Saul Williams.Pages

ATEOTT 49 Transcript

EPISODE 49

[INTRODUCTION]

[00:00:02] MA: It was the night before. I read the statistics and I knew what I was going to say. I was just, “Okay. There's been a few years. I think I have to Google this. I have to just see what's out there.” Yeah, I googled, and I did it really like, “Okay, so what would be the first thing that I see if I'm 10-years-old, or 12 and I'm just googling porn, clicking on the first link, watching the first video?” Yeah, I'm not going to be too graphic, but the two videos that I watched were graphic for sure. One of them being one girl and I think five or six guys just beating her up, really. That was the first video. I'm not saying that's every video, but that's what I saw then. I just, the day after, I went into this talk, just thinking that, “Okay, we got to talk about this.” Because that's always been my deal that if there's a difficult issue, we have to have a conversation about it, we cannot be silent.

[PREVIEW]

[00:01:04] LW: Hey, there. It's Light. We are back with another episode of At the End of the Tunnel, which is a podcast that shines a light on backstories and, particularly, on the backstories of people who've taken a leap of faith away from convention and in the direction of helping or inspiring people through their work, or through their non-proﬁt or, in the case of my guest this week, through their art.

Back when I was only dreaming about starting a podcast, I had this shortlist in my mind of the dozen or so guests that I really wanted to interview. My guest this week was near the top of that list. His name is Saul Williams. I ﬁrst discovered Saul's work in 1998 after going by myself to see an independent ﬁlm called Slam, which start this actor and poet named Saul Williams. His performance and the subject matter, which was about how easy it is for Black men to get caught up in the American prison industrial complex, it not only blew me away, but Slam went on to win Sundance and Con that year.

Then I started spotting Saul around New York City, where I was living at the time. I'd see him on the subway. I’d run into him at a couple of restaurants. Anyway, I got to enjoy a lot of his live

© 2021 At the End of the Tunnel 1 ATEOTT 49 Transcript spoken word performances that he was doing around town. His star was rising. I was just so inspired, because he's one of those people that, every time you see him, you learn something new, and it just leaves you feeling more and more inspired.

Then later, Saul got into doing more ﬁlms, and then he was on Broadway. Then he started writing and producing music. He's released about a half a dozen studio albums at this point. His production quality reminds me a lot of Kanye West's work, his best work, and that you can listen to the album's from beginning to end and they each tell a story that just gets you to think about – it gets you to think about society in a different way.

Saul's body of work, as a spoken word artist and a musician and an actor, I think about him as our generation’s Harry Belafonte. Belafonte always said, “Look, I am not a singer who gets involved in activism from time to time.” He said, “I am an activist who sings from time to time.” That's what I've always felt about Saul's incredible artistic contributions to the world, ever since I saw the movie Slam. He is ﬁrst and foremost an activist and his medium happens to be spoken word and music and writing and acting and so on.

The themes that show up in his work are often about social justice and race and gender and capitalism. He's collaborated with some amazing people over the years as well, everyone from Nine Inch Nails, to NAS, to Allen Ginsburg, to Rick Rubin. Even though he's been interviewed and proﬁled countless times, what we focused on in our interview was his backstory. We went really deep into his upbringing as the son of a minister and an educator, both of whom were activists as well. We talked about the moment when he discovered his passion for spoken word, which happened almost by accident, and how he had been preparing for that moment without even realizing it, which I ﬁnd to be the case with all of my guests about 99.9 percent of the time.

We touched on his unlikely path to starring in that ﬁlm that I loved, Slam, because he wasn't the director's ﬁrst choice but he somehow made it happen. We talked about that and we talked about why he decided to get into music later, which was a leap of faith that surprised even him.

As with all origin stories, Saul’s was indeed fascinating. As you know, I like to do extensive research, but there were some aspects of his story that surprised me. I was even more impressed with him and what he's done in the world. I think you're going to ﬁnd this

© 2021 At the End of the Tunnel 2 ATEOTT 49 Transcript conversation incredibly thought provoking and inspiring as well. I'm blessed to be able to have these conversations and to be able to share them with you.

