Crossing over from acclaimed poet and spoken word artist to the increasingly close-minded music industry seems an impossible task. It helps when you’re incredibly talented and have the brass to put together one of the year’s best and most challenging records. Saul Williams’ The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of Niggy Tardust is a forward-thinking mash up of raw punk energy, future sounds and hip-hop soul. Doing what very few artists in history have been able to do, Saul Williams has put together a political record that doesn’t sacrifice artfulness or energy in favor of a “message.” Sounding like the half-mad ghost of long dead Nintendos or the stomp of thousands of angry laptops, Niggy Tardust is a genre-twisting beast. ANTIGRAVITY talked to Williams about the connection between punk and rap, the concepts behind his new record and making music without history.

ANTIGRAVITY: Just to start off, how’s the tour going?
Saul Williams: It hasn’t officially started yet. I’m speaking at different universities and doing poetry reading, but I haven’t done any musical shows off of this album.

AG: Is that because you’ve been working on this show?
SW: Definitely. I wanted the album to have time to gestate with the public and I wanted to take my time allowing the formation of ideas, the concepts and all the preparation for the stage to happen. I had to expand my band a bit, so there’s preparation with the band and working with the artist Angelbert Metoyer, who did the art for the digital download and is now the art director for the show. We’ve just been getting ready.

AG: It seems like this album is more “stage ready” than your earlier work, in there’s more room for spectacle.
SW: In creating the album for myself, I wanted to set the stage [for me] to be able to experiment and for people to look at me and say, “Wow, I don’t know what he’s going to do, but I’m really interested in what’s coming next.” It’s so easy to be pigeonholed, whether it’s as a spoken word artist, a controversial artist, a political conscious rapper, whatever it is that people want to say. None of those boxes are interesting to me. I’m always…not so much fighting against the box, but encouraging myself to explore and expound upon anything I’ve found in myself.

AG: What’s the difference for you between performing a music show and doing a poetry reading or spoken word performance?
SW: It depends on how you calculate rewarding. After leaving a spoken word show, my heart/mind/spirit has been elevated, so to speak, and aligned with something important. It’s great to be able to whittle down language into distinct phrases and also, if we’re talking about the fact that it happens a lot on universities, to be able to communicate in that way as an artist and poet with students who are in really important years of their lives. The most influential experiences I had in college were often with guest speakers. To be able to play that role is a great opportunity for me. There’s something cathartic about writing a poem and sharing it. I would say poetry is the ritual; it offers the themes of the performance, the themes of so many things, whereas music is the actual process of ritual itself. A lot of my work has been done because I wanted to exorcise myself of my own fears and shortcomings, but the power of art is that it can also exorcise society, relieve tension and fears, and music heightens that experience. It can really help someone travel beyond themselves. It’s such a full on release in music.

AG: It goes beyond words and becomes emotion.
SW: Exactly, I create music so that I don’t always have to use words. Music is really one of the only things that go beyond language. When I’m doing a music tour there’s not a lot of hanging around, speaking to people—it creates this zone, this focus which is actually what the album came out of. I wrote most of it while on tour for the previous album, using that zone as an exchange for new material.

AG: How was the genesis of Niggy Tardust different from your previous work?
SW: The genesis of this album felt more musically aligned. Before I even knew what I was working on I’d written songs like “Scared Money” and “DNA.” But once Trent (Reznor) entered the picture, it was like when you make new friends and are reminded of the fact that there are like-minded people in the world and you can communicate beyond language—there’s real synergy. This is between people who may not come from similar backgrounds, who may not know the same people or the same things but are open and willing to share. When I connected with Trent in 2005 it was one of those experiences for me and really a turning of the key for me to feel free enough to explore in the way that I wanted to. I wanted to go this far out, but it’s sometimes hard to go there alone when you don’t have a level of confirmation. You might get it from fans, but from the perspective of managers and executives it’s, “I don’t know if we can afford this.”

AG: How did your collaboration with Reznor work in the studio? There’s always the myth of the Svengali producer controlling things.
SW: It didn’t go down that way for us. Trent was very respectful of my creative space. It was me spending a lot of time with myself, coming up with ideas and presenting them to him and him going, “Oh my God! Keep going.” That’s what made this experience shine for me, that there were no head games. When I was working with Rick Rubin, I played him a song and he said, “That’s horrible. It sounds like a really bad Lenny Kravitz song.” So then I’m working and second guessing myself and it starts breeding a level of insecurity. That never happened with Trent. He would give me music that I would chop up, sample, make new stuff out of, add 808s and whatever, and then put my lyrics on top of them. It was just continual confirmation for me and I felt more and more inspired to work.

AG: Is Niggy Tardust a concept album?
SW: It’s a total concept and the concept is exactly what’s happening in America right now. It’s to say that one day, whether we want to acknowledge it or not, our racial history and all this shit will end. We’ll be able to make more light of the matter than darkness. The word “nigger” is horrible, but the word “niggy” is cute, so there’s a strange twist on it. When I look at the rise of Barack Obama, that is the inevitable rise and liberation. There’s a lot of cynicism, a lot of naysayers, but America is proving America wrong. But it’s not just America; today is the day that the Prime Minister of Australia finally apologized to the Aboriginals. It may not seem like much to us, but in their country it’s a huge deal. Without the apology there could be no reparations, there could be no federal funds allotted to ameliorating their situation.

