Visionary

When I think Saul Williams, I do not think music. Having only seen Slam in 2003, five years after its acclaimed debut, I don’t even think slamming or spoken word. For me, Saul Stacey Williams, conjures not sound, but light.

The light of a poet, spilling self and others on the page, which is where I was first introduced to the light of Soulstice Will-I-am. I basked in the light on the page, because it gave me back a belief that had been daily dying. Reading lines like: her essence/cupped in her being/she has made herself/available to you/she needn’t steal your heart/if you give it to her, in said the shotgun to the head had me feeling damn, there really are men who see and trying to see women as divine and black men, my men at that. And for the first time in a long while, I was again content to claim black woman believing there were black men, so my existence was no longer in question. Plus, here was a poet reminiscent of my beloved Baldwin - courageous enough to not simply chronicle the times, but to surgically dissect them peeling back surface to call us (and self) on our shit. The purpose not to preach and chastise, but rather recognizing that we, this world, my folk, were indeed in critical condition - offered up a vision of faithful evolution pleading potential salvation in spite of the gravity, our ills not yet terminal. So when I saw the poster riding on the Paris 4 line on my way to interview: Saul Williams, 27 avril, Elysee Montmartre – fan that I am, no question I’m there.

Checking the website for tickets, though, I was surprised to find it listed as a music concert not poetry … a concert classified as pop-rock? I paused. Thinking maybe the Frenchies had lost something in translation, I checked his personal website but there it was again – punk hop. I respect that artists grow and music for Saul who had always been undeniably hip-hop, I could believe, but punk? Despite the Jewel, Alanis, James Taylor, George Michael and Maroon 5 that dot my music collection, I am admittedly a bit of a hip hop/R&B snob. Caught pouting, nose in the air, it suddenly occurred to me that if nothing else, Saul Williams had always been alternative - an alternate way of hearing, doing and being hip-hop and of breathing life into words. A bit skeptical, I bought my ticket praying I wouldn’t be disappointed.

Late as usual, I was later still to the concert unable to resist taking in the scenery around the Anvers metro station. Green construction barriers, boarded up store fronts and sidewalks lined with hand flyers promoting shows from rock, rap, and jazz to sex of every variety, the 18th arrondissement is the other Paris, often ignored and mostly unmentioned in the visitor guides and textbooks about the famed City of Lights. Compared to the overflowing walks of the Champs Elyseee or avenues of my latest quartier of Montparnasse, the 18th presented a photo negative, a landscape where the pepper was dotted with salt. It’s the home to what we Anglos might call France’s minorities - North & West African immigrants and immigrant descendants. Content that concert was happening here rather than somewhere on the Champs or some equally posh Parisian venue place, I rushed in to catch the last couple of pieces of the opening act. Not quite feeling the flow, I waited anxiously for Saul’s arrival.

Now tell me where my niggas at?

A synthesized, staccato drum beat overlaid with the tenor of Saul’s voice spitting solitary words or simple phrases disjointed, you could almost feel the pulse of demonstration marchers voicing demands in African Student Movement which opened the set. And as the concert moved on, I found my head nodding and feet tapping even to the hard-core guitar and uptempo beats of this hybrid hip hop-punk sound. Though I’d been resistant to thought of Saul as rock, his sound was as resistant to the silencing of boxes and categories as the light of his words, which shone exceedingly bright in my first live S.W. experience. From Black Stacey, then on heavy rotation in Paris, chronicling his growing up with the complexion hierarchies that still plague us back home and his call to put the divinity back in tact with Our Father (Dear Goddess), to the guests he brought on stage, a Rastaman singing:

will I be a slave today /I will be
but when freedom come / you take it!

the cipher kept going. The sound - hip hop, punk-rock and you don’t stop – kept pounding, and the words, the words, do y’all hear the words, kept coming.

Glancing around the crowd, a fusion of backpacking punk rockers, dreaded hippies and an occasional brown face, I watched the French folks taking in Saul’s sound. Heads nodding and fists raised, I wondered what it evoked for them. For me, the concert was as much an occasion of critical commentary as a comforting reminder of a home that had recently begun to feel very far away. Saul’s commentary on Fifty-cents’ two-stepping like double-dutch and the “wrong” of his reference to “baby mama drama” in telling us of a conversation with his child’s mother the night before had me laughing out loud, warmed by the familiarity of home. While not laughing completely alone, the silence around me testified to cultural fractures reminding me - everything can’t be translated. Still, watching them sing along to songs I did not know and shouting requests for others I had not heard, I had no doubt they too were fed. Be it flavored fried catfish & collard greens or beef Bourguignon – manna we were given. And given, and given, as Saul returned to the stage for two encores, finally giving the benediction with the reverberating force of his signature – Ohm.

The same light was given later at that night at the Tryptique at the “After,” as the French call it, when Saul reminded us that good poetry, like an ill beat, could make you drop it like’s it hot. And beyond his call to “retire late” and “retaliate,” when one of the cats who opened for him began to carelessly choke the cipher with the same chokehold he maintained on the mic he refused to relinquish, raising a call to “pound the pussy”, Saul with the near royal grace of a true headliner modeled the action necessary for change, reprimanding and righting things by passing his own mic to the poetess that the other (males) on stage had ignored. His message in Our Father still rang clear: the god & goddess are one and until we reconcile the divine – we can’t hope to reach right. And...

I could go on, recall I am a fan – but it seems best to leave the words to the poet. Call it punk-hop or spoken word – the message never fails ‘cause the truth has not changed – just the medium, now further accessible so that more can ingest the nourishment of a vision so desperately needed, for as Baldwin reminded, without a vision the people will surely perish.

JJB: May 2005