Maranda: Well, my inbox is full of questions from readers and we’ve got tons of mutual friends on the west coast telling me, “He’s one of the most evolved human beings on the planet.”
Saul: Well they all just sound completely deluded. {laughter} I don’t know, but I hear the weed is really strong in California…
Maranda: {laughter}
Saul: Must be something like that because I have no idea what these people are talking about.
Maranda: So tell me, what is it that really makes you want to wake up in the morning? Why do you want to get out of bed?
Saul: What makes you think I want to get out of bed?
Maranda: {laughter}
Saul: {laughter} …I can’t say that I always want to get out of bed, you know.
I live here in Paris with my fifteen-year-old daughter, and this year was the year that she allowed her alarm clock to wake herself for school, so that I don’t have to wake her up for school anymore…and I’m really happy about that. {laughter}
So. When I finally decide that I’m ready to get out of bed, it could be the sunlight, it could be the fact that I’m awake, and, OK, first of all, I wake up in the morning because I have to go to the bathroom. {laughter} So what is that, “your bladder?” Yes so, it would be my bladder.
Maranda: {laughter} This is profound, profound stuff.
Saul: Well actually it is…
Maranda: {laughter}
Saul: {laughter} You know… at least it’s beneath the skin. So on top of that, let’s see. That depends on the day. Honestly, I don’t always want to get up in the mornings, but I do anyway. It could be the realization, the…oh no that sounds too bull-shitty already…
Maranda: {laughter}
Saul: {laughter} I’m trying to dodge all words like “realization.”
Let’s see, what makes me want to get up in the morning? Really you know, I live in an apartment that’s mostly windows, like 360, so when I wake up in the morning, the first things that I see are the clouds. They’re right there. I look out my window now and there’s always, always a black bird of some sort on the ledge there. Usually I wake up and look at the birds. Look at one of the birds that’s perched there. Like yesterday for instance, I woke up trying to figure out what kind of bird it was because it wasn’t a crow, it wasn’t a pigeon. So by the time I actually get up I think it’s the sunlight that… I’m eager to open the window.
It’s usually the thought of the feeling of fresh air. Literally, I’m being completely literal, after the bathroom I get back in bed, I try to fall back asleep {laughter} and if I can, it is the thought of the fresh air that I will feel when I open the window. Now that, coupled with, whatever I choose to listen to musically—the stereo is right here by the window in my bedroom. The music with the fresh air, that’s awesome, that’s awesome. So it starts with that. {laughter}
Maranda: I should not be so literal. {laughter}
Saul: Because you know, one of the most amazing things that I’ve been doing, you know—why would I say, “that’s amazing?” I think everybody on this planet does that—trying to capture your dream after you wake up. So I’m usually trying to get back into the dream or analyzing the dream. And yeah, the days, most days begin like that. Or, you know, yesterday the day began because my daughter screamed, “They just cut the electricity!”
Maranda: {laughter}
Saul: Well, yesterday, if you asked me that yesterday, I would say, the desire to figure out why they cut my electricity.
Maranda: So what is it that makes you vulnerable?
Saul: Well…I might have to reverse that just to say that I feel pretty vulnerable all the time. So I’m usually questioning what is the thing that makes me feel, you know?
Because, for instance, I’m a very sensitive person at times. Not just to words that anybody says, but in relationships for example, the people that you open up to, you listen to, you hear—you know? So a lot of times, the key to some of my vulnerability is just through things, simple things—or critiques or whatever—or could be very simple things that are said.
But above and beyond that, I’m somewhat of an empath, I would say. I relate easily to ideas and stories, books, films, music. I’m moved by all of these things. Art in general. But not just art, you know?
