Saul Williams is working to desegregate the airwaves.
"There's one rapper that rock radio always plays - Eminem," he said. "They play him because he's white."
Williams, best known for his work in the 1996 film "Slam," challenges the boundaries of pop music's genres on his latest CD, a self-titled effort. He said he doesn't categorize the sound on the album unless he has to, and when he has to, he calls it industrial punk hop.
"If we think of music as sacred, then how we perceive music should be on that level as well," he said. "And to quarantine it according to race and form is some sort of invisible apartheid."
Though he's best known as a spoken-word artist, Williams said he's never written for the slam. He said the only year he participated in competitive poetry events was 1996, the year the movie was made.
"It doesn't make sense to refer to me as a slam poet," he said.
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He thinks of himself as a performer, he said, and he doesn't have a hard time drumming up the right energy in a recording studio, because he's performing there too. The thin line between the poetry, music and acting is all performance, he said.
And the spoken word, he said, is the oldest form of performance known to humankind.
"Spoken word is simply a phrase we have put on top of poetry to keep people from falling asleep at the mere mention of this ancient art form," he said. "Fact is, and this is most important, the history of poetry, the oral history of poetry, is longer than the written tradition of poetry."
The process on his second album differed from his first, Amethyst Rockstar, in that he wrote the lyrics after the music, Williams said. Rage Against the Machine's Zach de la Rocha and Serj Tankian from System of a Down make appearances on his latest disc.
The relationship between politics and art is inevitable, Williams said, because the relationship between everyday life and politics is inevitable. Similarly, Williams sees gangsta rap as an outgrowth of the Black Power Movement.
"When you see a guy that's an ex-slave, whose ancestors were slaves, and 40 years after his parents were sprayed with fire hoses, this guy is now coming at you via your TV with no shirt on, with a million dollars worth of diamonds around his neck or in his mouth," he said. "He's saying, 'Fuck you. Your kids want to be me when they grow up.'"
Williams said he bets the Bush twins bought the latest 50 Cent album and bump it in the White House.
Williams said he takes inspiration from many sources - everything from a well-written sentence to a well-crafted shoe. But it's not about having broad taste, he said. It's about finding balance and pushing himself out of his comfort zone.
As an example, Williams used a symphony he'd seen in Switzerland that was composed around his latest book, Said the Shotgun to the Head.
"There was this 80-piece orchestra and seven-person chorus, and the whole process of taking this poem that I had written and seeing it in the context of classical European ancient modes of expression was a challenge," he said.
But if the stage is a sanctuary, he said, then music is the Holy Spirit.
"That's like where God lives, in music," he said.
There's so much potential in a song, he said, and that's crazy because songs are invisible.
"I try to create music to try to kind of pay back the sources that fill me up in the humblest of ways," he said. "I constantly question whether I'm even capable of paying them back."
Saul Williams
The Launchpad
618 Central Ave.
Friday
$10 and $12
764-8887
