m as white as I am black, I’m as indigenous as I am foreign, I am as alien as I am from here, I’m all of these things at once.’ So he takes words like ‘n——-’ and names like Ziggy Stardust and does the traditional B-boy stance in front of it . . . and [there’s] Niggy Tardust.”

Ziggy Stardust was a “Martian Messiah who twanged a guitar,” a “fictional rock superstar” created by musician David Bowie in the early ‘70s who was dropped onto Earth just as the planet entered its last five years of existence, according to Bowie’s Web site. A simple soul, Ziggy began to think like an earthling and became the victim of his own success, “a rock ’n’ roll suicide.”
Near the conclusion of Niggy’s 19-city North American tour last October, Williams said in an exclusive interview with StreetWise that “I feel like I internally had already concluded him, so this is like going back in time.” Williams says he’s now ready to plunge into some new projects, including a play, his fifth book, and his fourth album.

The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of Niggy Tardust, composed in collaboration with Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails, was distributed on a “name your own price” basis at SaulWilliams.com in October 2007. At the same time, Williams drew criticism when he lent the song “List of Demands (Reparations)” to a Nike commercial. It wasn’t Williams’ first taste of corporate sponsorship —his books are published by MTV.

He laughs, “That’s probably the best point I never made. People were like, ‘Why did you let that song go with Nike?’ I should’ve said, ‘Have you ever seen who my books are put out by?’ Those corporations owe us.”

In several written responses to criticism, Williams has stated that “if you want to stop something, you have to go inside it” –encouraging people, essentially, to participate in the establishment in order to effect positive change within it.

“That’s the biggest cloak poetry has put over me,” he says. “Whatever I might believe in, or people might think I believe in, ever since I was a five-year-old kid rapping, dancing, ready for the big stage, I was never afraid of conglomerates. That was just part of my scope, that commercial side of things. That was more of my intent than the other stuff. I always intended to do that. Like, I didn’t intend to become a poet . . . But it’s one thing to play ignorant — it’s hard to actually be it. I was always mad at it. Like, someone would say, ‘Hey, did you know that Twinkies are made of melted children?’ or something, and I’d be like, ‘F—-, why did you tell me that?’ I’m interested in learning, but I always wanted to perform.”

Niggy increased ‘the swagger’

In many ways, Williams says, the Niggy Tardust character has allowed him to do just that — to have a little fun, to simply perform. “Niggy was gracious enough to allow me to use him to learn a few things, express a few things . . . I guess you could say I needed him to increase the swagger.”

Williams sees himself as the medium through which Niggy Tardust has spoken. In his third book of poetry, “The Dead Emcee Scrolls: The Lost Teachings of Hip-Hop” (Simon & Schuster, 2006), he made a similar claim. The book’s premise was that the author had found a mystic scroll of yellow-brown paper rolled tightly inside a spray-paint can underneath the third rail of the New York subway system. He then channelled the ancient prophetic poetry on the scrolls through a meditative process to understand the power of hip-hop.

“I believe so much in the power of imagination. That’s the main thing missing from hip-hop a lot of the time,” Williams says. “I wanted to write about feeling like a vessel. The book is written as a confession . . . I wanted to reach out to, like, 12- to 15-year-old kids in [juvenile detention] who don’t feel like reading.

“It was also the first step in realizing that if I wanted to achieve certain goals I had to let go of things, and in this case that thing was me — my story, Saul Williams. I had to get away from the serious-thinking, philosophical side and explore the fun side of it . . . to express closer to who I am by excusing the projected self from the story and stepping into something else more ‘me’ — by creating a character, like Raymond Joshua for ‘Slam,’ which wasn’t that much of a stretch but goes a bit further out and deeper in.”

In the 1998 film “Slam,” for which Williams is credited as a co-writer, he stars as Ray, a young, gifted hip-hop MC who’s trapped in a gang-dominated housing project in Washington, D.C. After Ray takes part in a drug deal that ends in a friend’s death, he’s caught between rival gangs in prison, where he stages a unifying poetry slam. The film won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival, and its soundtrack features Williams’ first major recording, “The Ocean Within,” a collaboration with hip-hop legend KRS-One.

Although he sees the Niggy Tardust album as expressing a more fun, even silly, side of himself, it’s far from lacking in serious subject matter, as Williams explores the effect of racism on the psyche of an individual. He also expresses an uplifting message of self-respect and unity.

“[We are] the gatekeepers and the street-sweepers. A mountain of ports outside of a city of dreams. A bird that prays, yet offers its wingspan to the wind. Things are not as they seem. We hover above while giving the appearance of scurrying below. All is as it should be. We are more than we know. More than we hoped and dreamed, a generation of generators, a power source and supply.”

“Pedagogue of Young Gods,” from “The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of Niggy Tardust” (2007)

Niggy Tardust represents a unique blending of the rock and hip-hop genres, but that’s not surprising for an artist who’s performed with everyone from poet Allen Ginsberg to KRS-One to Zach de la Rocha of Rage Against the Machine. The song “Tr(n)igger” features a sample of Public Enemy’s “Welcome to the Terrordome,” and Williams covers U2’s “Sunday Bloody Sunday,” the video for which features him playing a homeless man struggling to survive in a shantytown that gets raided.