Yesterday, for example, as I was walking from one electricity center to the other, there was this woman, an old woman on a cane and she stopped me in the street. First I was like, “Is she trying to rob me?” and then “Wait, she’s too old, why would she be trying to rob me?” And so then, the first question: “Why would I think that?” Then, she asked me if I had passed a travel agency where I was coming from, because she was tired of walking. She sat down on the bench and asked me if I could look for her. And I started imagining what it felt like to be that age. She had a bad leg or foot, and I could see how tired she was, so I walked three blocks down, looking for a travel agency for her—didn’t find it, came back up, she’s sitting on the bench, I asked if there was anything else I could do for her. She says, “No, thank you,” and I move on, but from that moment forward, I was suddenly aware that the next thing I saw was a man who worked something like Fed Ex. He was in the back of a truck getting a package, and about to go into a building and it was like, “Oh god! You know? Fuck, people! People work! {laughter} People work for a living!” ‘cause I was sitting here writing poems! You know, it’s a little upsetting at times to think, “Oh really…am I being somehow rewarded for a way with words? What is this?”
So I spend my time sitting in train stations, parks, parking lots, cafes, just looking at people—eavesdropping, basically. I’m vulnerable to all of it. You know, I’m watching the body language between couples as they walk. And sometimes I see expressions on faces and I’m like, “Oh god…I know that feeling…fuck…{laughter} Good luck, guy.” All of it makes me feel vulnerable—yeah, all of it, every single thing.
MP: How do you transform your pain? How do you dance with your pain? What do you do with it?
SW: Well, you know, remember when I wrote the song “Black Stacey”—I felt like that was the first time that I had done exactly what you said. That I had made music of pain, that I had found humor in pain, you know? And I was excited, I was super excited, because I could see my own personal growth and I could see how it applied to my creative expression, to my creative output. Thus, you know, here was proof for me that what I was doing was cathartic and maybe it could serve someone else as well.
So how do you do that? Probably kind of the same way they make Cognac or something. What do they do? They take white wine and bottle it for a hundred years? {laughter} So, you know, sometimes it’s bottling emotions and letting them distill with time—or not.
Sometimes… I think that’s what I did as a kid, is that I held things in. Now it’s more of a ventilation process. But you can’t help the fact that some things…You start to realize connections between experiences and things that push your buttons, and things that have touched you in those vulnerable areas and what-have-you. And they form a little collection over time—at least I do—and as time progresses and new things are learned, you kind of sift through those things until they’re air or danceable, you know? But they start as this thing that’s either too hard or too soft to dance to.
So it’s a matter of finding that rhythm, that synchronicity, between that and the rest of life. Sometimes that takes time. Sometimes that takes epiphany, you know, which is maybe not as connected to time and distillation. Oftentimes it comes to walking, that could lead to the epiphany of like, “Oh my god! That was actually necessary.” But I don’t know.
You know, I remember going through this crazy break-up years ago, where I found out that someone had, you know, the person that I was involved with had slept with somebody else. I was crushed. I was like, “Oh my god…” {laughter} It was intense, but you know what? I remember the moment, yes, when I couldn’t eat. I remember the moment when I cried, and I remember when I could no longer cry, and I was trying to cry and the tears wouldn’t—you know—there was no more water to come out of me or what-have-you.
I also remember the epiphany of, well, one: the slow realization that I had played a role in this somehow. ‘Cause at that point, it was actually my biggest fear, and the fact that I had held onto a biggest fear, I started questioning how I had conjured the situation. What role did I see in that? In actualizing my biggest fear by having one perhaps?
And then, I had this epiphany about love, and about it not being something that, perhaps at that point—I was much younger then—but at that point my epiphany had to do with how possession and jealously perhaps had no place within the actualization of love itself.
And at that point, that’s when my ex and her new lover started thinking I was crazy. Because that’s when I started thanking them, sincerely {laughter} like, “Oh, thank you so much for what you guys did. Because, oh I get it now! And you’re right, you know we were a hundred miles apart and we should be able to live in the moment. We’re young, you shouldn’t be holding yourself for me and some idea, this fantastical grownup thing that we had planned on doing. No, live in the moment! This is what you felt, this is what you do.”
Not to say that if you feel something, you should do it. You know, like Thom Yorke says, “Just because you feel it, doesn’t mean it’s there.” But in that pain, the transformation began to the realization that the pain itself was actually there to help me grow.
