LONG FORMHacking Parallel Worlds
Interview by Mike Nicholls | Photography by Pamela Torno
Copy editing by Louis RawlinsSaul Williams has been doing ground-breaking work since starring in the 1998 film Slam and releasing his 2001 debut album, Amethyst Rock Star. After gaining global fame for his poetry and writings at the turn of the century, Williams has performed in over 30 countries and read in over 300 universities, with invitations that have spanned from the White House, the Sydney Opera House, Lincoln Center, The Louvre, The Getty Center to Queen Elizabeth Hall. The Newburgh, New York native gained a BA from Morehouse and an MFA from Tisch. In 2021 Williams co-directed along with Anisia Uzeyman, Neptune Frost, a sci-fi Afrofurturist romantic musical film with his album Encrypted & Vulnerable, serving as the score. Released in 2022, New York Times listed it as one of the best films of that year and Neptune Frost was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award for Best Cinematography.
In 2019 at Red Bay Coffee roastery in East Oakland CA I sat down with Saul as we discussed his hip-hop journey, starring in his breakout film and what it means to juxtapose universes to create art. Enjoy this candid conversation with one of my top 50 emcees Saul Willams.
Pam Torno: Hi, I’m just taking candid photos of you, per Mike’s direction.
Mike Nicholls: Yep. [chuckles, adjust microphone]
Saul Williams: Yep. All good. [all laugh]
[camera beeps, shutter clicks repeatedly in the background]Mike: Thank you for taking the time to sit with me. I've been a fan of your work for years.
Saul: Thank you.
I saw the movie Slam back when I lived in Philly. Also around that time, there was a Ninja Tunes compilation that featured one of your songs. I'm paraphrasing the line but it was like, “You don't know hip-hop until you listen to...
Not until you listen to Rakim on a rocky mountain top / Have you heard hip-hop
I think that has a connection to Oakland because, if I'm not mistaken, the Amtrak train leaves from here... Leaves from Oakland doesn't it? Yeah. When so I wrote that, I was livin’ in New York at the time and I was on spring break in grad school and my friends we're all gonna meet in this cabin somewhere outside of Seattle. And so I flew to meet my boy here in Oakland. We got on the Amtrak and while we were on the train:
Riding on the freight train / Listenin to freezin rain / Listenin to Coltrane / My reality went insane
And I think... That's on the train from Oakland to Seattle.
Uh-huh. [laughter]
And I know we were in Oregon at the time, because there's a moment on the train in Oregon where I was looking down at the ocean and nodding to Rakim, on the rocky mountain top viewing it: That was that. Yeah. Hip-hop in nature is a whole ‘nother thing. Hip-hop in nature opened my eyes. Booyah. My first real experience of that though was in '94, in the Gambia. Actually I was staying in the Gambia but I was taking a train from Dakar, Senegal to Bamako, Mali. Which was about 36 hours on the old train which I don't even know if it exists anymore.
And, I was listening to Illmatic.
Oh my gosh, man… [chuckles]
And yeah.. going through the Senegambian region listening to Illmatic. It was my first time on the continent. So I'm looking at people in villages, and men holding hands talking to each other, and all this type of stuff that was like... pff! [hand gestures upward] And I remember just thinking, “Whoa… how did we get from this to that?”
[camera beeps and shutter clicks]And it was just a weird juxtaposition.
So when you're in that space, are you in parallel universes at that time?
How can you not be? [stretches] How can you not be? You know, like the New York State of Mind was my world. I knew that world. And here I was visiting a new world.
[doppler sound of train whistle becoming louder than voices, loudest, then quiet again]And then, of course, the most interesting part was that we know that we are descendants of this world that I was visiting – at the time, between Senegal and Mali and with no real knowledge of direct origins – but knowing that we're from this continent and possibly from this space, right? I know that in Senegal when I didn't open my mouth everybody just assumed I was Senegalese.
Mm.
And… yeah! It was a parallel world. And so then I started paralleling worlds. Because that’s ‘94.
Cut to '97 when we're shooting Slam, we’re in DC jail which is all black bodies in prison. And I'm in a prison uniform too although I have my visitors pass tucked in my underwear.
But once again unless I pull that visitor’s pass from my underwear there's no distinguishing factor between me and the bodies in prison. And, I had on headphones listening to two things: Pink Floyd’s, Ummagumma and Echoes, and Radiohead’s, OK Computer.
[camera beeps and shutter clicks]So that's what I'm saying, the most important scene of Slam for me was when you were in the prison. You have to decide which which gang you're gonna join, and then you just go into this poem. And it fucks everybody up like, “What is he...”
