Here stands the poet. Standing alone, standing under his own name, reciting the
verse that will make his name: "Telegram to Hip Hop: Dear Hip Hop. Stop.
This shit has gone too far. Stop." Only he doesn't stop, he don't stop,
and he don't stop, noting that neither cash nor murder are in the genre's
tenets, remembering that MCs were once slaves (and now they're slaves
once more), wishing for a discontinuing of the lyrical line of unbroken
braggadocio. Unlike 50 Cent, whom he dares to do a deadpan depiction
of in humble mumbles faking masculinity, Saul Stacey — the boy they
called Black Stacey in school — knows that he ain't bulletproof;
he forsakes myth-making to dare speak about reality without the obnoxious
posturing of "realness," fearing not, because "you can take your aim,
but you can't kill the truth." Truth-seeking and truth-speaking, Saul's
second longplayer finds him returning from the outer-space orbit of his
first record, Amethyst Rock Star, this go-round — razed of
guitars, stripped of strings, clipped of florid imagery, its fierce words
set to blunt beats and throbbing bass — obsessed with the realities
that the poet once forsook for surrealities, less about the wild-eyed
purple-hazed planetaries plotted by his early poetry, and more about
finally finding that spot where truth echoes. And now he's found it,
he's not about to stop. He says: "I was watching BET, like: What the
fuck? Son, this is foul." Then says: "I gave Hip Hop to whiteboys when
nobody was looking/ Found it locked in a basement when they gentrified
Brooklyn." Then says: "Hip Hop takes its last breath/ The cop scrawls
vernacular 'manslaughter' onto a yellow pad." Hitting this lyrical nail
on its head over and over, Saul hammers nails into the coffin of hip-hop,
reading out its eulogy with the backing of The Fader, no less, who see
their nascent label as the place for Saul to hammer home lyrical realities.
His voice and its words call these thoughts into reality, the album truthful
and personal so many times over; his first love and hip-hop's last rites
are placed side-by-side, track-by-track on an album that's been conceived
as whole work, as thematic whole. His first album found Williams "discovering" music,
uncovering some sort of drug-rock/ art-rap sound with Rick Rubin by his
side, setting so many of his previously performed and published poems
to peculiar music. This album is the album, his album, with his name
on the front; he's standing by it, standing strong, standing alone, on
his own frontline, behind the line he's drawn in the sand. He calls it:
Enough. Stop.
|