And at that point I started, you know, I kind of invited it, at that time I welcomed it. Of course that would be completely different if someone had stuck a knife in me! {laughter} That would be like, {scary voice} “Welcome to my bladder…”
Uh…{laughter} I don’t know. Yeah I prefer the abstract meaning than the actual. {laughter}
MP: What is it that breaks your heart?
SW: {laughter}
MP: Light conversation! What is it?
SW: {joking voice} “What is it that makes you vulnerable…what is it that breaks your heart…?”
MP: Last sad one!
SW: Gettin’ all lovey dovey over there…Ok, {laughter} you need a beer buddy, you know. {laughter}
MP: {laughter} I’m gonna need something stronger than beer!
SW: {laughter}
MP: The women want to know, Saul! {laughter}
SW: {laughter} You guys are on absinthe over there…{laughter} OK.
MP: Actually that’s not on our list, I have no idea why I just asked you that.
SW: But you said, “What is it that breaks my heart?’
MP: Yeah.
SW: {laughter}
MP: You can pass.
SW: No …You know what breaks my heart? And don’t get me wrong, because mostly I think that heartbreak is a good thing. You know, I think that the heart is a lot like—I’ve said this before—it’s a lot like those wonderful fruit, like coconut and mangoes, you know, you have to break the skin, you have to break it open to get to the good part.
I’ve often felt it’s almost like the heart breaks, and kind of like, carves out a space. Like you might do if you were planning on building a pool in your backyard, to the ground, to the soil, you carve out a space. It might carve out a space there within your heart, but then, you know, it actually creates something for you to fill.
So me, I’m like the heartbreak king at this point. You know, like, wow! I feel like I have tripped, you know? I’m dancing on heartbreak by now! I mean head spinning, wind mills, I am total 1981 Rock Steady Crew on the knowing, the allure, of heartbreak. You know what I’m saying? I’m all over it now. And the poses, the crazy people in poses, I’m… that’s all… yeah. I’ve been…{sighs} but that’s not your question.
What is it that breaks my heart? What breaks my heart… if you really want to know. The thing I’ve been talking about with daughter is the idea of—and I’m talking about essentially in America—the possibility of, a lost generation. I’ve been listening to a lot of music—as a fan, as a critic, as somebody who likes to dance—but I hear, you know, within these songs and half the people I hear, these philosophies encoded and embedded in these songs. And I remember, way back to whatever year, the first time I heard the Notorious B.I.G. song where it was like, “Get money…” and I was like, “Oh fuck. Oh fuck. I hope you’ve got something like everything is over or everything is better just when you get money.” And sometimes, sometimes, not every day not all the time, you know, like today me and daughter danced to “Rack City,” you know that song? {laughter}
MP: {laughter}
SW: But you know, if you look it up you’ll laugh. It’s R A C K, by a guy name Tyga. But you gotta find the video with the grandma dancing to Rack City ‘cause that’s…
MP: {laughter} Done.
SW: But sometimes I listen to… yeah, music is just entertainment right? For the lighthearted and whatever. But within that sometimes, when I get serious, I’m like “Oh fuck…what are we dancing to? What are they saying? What’s being discussed, what’s not being discussed? Where are these things being discussed?”
It’s not in school, it’s not on this website or that website and it’s not in the music. This song is number one. This show is number one. When I look at certain aspects of popular culture—not everything because I like a lot of things—sometimes my heart breaks a little bit, just a little bit. {laughter} I begin to ponder what happened to this generation, I don’t know.
Your library teacher would say, “What happens to a generation that doesn’t read the Classics?” Me, I’m not your library teacher. But I have some of the same questions and concerns, you know? {laughter}
But I think it’s that, the idea of a lost generation. And what I mean by that is, you know, like, there’s that Jay-Z song where he says, “I dumbed down my lyrics and doubled my sales.”