Yeah, exactly. “I don’t even know what happened. What the fuck was that?” That's what the verse says, yeah.
And you know that's a real moment. Maybe you've heard.
No…
Oh. Well, you know we shot Slam in DC jail, in a real prison. The warden at the time allowed us to work with 16 prisoners.
And those 16 prisoners composed the... What do they call themselves, the Dodge City gang or whatever? And so those are the guys who are looking like they're about to jump me, right? Bonz Malone is Hopha in the film, is an actor, right?
The only other actors are Beau Sia and Sonja Sohn. The rest are all real prisoners.
And so, in that scene, we had to beg the warden to release prisoners into the courtyard. We couldn’t do a convincing courtyard scene with only sixteen people. And so she was like, “Look I’m gonna release Ward C for one hour and I'm not gonna tell them you're shooting a movie, because if I do they're gonna act up.”
Now, we know that this is the most pivotal scene in the movie. We also know that – Ward C is 150 prisoners who – to them, I’m the new guy. And so the directions the director Mark Levin gave me was, “I need you to establish the tension first. So for the first 40 minutes, I just need you walking around the courtyard and then I'm gonna give those guys a cue to come as if they're gonna attack you, and then you can go into the poem, okay?”
So for those first 40 minutes, I’m just walkin around. And cats are seeing those other guys who are acting, throwing looks at me. And so they’re like, “What the fuck is up with this dude?” And then, maybe 10-15 minutes into it, they start noticing that the camera is following me.
Which to them, means I’m a snitch.
Ooo…
It means that I agreed to allow a film crew, which is probably the news or some shit, to follow me.
[camera beeps, shutter clicks repeatedly]And so, as I’m passing crews who are sitting there, they’re like, “Don’t come over here motherfucker! Snitch-ass nigga…” Those are the types of shit I hear folks saying as I’m passing by. And I can't be like, “Oh look, we’re just shooting a movie.”
[laughter]
I have to stay in character, we only have this one time. I can't be like, “Yo yo, I'll explain it after,” so I'm just like giving looks back or whatever. I say all that to say that with those 20 minutes left, when he gives the cue to those sixteen prisoners like, “Now, go towards him.”
Way more than them started coming towards me. Way more than them. Mad cats were like, “Yo, let’s get this nigga.” And so when I go into the poem and everything stops, that moment is as real for me as it is on the screen. That’s it.
So it feels like when you exist in parallel universes, these things happen.
And these worlds collide. [laughter]
[camera beeps, shutter clicks]The only thing that you could do to protect yourself and kind of hold your space is your words, is your artistry. Does your artistry become like a force field in a sense?
I think it’s always been where I grew up in Newburgh, New York, another really beautiful and rough city. And on one hand the thing that protected me was that I could rap, but that also got me in trouble because there were some cats who didn't like to be beat in battles.
And I wasn’t into losing battles.
And so there were some kids who got really mad and planned to jump me or whatever, because I beat their boy in a battle. So it would always be one cat – the other thing that saved me was that my dad was a pastor there, and preached everybody’s funeral and wedding – so someone would always jump up and go like, “Yo yo, nah man! That’s Reverend William’s son. Leave him alone man, leave him alone."
But literally it’d be like last minute.
Oh my god, yeah.
Do you want that convergence of parallel universes to make your art? Like is there a way that you feel like that these experiences define your art? And so, do you look for those?
[the sound of a loud muffler rises and fades]It’s not that I’m seeking out…
I mean, on one hand, I’m always looking for the magical door, the vortex, that place in between. It’s no different than funk. Like if you’re a dope MC you're looking for the perfect place to drop your voice. On the track. You know what I’m sayin’? Where it's like that Double Dutch shit, where you're like, “I found my entry point.”
And you hear that flow, and you're like, “Yo, you hear how he’s hitting that? The beat is right behind him, the beat is right ahead... He's right behind...” That’s what MF DOOM does. You know what I'm sayin’? That’s what Q-Tip does. A great MC, or a great musician in the Black tradition of music finds that pocket, is what we call it. And that pocket is that space in between.
It’s not necessarily a parallel universe, but it's between. It's between the expectations. The space.
[camera beeps, shutter clicks]How do you visually illustrate what we’re talking about? How do you take this conversation then put it in something that is tangible and not really “digestible” but like, people could say, “Oh, something is happening there.”
I feel like with your music, you’re constantly doing that... Particularly with the hack.
Mm.
And just that word and particularly how it's phrased and with the trailer for the movie, Neptune Frost. The way he said “Hack!” and then said the rest of it in...
…in Kinyarwanda.
I feel like there's a way that you've hacked through your art. Do you look for an opening? Do you look for the pocket?