Homelessness ‘comes from a few different angles’

When StreetWise asked Williams for his thoughts on homelessness in America, he had this to say: “The homeless situation comes from a few different angles. Thinking of health care, when people were let out of institutions and what have you, with Reagan discharging folk onto the streets so you have a community of homeless discharged from various institutions . . . I mean, we have to find a better way to take care of our citizens … it goes so deep.”
He continued, “For example, you have use of drugs in place of an alternative treatment [that would allow] someone to build something on their own without the use of a crutch, so [there would be] less chance of falling . . . Homelessness is a strange phenomenon, especially in America, when you consider the potential of the infrastructure. Except when it’s a choice — there’s a fine line there, but it’s a big difference. We made a film, “Kings of LA,” that never got released, and there was this vet of the Gulf War that was homeless, but for him it was almost more like an aesthetic — he was someone who had given up his material existence because he didn’t believe in life in that way. He wanted to connect to something more grounded.”
Since moving to Paris, Williams says he’s noticed “whole communities of people living in boxes, a lot of people living on the streets.”
People who focus a lot of attention on racial/equality issues often tend to get jaded, cynical, and even prejudiced, but Williams seems to have avoided that. “In a lot of my work that’s what I’m fighting against. What you’re hearing is the fight scene, the crime scene . . . If I haven’t become jaded or more prejudiced, it’s also true that that has been a conscious part of the goal — to stay open.”
Williams went on to comment that he sees many aspects of the concept of race as being “silly.”

“I have sat on a lot of different angles, weird angles” regarding race, he says. “As a teen I lived in Brazil, so all of a sudden ‘black’ meant poor but ‘American’ meant rich, so they were confused about how to perceive me. Then there’s the way that I spoke: black kids would tell me, ‘You talk kinda white,’ but at the same time I was the darkest person in the room. All that crisscrossing going on basically opened me up.”

He addresses this “color complex” issue directly in his 2004 song “Black Stacey,” in which he talks about feeling self-conscious growing up because of his complexion, and calls on “baller players” to “share your essence with us,” and be honest about any insecurities,” and if you dare to share your heart we’ll nod our heads to its beat.”

Much of Williams’ work has also had a feminist bent. His book “S/he” (MTV, 1999) explores man’s relationship to woman in the context of the end of a relationship.

“A lot of that stuff is just logic to me,” he says. “It makes sense to me that, for instance, if a stick is bent this way and you want it to come back to center, you push it to the opposite side so it bounces back to center. I encourage myself to understand the idea of woman so I have an idea of man — to balance my perspective, check my self-importance — and I’ve continued to do that as time evolves. I have a daughter, Saturn, who’s 13 now. I’ve had relationship problems, which have challenged me to change myself, and also there’s the spiritual aspect. All of these things go back to women — learning from, or because of, women.”

‘Not in My Name’ reflects ‘responsibility’

In 2003 Williams and DJ Spooky released an EP, “Not in My Name,” that included the track “The Pledge of Resistance,” which states, “We believe that as people living in the United States it is our responsibility to resist the injustices done by our government in our names.”

StreetWise asked Williams, “Did you believe the war in Iraq would go on this long?”

He took a moment to respond, then said, gravely, “It’s so crazy to me how unrealistic war remains to me. As an American I talk about it, watch movies, read the news, but I can’t really imagine it, the fear that I personally would live with if I felt that unsafe all the time. No, I can’t believe that there is still war going on after all this time. I can understand it intellectually, but can I believe it? No.”

Regarding the George W. Bush era, he says, “The hardest thing is when he got re-elected. The further I get away from it, the more amazed I am. Living in the midst of it made more sense than now — part of me thought it was great he was being re-elected because we were rooting out our deepest, worst beliefs . . . we needed something to point to and go, ‘Oh, wow’ . . . His reign was symbolic for America, the height to which we raised the cowboy as a hero, when it was cowboys who raped and pillaged in the name of pioneering. To be able to see a ‘cowboy’ in office, what that meant . . . like, ‘Wow, that’s what I have to watch out for’ — blind arrogance.”

During the show at the Double Door, Williams asked the crowd, “How are you feeling, Chicago?” As the expected cheer went up, he chided, “No, no, I mean health wise, how are you feeling? Is everybody insured?”

“It’s not Obama’s health care thing, it’s our health care thing,” he told StreetWise backstage. “We have to stop looking at him to make change. We have to make change. Just like how everyone got up to vote [in 2008], we have to speak up to people who oppose [universal health care] for silly, asinine reasons, like that it’s a step closer to communism. We have to dialogue with people . . . When we talk about health care we don’t need to be talking about Obama, we need to be talking about how it would make a lot of sense for all of us. All it takes is us reassessing our resources and priorities. It doesn’t mean ending capitalism. The market will remain free, but in order to achieve real freedom we need to pool our resources into something other than defense.

“Since I was a teen and I learned that other countries had better [health care] plans, I questioned why we didn’t have that here. I know people who decide ‘I want to be a lawyer,’ for example, but think ‘I can’t go because I don’t know how I’ll pay for it,’ whereas in Switzerland, elementary school [up through] college is free. You can be whatever you want to be, supported by your country, and if you get sick you will be taken care of. That’s real patriotism. If you want people to fight and die for their country, give them that first.”

Onstage, DJ CX Kidtronik pogos behind his laser beats, guitarist Davin Givhan wails away in a prom suit, and Kwame Brandt-Pierce, dressed as Dracula (the Double Door show took place a few days before Halloween), pumps a fist in the air over his keyboards. The heat of the crowd is overwhelming as they bop up and down.

“Would y’all like to hear a new song? We’re still working on it.”

The band plays the in utero tune for about a minute, after which Williams proclaims, “Congratulations, you just helped us write a new song.”

At the end of the show, he jumps off the stage and disappears, becoming part of the crowd.

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