MP: Oh…
SW: Right? And I remember listening to that. I’m a fan of Jay-Z, now, I like him. But I remember listening to that years ago and, one: I was a little bit insulted, ‘cause I was like, “Are you saying that’s why I bought your album?” {laughter} You know, cause you dumbed it down, is that why I liked it? {laughter}
So I was a little offended as a listener, but on the other hand, I was like “Fuck, are those the rules? Are those the rules?” ‘Cause it’s not the rules everywhere, you know? That’s not the rules everywhere—that things have to be dumbed down in order to become massively popular. And that hasn’t always been the rule, even in America. You know, like, two nights ago I was watching John Cassavetes’ “A Woman Under the Influence” and holy…have you seen that?
MP: No, no. I sleep at the office. I don’t really get out much.
SW: Oh watch that. I watched it on my computer.
MP: I will. I have between 2am and 3am generally open. That’s my window.
SW: Oh it’s perfect for that. {laughter} You know, with whatever you have that’s stronger than beer. You’ll love it!
MP: Oh my goodness…last ones. I know that I promised no more heavy ones…
SW: Oh no, keep going!
MP: Good good, I lied. Because my good friend Polly, I don’t know if you know Polly Armstrong, she’s the videographer for Michael Franti, and she’s also just become our international editor.
SW: Yeah.
MP: She’s amazing, 6 foot tall, dreadlocked, one of the most beautiful, strong women I’ve ever met, and a social activist. She’s amazing.
She said, “Why don’t we ask him, how do you let go? Like, how do you let go?”
SW: {laughter}
MP: {laughter} There’s a little something for you!
SW: {laughter} You guys are funny…(sarcasm) “What breaks your heart, how do you let go? What makes you vulnerable?”
No, I feel it, it’s just still funny to think of you guys sitting there thinking up these questions…{laughter}
MP: {laughter}
SW: Yes ok, punk rock meditation. So, punk rock meditation.
MP: Punk rock meditation. You know, I’m gonna put that on our cover.
SW: {laughter}
MP: You think I won’t, but I will!
SW: I dare you.
MP: You know what, it’s a done deal, “Punk Rock Meditation” on our cover.
SW: There you go!
MP: {laughter}
SW: Punk rock meditation, that’s what keeps it going. That’s how I let go, you know. It’s exactly what I do, I blast it and run around crazy banging my head on the wall. {yells} If you asked me that five years ago I would say, “Meditation.”
MP: {laughter}
SW: Just like that, “Meditation.” {laughter} Now, I say, “Punk rock meditation.” {laughter} I think it’s better than Bikram yoga, personally. {laughter}
MP: {laughter} As long as you don’t wear those little panties…I don’t know…maybe you in those panties but..{laughter}
SW: Wait, what’d you say? {laughter}
MP: You know how he wears those little speedos, you know? We don’t need to get into that…
SW: {laughter} When I did it—I did Bikram for a while, just because I was living in LA and you have to do something like that if you want to stay. {laughter} Yeah, you know. Everybody knows that. So I didn’t wear those. I didn’t wear those little panties.
MP: “I did not wear those panties.” Oh my god, you’re probably the only man in class we’d want to see in those panties.
SW: Oh my god no.
MP: I’m sorry I think I just sexually harassed you…oh no…that’s why I only work with women.
SW: {laughter} That’s great.
MP: Great: “Punk rock meditation” and “I sexually harassed Saul Williams.”
SW: {laughter} There you go.
MP: We got our title.
SW: {laughter}
MP: So I know that Sony is not going to be very happy with me if I don’t ask. Is there anything coming up for this year? I know we already feel this shift, this 2012 shift, and for me it shifted. Maybe it’s just the collective consciousness just pushed that way, but for me I felt it. I felt like this was a new beginning, and I started cleaning out. Do you have projects coming up this year, exciting things you’re pouring yourself into?
SW: Yeah, yeah. Well first thing I’ll say is, I feel that shift super super super well. I feel like I was cleaning up 2009, ’10, ’11, and this year it’s just pure dance, punk rock meditation, break dancing, new heartbreak, you know like all that shit. It’s only the good stuff.
I have great stuff happening this year.
One is the film that I shot in Senegal. I was in Senegal over the summer shooting a film called Aujourd’hui, and it just got officially selected in the competition for the Berlin film festival.
MP: What is it called again?
SW: Aujourd’hui.
