Saul Williams: hip-hop’s poet laureate

As a hip-hop artist, poet, actor, writer and singer, Saul Williams is a living reminder that the cultural parameters that ultimately define the hip-hop genre are as deep as they are wide. The man born Saul Stacey Williams is a pure child of hip-hop – a hip-hop poet laureate if you will – and has managed to craft an acclaimed, inimitable style that reminds us of hip-hop as truth to power.

Looking at his words – spoken or on the page – it would be disingenuous to define the influential New York-born artist’s free-wheeling, socially aware and often politically charged body of work as alternative.

Since hitting the world with an aggressive rock- and rap-styled album that was 2001’s Amethyst Rock Star, Williams’s succeeding efforts (tracks such as “Black Stacey” and “List of Demands”) reveal that hip-hop is a constant in his universe.

An intense poetic style

From his start in the New York café slam poetry scene, his collaborations with hip-hop artists such as the Roots, Nas, and KRS-ONE, and his collaborative project with Trent Renzor (2007’s The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of NiggyTardust!), Williams has been wholly defined by his intense, unyielding poetic style.

“I would never say that I was the (voice),“ Williams says over Skype from his current home in Paris. “I was but one of many voices of rebellion. I think that the voice is just a reflection of the thoughts, and my thought processes are anti-authoritarian, anti-establishment and what have you.

“When I started making music, yes I was trying to fit in as many words as possible. That’s really changed over the years. For the past couple of years, my experiments have been with using less words – my last album [2011’s Volcanic Sunlight] was a personal experiment to see if I could let the music carry an idea more that the words themselves.”

Indeed, connecting the dots between hip-hop and poetry has been an effortless endeavour for the artist. His latest effort is Chorus: A Literary Mixtape, his fifth book of poetry. The anthology work (“100 living poets voices fused into one”) features powerfully crafted poems that strive to capture a post-millennium activism, to speak to a heightened socio-economic awareness that “transcend the identity politics” of the day.

Music dictates words

“Yes, there is a true difference between writing for poetry’s sake and writing for music,” Williams says. “For me, when I write music, primarily I usually write the music first and then the music dictates where the words should or shouldn’t go. For me it was about stuff that could work on the stage as well as the page. It was always a clear test first to see if it worked on the page – if it worked on the page then, trust it [would] work on the stage.”

Hip-hop “is what it is,” he says of the genre’s current mainstream direction, adding that Mos Def said it best on “Fear Not of Man," his classic track: "So the next time you ask yourself where Hip-Hop is going, ask yourself/Where am I goin? How am I doin?"

 Wide-ranging listening

“It’s still much a part of me,” Williams says. “There is a lot of hip-hop today that I enjoy.” On any given day, he might listen to anything from old school hip-hop to newer artists such as Lil B or Azealia Banks, he adds.

 “I’m never been one to think that hip-hop only has one way to sound. Again it’s always been about the balance and approach. I’m equally interested in an integral experience of life – I can enjoy a Sade, a (John) Coltrane or a Portishead as much as I can enjoy something that’s in your face and slapping you with meaning and relevance.

“It’s really about the balance. Success for me is in achieving that balance.”

That said, the power of hip-hop to expose truths and speak on the current issues of the day should never go overlooked, he says.