Well, one, when I think of poetry, poetry is a very... And you know, hacking exists way before the technology that we use to reference it with. It's even actually referencing more of the movement of a machete or something chopping down shit. That's hacking. It's a shortcut. It's an easier path. It clears the pathway, right? That's what it is.
And poetry is the economy of language. On one hand, we're looking for the economy of language. We're also looking for that circuit to connect to emotion, and…
Yes, I’m looking to illuminate ideas and feelings that correspond with something within and beyond myself and trusting that if I can connect to that, you also will connect to that. You know? That idea of if I have a well in my backyard and you have a well in your backyard, we may go to separate wells to get our water, but the deeper we go, that source is communal.
Right? And so, I guess the short answer to your question is yes. I mean, yes: Yes.
It’s not even that I'm looking for it. I think one's relationship to language or emotion may ready them for that. It's just like a visual artist may look at a groove in the wood and see something and somebody else may look at that same thing, and be like, "I didn't... Wow, how'd you see that?" You know what I'm saying? But the eye is trained at this point, and the eye is forever linked to the imagination and the ear is forever linked to the imagination, you know what I’m saying?
Where do you draw from as an artist? Is it more inward? Is there a source that you feel like, “You know what? I know I’m drawing from this galaxy, or this waterfall?” Is there a particular source?
Well one, I believe that inward is outward, you know? That inner space is a microcosm of that of that outer world. So it's one in the same.
The pool that we all pull from is communal. So the thing that I pull from I believe anybody could pull from. It's not where it's pulled from only, it's the filter that it goes through.
Say, word!
And we all are, thumb prints and all, unique filters. I feel I pull from a communal pool that's readily available that we can all wirelessly connect to.
On the other hand I've had weird things where I was at some spot, and some hippie-ish white girl came up to me and was like, “Oh my God. Are you blah, blah, blah, blah?” and was like "You know what? Last night, my friend and I listened to Amethyst Rock Star on DMT and that's how you wrote it, right? We understood that's how you wrote it, right?"
And at the time, my response was… “No.” Because it’s true, it’s not how I wrote it.
Cut two years later, I decide to try DMT and I’m all like, “Oh fuck.” I got the person there to administer it and I’m like, “Oh. This is where I write poetry from.” I was like, “That’s it? Oh, I’m here every day. This is where I write poetry from. I know this place.” And so… [laughter]
[camera beeps]So yeah, I don’t know. That’s in response to the question "Where do you pull from?" I have no idea, in that sense.
Have you always seen your artistry beyond poetry? Have you always had a vision for it to be, whether it’s a film, whether it's a graphic novel?
I did not grow up dreaming or thinking of poetry. Poetry was always there, but I hardly gave a fuck about it. I only used the word “poetry” to defend hip-hop as a kid. I was a rapper.
My first love is theater. I came home like, “I wanna be an actor when I grow up.” I discovered Shakespeare and was like, “I wanna act."“ And so I did every school play every year from third grade on through and then I got a Bachelors in acting, than a Masters in acting. I was focused on acting and then rapping was a hobby, because you couldn't study it in school, whereas you could study acting in school.
But I was rapping, and I started writing my first musical when I was sixteen.
[oscillating humming sounds with crystalline noise in the background]And then, when I was a senior in college, my friends and I started a magazine and I decided to do these poems and essays in this magazine that my friends and I started called Red Play in Atlanta. It doesn't exist as a magazine anymore.
Then, when I took that trip to The Gambia, Senegal and Mali in ‘94 – it was my graduation gift from college – it was the first time I kept a journal.
I found that when I was writing and it wasn't a school assignment, that the stuff I was writing would probably be called poetry but it was just my journal entries.
I was like, “Oh,” and then when I came back from that first trip to the continent I moved from Atlanta back to New York City and got invited to a poetry reading, and heard the people on stage and looked at my journal and was like, “Holy shit!
[laughter]
This is just like the type of shit I have in my journal.”
And so I’m already twenty-two or whatever at that time, and that's the moment that I start writing, thinking, “I’m gonna write this stuff and the next time I find one of these poetry reading things I'm going to read something from my journal."
And then of course I'm in grad school for acting at that time and so the distinction between me and the other poets at the poetry reading is that they're like nervously approaching the stage and I'm literally leaving play rehearsal and I've spent the entirety of my life on stage, so the stage is like, "I'm cool with the stage. I understand what presence is, all this stuff.”
And so the performance, the performative element was the distinguishing factor because I was so comfortable with the idea of performance, whereas most of the poets were coming from a much more like, "I was depressed, broken... " whatever it was, it was a different thing.