MP: Ah, I thought you said, “Ocean 3.” The connection isn’t…
SW: Oceans 13! {laughter}
MP: I was like, “What? We need to talk about that!”
SW: It’s me, George Clooney, and…{laughter} No, but it’s called Aujourd’hui, and I play a man who lives in a fictitious village in Africa where the dead come to choose one person to go back to the land of the dead with them, and you find out in the morning that you’re going to die that night. Only one person per generation is chosen. To be chosen is the biggest honor that one could ever receive. The family and the community win all these modern-day amenities, like new hospitals, and the personal family gets a salary and a house and all this stuff. And I play the guy that’s been chosen, and so the film starts from the moment he opens his eyes and finds out, to the moment he closes his eyes. So it’s the last twenty four hours of a man who knows that he will die peacefully that night, kind of like a modern-day sacrifice.
I spent two months in Senegal shooting that. It was the most beautiful experience. Anyway we just got accepted, officially selected, for a competition in Berlin which is in February. So that, after that, this is the SXSW issue coming out in March? So when that comes out I’ll be on tour. I’m touring the states from February until the end of March.
MP: What kind of tour is it? Is it a spoken word tour, a music tour?
SW: It’s a music tour. I’m touring for my album that was released in the states on 11/11/11 which is called Volcanic Sunlight. Volcanic Sunlight, that’s the thing that rises, that source of light that comes from deep within as opposed to above. You know the rise of the underground, the rise of that internal source and that burst of light and energy that so lights the world that then we see your blah blah blah….but yeah I’m touring for that. I come back and shoot another movie, but I don’t think I can say the name of that one yet.
And then I edited an anthology of poetry, of one hundred poets. One hundred new, fresh voices in poetry. The name of the book is Chorus, and what I did is, we had like 8,000 submissions, and we chose 100 poems, and then I tried to make, basically, a novel out of the poems, by finding the through-line between the poems. For example, finding the last three phrases of a poem and the first three phrases of another poem and finding the through-line, so I connected them. So you don’t see the titles of the poems at the front of the book, all of the poems just flow. It reads like a novel, but it’s one-hundred voices. So that’s my first anthology of poetry that I’ve ever edited, and that’s coming out in September, through MTV books. And I’m sure there’ll be tons of fun surprises in between.
MP: Wow, so is there any, we covered about everything! {laughter}
SW: We didn’t cover the Mayan calendar. No, I’m kidding.{laughter} And we won’t.
MP: {laughter} So is there anything else you want to say about this shift, or is there any other organizations or anything close to your heart that you’d want to include in this? Is there anything else?
SW: {laughter} Let’s see. To me the thing that I thought about before you said anything about organizations close to my heart, ‘cause the one thing that I forgot is the other reason why I’m so excited about this year, is that I have a birthday this year. You know my birthday is February 29th, and so I’m turning ten on February 29th. And now there is a Leap Day society online, and that organization is very close to my heart. {laughter}
MP: {laughter} Oh my….
SW: {laughter} I joined it about four years ago and…anyway.
MP: Oh my gosh, that’s great.
SW: {laughter} Aside from that, I would say, “The organization of self, and all self-aligning principles would be those that I promote.” {laughter}
MP. And then you laugh. {laughter}
SW: {laughs}
MP: You have been such a bright spot in this day. Thank you so much for your time.
SW: Are you gonna send me a magazine here in Paris? You’re gonna send it to me? Well, actually I’ll be in Austin in March, though.
MP: Are you coming to SXSW?
SW: I’m not coming to SXSW, but I am coming on tour through Austin.
MP: Are you serious?
SW: The Mohawk? Is there a place called the Mohawk?
SW: Well that will be awesome. Hey, do me a favor? Don’t print anything I’ve said.
MP: Geez!
SW: Just make it up. {laughter}
MP: {falls out of chair}
SW: Especially the stuff about what breaks my heart. I don’t know why I was talking about that. Just go ahead and feel free, I’ll co-sign.
