Events
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Saul Williams Live
@ The Casbah – San Diego, CA 3/24/08
By Eliza C. Kane
Photos by Joe Spurr
Saul Williams has a long career as a captivating performer, but in the skin of his new alter ego Niggy Tardust, you might wonder if he’s lead you through a wormhole to another dimension. The Monday night crowd at indie haunt The Casbah abandoned their initial lethargy for his dimension, one where social and musical boundaries are exposed, intertwined, and ultimately obliterated.
Sporting shaggy knee-high boots, face paint and feathers in his ‘fro, Williams brought 2007's The Inevitable Rise And Liberation of Niggy Tardust to life with an Aboriginal flare. Though obviously inspired in concept by David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust experiment, Niggy’s musical cousins are closer to Gil Scott-Heron and Electric Ladyland Hendrix. Above all, producer Trent Reznor’s influence shines the brightest – or, more accurately, the darkest.
With a backdrop of industrial swells, eclectic sampling and live accompaniment, Williams gave an aerobic performance to say the least. His self-assured posture conveyed both warrior fierceness and glimmers of androgyny in alternating turns. When the stage wasn’t enough to contain his spins and swagger, he jumped down into the crowd – and not just to grant the customary cheap thrill. For the middle three minutes of “WTF!” Williams carved through the audience, making eye contact with every person he passed and eventually starting a dance circle between the bar and the soundboard. Not yet finished, he crossed to the opposite corner and disappeared among his disciples except for the mic cord wrapping around their feet. A path cleared respectfully as he returned to the spotlight (though some did reach out to touch his shoulders or take a picture), and all in all the whole Messianic interaction felt at once totally absurd and perfectly natural.
But spectacle aside, the true highlight was, of course, Williams’ lyricism and delivery. Flowing from rap to spoken word to chant and sing-song as few can, vocals were the point of intersection for every theme and function. With “Black Stacey” he aired the insecurities of his adolescence and what he called the task of “learning and unlearning the rules” of his race. Copping to this stint of posturing, skin-bleaching and masturbation, Williams opened himself up enormously without ever seeming vulnerable. The warts-and-all self-portrait allowed him to assume the voice of enlightenment during the encore, “Untimely Meditations,” with zero hint of arrogance. In fact, the tension between catharsis and celebration is exactly what makes the album more than agitprop and Niggy Tardust more than a gimmick. Niggy is, ultimately, an exaggeration of Saul Williams’ oppositional characteristics – masculine and emotional, disenfranchised and empowered, primal and evolved, universal and alien – being at peace together. The gift Williams offered the audience was permission to be all of these things as well, and to embrace that as revolutionary.
It’s a tough balance for any performer to be so message-heavy without coming off as preachy. Lots of artists talk a good game about dissolving the imaginary barriers among us, but when their sets are done few mingle with fans and exit out the front door like Williams did. Perhaps the theatrical aspect of Niggy helps, or maybe this is just a honeymoon period between blowing up and burning out, but under the makeup, muscle shirt and self-referential brass knuckles, it’s clear that while Williams may be many things at once, he is always one thing most of all – truly sincere.
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