A different relationship to language, my relationship to language had been influenced by theater and of course by church, my dad was a preacher, and by hip-hop. And so then I was just mixing all these things, right?
It almost feels like poetry is the combination of theater and hip-hop, in terms of the use of language and then the use of performance.
Definitely in my relationship to it, not all poetry feels that way necessarily but my relationship to it definitely had that. Especially my earliest poems from the mid ‘90s, for sure.
In terms of hip-hop, how was your poetry influenced?
That's a huge thing for me because that moment where I started keeping a journal, where I started going to poetry readings was like a year or two after The Chronic came out, which is about when is about when they started saying stuff that we had never heard before, like "underground" hip-hop, “backpack” or “conscious” hip-hop.
We used to not make those distinctions; it was just all hip-hop. Public Enemy wasn't conscious hip-hop, that shit was hardcore, we called that hardcore.
Do you think that The Chronic helped start people to define it? “Wait a second, oh this is... Oh that's this...”
I feel like the shit that was coming out of some certain proximity to Hollywood was giving the industry tools to learn how to exploit it. Because it’s not really the birth of gangsta rap, we had Kool G Rap, we had tons of gangsta niggas that were rapping before.
It’s just that, after that, there was a very clear lane for the industry. There was a very clear lane in terms of what they wanted to put on MTV and on the radio. There was a clear lane then.
It’s funny because I feel like your journey is a hip-hop journey.
It is a hip-hop journey. It’s a pure hip-hop journey, bro.
So yeah, I was even saying that I started rapping when I was eight. The thing that made me rap was the first single that ever came up on Def Jam which was “It's Yours" by T La Rock. I heard that, and I was like, “Yo I want to rap.” I started rapping then.
And I quit when I was sixteen, because I figured I was too old. I was watching LL and these cats were like the youngest rapper, I was like “I'm the youngest rapper!” But I was sending demos to Rick Rubin and Russel Simmons and not getting a response. I was just like, whatever, I quit at sixteen.
The way that I quit was I started writing a musical, a hip-hop musical, I called it a hip-hopera, then. And I kind of gave that up and then went to college, and in college I wasn't rapping, I was focused on acting and learning philosophy and history and all this other shit and I wasn't rapping anymore when I went to college.
What is the culture of hacking for you? In particular in regards to your film that started as a graphic novel.
Well, you know, it’s funny, right? Because if you look at, in the popular sense, there was a moment, an opening, where it’s like hackers had the opportunity to kinda be heroes – the hackers were the whistleblowers for a minute.
The Matrix.
Yeah, you know? Because the deep web and the virtual world was the wild wild west and these kids were able to think and move faster than the old people that were in charge of it. Right?
And I guess enough people…
[camera beeps, shutter clicks]…got arrested or signed-up to work with the military and all this other shit, so that now there’s this… You see what social media and this shit has done in terms of even to this cyber-psychology.
Now, I know some of those old hackers. The ones that come from that real world of, “Fuck these motherfuckers. Fuck them.” You know, I’m talking about the power, The Authority. And some of them still do deals and now do cybersecurity to make that money… Some of the biggest and craziest hackers in the history of hacking work for like Microsoft…
Hmm. I listened to the talk you did at Google years ago, you talked about the way your videos are like distortion and static.
Yeah, yeah. There’s the glitch side of it, but also that fact of like, "I’m not tryin’ to steal your shit, ya know?" It’s just like the graffiti artists, "I’m not tryin’ to destroy your property, muthafucka, I just have somethin’ to say! Muthafuckas, I’m gonna spray paint "‘GENTRIFICATION’ on this muthafucka because it’s real. And I would like the people passing down this street to see it: Everyday." You know? [laugh]
Mm-hm. Exactly. That’s so real.
Right. So, then it’s like, if it’s not about that, it’s not about privacy – which is a big thing now – right? Because privacy is so connected to the idea of property and ownership.
[knocks on the table, taps on chair to reinforce statement]And those are the things, actually, that like, that from you know, I don’t know. From a certain standpoint. We’re still questioning this idea of ownership because muthafuckas have claimed to own a buncha shit that hasn’t belonged to them.
And they’ve monetized it, controlled it, killed people, imprisoned people. All for the sake of owning this shit.
Whereas, we have huge questions for ownership and for the muthafuckers… like muthafuckin owners of the Big Business and Big Lands and Big Corporations and like mines and prisons and all this shit. And so, how do we deal with that? How do we hack into the real mainframe of the discussion that needs to happen and the shit that needs to be hacked into pieces – meaning destroyed, broken up!
…so that, real people can enjoy lives with what’s available to all of us.
Saul. Thank you, it’s been a journey bro.
To learn more visit: saulwilliams.com