Saul Williams’ open-mic escapades with the Nuyorican Poets peaked at Sundance when Slam won the Grand Jury Prize, and the art world celebrated the arrival of a whole new kind of talent. He defied his genre’s precious reputation and tore voraciously into the guts of life, groping after the exalted and transcendent sex sensations that make it all worth living. His early success led to collaborations with the likes of Erykah Badu, Nas, The Roots and Zack De La Rocha, and descended as much from KRS One and Public Enemy as Allen Ginsberg and Amiri Baraka, he was a new kind of poet.
With each of Williams’ great successes has come abrupt change. He has pinball bounced from Morehouse philosophy scholar to cerebral street sermonizer to breakout indie actor, from hallucinatory hip-hop alchemist to dreadlocked mohawk rockstar, vibing Nine Inch Nails, scurrying across tones, modes and media to defy categorization. He has read published poetry volumes to operahouse audiences with full orchestral backing. He has contributed to the New York Times, voiced Jean Michel Basquiat in Downtown 81 and cut records with Rick Rubin and Trent Reznor. Throughout all these chaotic ventures, Saul Williams has been one steady thing: an uncompromising voice determined to tap the adrenaline center of his existence with any tool he can get his hands on.
With 2011 release Volcanic Sunlight, Williams distills his lifelong pursuit of incendiary, gut-felt joy down from an “Amethyst Rocks” prison riff, my culture is lima beans and tambourines/ dreams, manifest dreams real, not consistent with rationale/ I dance for no reason, to an ecstatic and trance inducive “ come on everybody dance with me”. He calls it a pop album. A dance album. Volcanic Sunlight is a TV On The Radio twist on his regular Rage Against TheMachine, inspired by a life lived for love – by parents, parenthood and by time spent in Brazil as a teenager in a mansion with speakers that carried the songs of live exotic birds in the hallways, to all the rooms of the house.
Recorded in Paris, Williams’ newfound home,Volcanic Sunlight sees the breathless-spat attacks of his early slam poetry reduced to the exultation he was always chasing. He maintains his ferocity and ups the percussion, while losing the frown. Williams has also dropped his trademark verbal traffic jams in favor of more concise emotional outbursts. “There is a lot of fun to be had when you try and fit as many words as you can within a three-minute song,” he recently told Dazed Magazine, “but there is also a lot of fun in trying to get that message across in three words, or better yet when the music can overpower the words and convey something really pure and perfect… It’s as simple as wanting to lift the spirits.”
This is an appropriate sentiment for an artist who entered the world screaming to the nasty, ain’t-it-funky snare pop of James Brown’s “Funky Drummer” (Williams’ mother was literally rushed from a concert hall to the hospital). Raised in Newburgh, New York by a preacher and a schoolteacher, Williams’ learned early on what it meant to have a calling. He first tasted the intoxication of performance in an elementary school production of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. The next year, a 4th grade encounter with T La Rock’s “It’s Yours” inspired his first poem. This creativity blossomed into academic ambition, but, as Williams told Interview Magazine, “It was always important to me to be that kid who could rock the party as well as rock the English professor’s mind.” Next came the usual muses and the major heartbreaks in their wakes, and Saul Williams was officially born. A journal he started on a heart-healing trip to Africa with his mother, and continued through his NYU acting education, gave way to the more personal verse that would eventually evolve into his Nuyorican repertoire.
These third-eye-opening experiences conspired with a background steeped in devotion, academia and deeply felt love to produce an unclassifiable creative force. Out came Saul, the ever-generous shape-shifter, who gave away The Inevitable Rise And Liberation Of Niggy Tardust, his industrial epic, for free on the Internet. The angry young poet who brought his baby daughter Saturn to slams in a backpack and let her tug on his ears while he bopped nodding heads with sci-fi rhymes on the Bowery. Williams embraces contradiction, he invites the dark side, unleashes his rage unfiltered and still always manages to channel his boundless creative energy into something beautiful and positive. On Volcanic Sunlightcloser “New Day,” Williams looks the issue in the face, answering his incidental daily suffering with a chorus ofAll I am saying/ is that it’s a new day/ and I’m gonna lift my voice/ in a new way.
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