Saul Williams on 'NiggyTardust'. ('Ladies and gentlemen, it is with the greatest pleasure that I present Niggy Tardust') which is cut from retail CD/vinyl release. Lyrics NiggyTardust: Grippo King, philosopher, and artist. Downright to the marrow, he’s the arrow through the heartless.
Currently, I can’t not listen to ‘ new album,. I hadn’t heard of Saul Wiliams before seeing him support Nine Inch Nails a few years ago, and I grabbed his excellent eponymous album the day after the gig. Trent Reznor’s production of Niggy Tardust is a logical progression, and you can sense his familiar NIN sonic traits—slowly building orchestrations of tense atmospheres, fuzzed-up and tightly wound guitars, and sinuous, rumbling synth lines—all the way through this album. The initial tracks I seem to skip a lot.
The swaggering digital hardcore of ‘Black History Month’, the wild shrieking onslaught of ‘Convict Colony’, and the Public Enemy-driven ‘Tr(n)igger’ get plenty adrenaline going, but they’ve not made much of a home in my mind’s ear. I’m no U2 fan, but it’s the fiery, pulsing, buzzing cover of ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’ where things really kick off for me. From there on in, there’s a few near-duds—mostly, for me, the sparser tracks like ‘Niggy Tardust’ and ‘Raw’. But between the smouldering ‘WTF!’, the brooding jazzy hip-hop of ‘Scared Money’, and the stupendous final five tracks, the album racks up enough infectious refrains, potent lyrics and atmospheric sonic thrills to make it an all-round triumph.
And it’s free. You can download it in 192Kbps MP3 format for nothing, or pay a mere $5 (100% of which goes to the artists involved) for the extra options of 320Kbps MP3 or FLAC lossless formats. All versions include a PDF with artwork and lyrics, and all files are 100% DRM free—no restrictions on where and how you play them. From the penultimate track, ‘Raised to be Lowered’, lyrics that have seen me through some harsh moments recently: To manifest your dreams before you manifest your fears To navigate beyond the treachery of self despair To find the balance between all you sense and all you see To find the patience and the strength it takes to let it be To stand amongst the crowd and have the strength to hold your own To throw away the pen and pad and simply be the poem To rise above hatred to love through seeming contradiction To seldom take a side and learn to compliment the friction. To bring about the change within that we can’t live without.
To shift and re-arrange ideals and learn to deal with doubt. To voice the victory and unlearn ways of self-defeat To learn the value of, “Yo, fuck the words just ride the beat” To leave the comfort zones of all you know to all you feel To step beyond the void and realize the unknown is real To re-imagine every obstacle as just means of honing craft And learn to laugh at failure’s funny dream No comments here for now, but if you want to you can chip in on.
For anyone who has yet to listen, The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of Niggy Tardust is an absolutely amazing collaboration between Saul and Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails. Saul has always been known for his post-conventional approach to Hip Hop, and nowhere does this come through more than on this album. It is truly a trans-genre masterpiece, perfectly blending Saul’s powerful vocals with the industrial “wall of sound” orchestration that has come to define Nine Inch Nails. But even more impressive than Saul’s impulse to transcend genre is his ability to use art to transform and transcend identity itself, breaking through the self-imposed limitations of the finite self, and opening to the clear, limitless consciousness at the heart of this and every moment. This move toward more freedom and more fullness is, of course, a gradual process, and one that requires a tremendous amount of practice.
For Saul, performance is that practice—whether it’s acting, poetry, or music, performance is a place where the phoenix can cycle through its own creation and destruction, losing itself and finding itself again and again through greater and greater degrees of identity and awareness. Art has always been Saul’s primary path of transcendence, and has led him through some of the most extraordinary experiences available to human consciousness—from “me” to man, from man to black man, from black man to human being, and from human being to just one of an infinite number of masks God wears to make existence a little more interesting.
In this talk, Saul describes his creative process while recording Niggy Tardust, and how he has been able to turn his life on and off the stage into a sort of “walking meditation,” so that he can harness all of the energy from performance, and focus it all into his creativity while working on the new album. He also discusses the connection between his poetry and his dancing, using his body to dictate the rhythms and cadence of his voice, whether he is rapping, singing, or reciting.
By consciously bringing Spirit, mind, and body into mutual synchrony, we can open ourselves to a vast field of creative potential—and by creating from this transcendent space, the very same consciousness can be directly transmitted through artistic performance, as artist, artwork, and audience melt together into an absolutely singular experience, effortlessly unhindered by the this and that of dualistic thinking. “Great art,” says Ken, “is both great content and great delivery.” This certainly applies to Saul’s performance, and to his ability to cultivate not only amazing things to say, but also amazing ways to say them—but this phrase also perfectly describes the methods by which Saul is releasing the album to the world. In a nearly unprecedented move, Saul and Trent made Niggy Tardust available to download for free, with an optional $5 donation to download a higher-quality version of the album.
A well-timed reaction to the dismal state of the music industry, this experimental means of distribution may in fact be heralding a whole new age of content delivery—whereas the “Dick Clark” model of the industry may have once been entirely necessary, it is obviously ill-suited for the 21st century, and is beginning to crumble under its own monolithic weight. As Ken has mentioned before, when a system becomes unable to meet the needs of the changing world around it, it experiences a “legitimacy crisis” and initiates its own form of an Inquisition. Thus, the modern-day Inquisitors (e.g. The R.I.A.A.) attempt to tighten their grasp, filing lawsuits against people sharing music online, often including children, and even the deceased. There is no telling what form the music industry will take in the future, once it has adapted to the problems and possibilities of the information age; nor can we prophesy how up-and-coming artists will be able to market themselves without the current industry, but it is probably safe to say that the future will more closely resemble Saul and Trent’s ideas more than it will the form it has taken for the past several decades.