AG: That dichotomy you brought up is a theme in the record, where very serious material is talked about in a way that’s not overly pedantic and instead uses humor, metaphor, etc…
SW: That was the goal. That was how I was able to distinguish my album from, say, a Rage Against the Machine album. I wanted to have fun and Niggy Tardust gave me an excuse to shop and buy fun clothes. I wanted to have fun, but I wanted to talk about things that were pressing. I wrote the album between Australia and America. “Convict Colony” was written in Australia. Some of the album was written in South Africa and there’s a weird kinship in the governments of those countries. It was about the realization that I knew regardless of how hard it was for me as a musician who has dark skin, for me to step up to a label and present them my music their first response is, “That’s not hip-hop.” You’re so fucking ignorant! You have no fucking clue about how much more albums you could sell if you stop underestimating the intelligence of your audience.

AG: The Niggy Tardust record seems to push aside traditional hip-hop notions, but there are some similarities. It has this twisted version of hip-hop swagger running through it.
SW: I come from hip-hop and I love that, but I don’t like the limited, self-imposed definition that restricts growth. That’s why in the song “Black History Month” I say, “Sometimes I find it very hard to be me.” The idea of imposing limiting definitions on yourself while you’re still in a state of growth ends the learning process. That swagger is intact for several reasons. One, I still look for it in music. There’s such a B-Boy swagger in the rock idea of “I’ve seen a million faces and I’ve rocked them all.” You definitely had your hand on your crotch when you said that.

AG: That connection between rock and rap is interesting too. When hip-hop was still young it was looked at as the new punk rock.
SW: Thank you so much—you get it! That’s exactly what I was going for. My self-titled album was my exploration of punk in connection with hip-hop, that’s why the album sounds so raw. I wanted it to sound like ideas formulating. This record is a lot more polished, but that’s the same exact energy I was going for. That’s the energy I love about MCing, that punk rock energy. Touring with Nine Inch Nails and standing in front of all those kids with them looking at me like, “This guy’s probably a hip-hop artist. I don’t like hip-hop. A black dude’s not going to make music I’ll dance to.” Being able to stand there and challenge them to rise to the occasion. For them to rise to it and acknowledge the fact that this may be better than any fucking thing they’ve ever heard, and I say that with all humble swagger. To be able to play them a song like “Black Stacy” and say this is a song about taking off your black shirt and still being black felt like punk to me. It set me free from falling into the trap of being black, male and young in America.

AG: I need to ask you about the distribution of the album. Whose idea was the digital release?
SW: It was Trent’s idea originally. He thought it would be really cool if we could find an alternative way of releasing the album or giving it away for free. I got it, but I wasn’t really gung ho about it at first because I’m a struggling artist and if I’m doing an album with Trent Reznor I think I should cash in on that. Once I really got into the album and got into what I was doing my confidence was boosted and I felt like this was the time to do it. Realizing that it was such a visionary album and having such an un-visionary approach to releasing it… The labels were interested in releasing it, but they weren’t interested in doing anything original.

AG: Just slap it in a jewel case and throw it on the shelves.
SW: Yeah. You know it’s going to leak, so for me releasing it this way was a way of putting a price tag on the leak while building excitement and buzz. We still have a physical release in early summer.

AG: I’ve heard that not as many people bought it, but the number of people listening to the record was very high.
SW: Yeah, and ever since Trent’s C/Net interview the number of people who have bought the album has practically doubled. It’s people who have listened to it and gone back and bought it. There were tons of people who liked the album and felt guilty, and they go back and pay for it. Then there’s MySpace messages like, “Dude I don’t have a credit card, but if you come on tour I’m coming to the show and buying a t-shirt.”

AG: Do you think because of the slow release of the record that some of the media attention or critical response will come later this year as opposed to last year?
SW: That’s exactly what I expect to happen. People think they’ve heard the songs, but they haven’t heard it until they see it live. It’s one thing to listen to a Radiohead album. It’s another thing to be at a concert. It’s another thing for me to be on the stage, in the middle of the song. It’s the only thing better than headphones, being in the actual convergence of those melodies and beats.

AG: The atmosphere of the show…
SW: That’s what we’re doing with this tour, really heightening and creating this atmosphere for the proper experience for the album. That’s where the acclaim comes if it comes.

AG: Would you do anything differently?
SW: Right now I’m really excited about the way we did and I wouldn’t do much differently. I’m amped about the number of people listening to the album. That’s something that’s always been aligned with my poetry. I was amazed at the fact that I’ve been able to earn my living writing poems, which were things I could hand out for free on the subway. So with music, for people to be able to hear it for free and explore beyond whatever parameters they’ve put on about what they think they know about music is fucking great. It was so exciting the day we released it, to just press send and have it travel through that invisible ether and know that it was going to come through people’s speaker system and sound like something that would come from that ether.

AG: The record sounds exactly the way you would expect something electronically born to sound.
SW: That’s what also made me excited to release it the way we did. The final straw for me was the day before we released it, we had been talking with lawyers, but they couldn’t answer our questions because the fact is there’s no history for this. For me, sitting in my room and hearing there’s no history for this was my cue to say, “Okay, that’s the direction I want to go.”