This past Sunday night, I bumped into Nick, an old writer friend, at The Sultan’s Room, a live event venue in the heart of Bushwick. We were there to see the poet/vocalist and actor Saul Williams, one of the handful of 1990s Slam-era spoken-word artists to experience any semblance of mainstream breakout fame. Nick remarked that he had not seen Williams perform in twenty years, and until I caught Williams’ notable turn as Pastor Jedidiah Moore in this year’s blockbuster “Sinners,” it had been a minute since Williams crossed my radar and screen as well.
Time, or maybe timelessness, was the subtext of the evening. Williams’ public poetic output has been sparse over the years, but you’d be off the mark if you referred to his current creative flourish – his recently released graphic novel, “Martyr Loser King,” his spoken word album, “Saul Williams meets Carlos Niño & Friends at TreePeople,” and his current tour – as a “comeback.” Williams’ voice and politics have evolved, yet have nonetheless remained fiercely consistent since he was named the Nuyorican Poet Cafe’s Grand Slam Champion in 1996 at the tender age of 24. When you walked into the Sultan Room on Sunday with its multi-generational, multi-racial hipster audience and its ambient psychedelics, it wasn’t clear if it was 1968, 1998, or 2028.
As Williams advised early in his roughly 60-minute set, this wasn’t so much a “concert” as it was a “meeting” in which the proceedings and agenda were “improvised.” Indeed, rather than simply performing the tracks from his recent album, Williams held court. His more formally structured poems were punctuations to what at least felt like extemporaneous meditations, political sermons, and calls to action. His revolutionary subjects and “keywords,” as he called them, included climate exploitation, anti-capitalism, indigenous sovereignty, and anti-colonial resistance.
The most effective moment of the evening was Williams’ history lesson on the first multinational corporation, the Dutch East India Company, and its fifteenth-century colonization of the Lenape-occupied territory, which we now call Manhattan. Williams reminded the audience that Wall Street was named after the actual defensive wall that the Dutch used to keep out the Lenape, thus helping to advance genocide, racialized capitalism, and corporate extraction on these shores. Following this storytelling, Williams’ exhortation to hack colonial oppression invoked Assata Shakur’s famous quote, “And, if I know anything at all/It’s that a wall is just a wall/And nothing more at all/It can be broken down.”
Amen.
Listening to any single artist’s spoken-word cadence for an extended period of time can risk monotony. In particular, if binged, William’s rapid and incessant phrasing can threaten to overwhelm and become word salad, with meaning rushing by indistinguishably. But William’s adjustments of oratorical tempo and style kept the evening sonically nimble and intellectually stimulating. The accompaniment of the two percussionists (Carlos Niño and Austin Williamson) and the keyboardist (Surya Botofasina) provided a lush and textured soundscape that communicated energy without devolving into simple mood music or musical wallpaper.
William’s radical posture as a thrower of lyrical Molotov cocktails will certainly keep him on the pop culture sidelines. And movies like “SlamNation” and “Slam,” which made Williams an artist of the moment, have long dropped out of the zeitgeist. But his clarion call to dismantle fascism and to serve as a “death doula” for the end of empire, has pointed resonance and relevance during this MAGA-haunted fever dream we find ourselves in. Maybe we have it all wrong: Williams never left us in the first place. Perhaps we are the ones returning to him.