I want to thank those of you who've already left your five-star rating or review, because that's how we can spread these stories even further and wider. You can do your part right now from your phone. It only takes 10 seconds. Just look at the title of the podcast in purple, which is if you're looking at it on the Apple Podcast app, click that, scroll down past the previous episodes, you'll see the five stars, just tap the fifth star. That's it. That's all you have to do. You've done your part to help expose other people to these stories that could inspire them to take their own leap of faith. It only takes you 10 seconds to make the world a better place. Thank you for that.

Without further ado, let's get into my conversation with Mr. Saul Williams.

[INTERVIEW]

[00:06:30] LW: Mr. Saul Williams, it is my pleasure, it is my honor to sit down with you and talk a little bit about your life. I have known of you and cross paths with you for several years now. Most recently, in Los Angeles, probably, I don't know, seven years ago, or six years ago, or something like that. I think we saw each other on Laurel Canyon, or we saw each other in one of those canyons.

Now, we get a chance to go a little deeper into our relationship, but also just into telling your story. You've told your story so many times, and I have seen a lot of your interviews in preparing for this conversation. I'm hoping to go into some stuff that maybe you haven't talked about as much in those interviews. Thank you very much for being here and being open to all of that.

My ﬁrst question that I like to ask my guests is, thinking back to childhood. I know you grew up in Newburgh, New York, about an hour outside of Manhattan. When you think back to young Saul, the youngest of three, and your favorite toy or activity as a child, what would you say that was and why?

[00:07:42] SW: There was this Tonka truck. You’re laughing like you remember Tonka Trucks.

[00:07:56] LW: Yeah, of course.

[00:07:59] SW: I had this yellow Tonka Truck with a tractor that my grandmother gave me. I didn't have a lot of toys like that. I had a lot of fun playing with that. I played with train tracks and race track. I never could say that I had a favorite toy, because I was more of an adventurer, and I was sometimes making toys and games in my head. That was my favorite thing to do.

I grew up in a house that had 28 rooms, nine ﬁreplaces. Yeah, it was a crazy house. It was built by the same guy who built Madison Square Garden in 1906 in Newburgh and my parents purchased it for $20,000 or something. It was always freezing cold in the winter. There were lots of places to hide all these crazy things under the stairs and crazy rooms in the basement. Then outside, there were pine trees.

I would collect pine cones. I would use my – I don't know if you remember the round sleds that you would sometimes use to sleigh down the hill. I would paint those and make a shield out of those. Imagine the pine cones as grenades. I spent a lot of time trying to ﬁgure out how to make a bow and arrow. I spent more time trying to ﬁgure out how to make slingshots. I would order Chinese stars from the back of Mad Magazine and destroy my walls.

I would constantly use coat hangers and hang them with bald socks to play basketball in my bedroom. My favorite thing to do, I think, was after hours, I had always made sure I had a radio and I was always a procurer of headphones. I loved, late at night, I had insomnia as a kid. Two things; one, going through the radio stations and seeing if I could ﬁnd any old radio plays from the 40s or something, listening to those.

Simultaneously, there were these watermarks on the ceiling. I would stare at these watermarks for hours deciphering shapes and whole stories surrounding the shapes that were coming through the watermarks, while simultaneously there were squirrels in the wall. I'd be listening to the squirrels and stuff like that. Yeah, there was never one toy. There was lots of games. I mean, I was always busy. I will say this, which is that, for whatever reason, my father made it – We were not allowed to use the word bored. We literally, were not allowed to use the word bored. There was two words I was not allowed to use as a kid: nigger, bored. Oh, yeah. There was also one else: liar. Three words.

I always feel like, maybe in my recounting of things, I'm like, “Well, maybe I was never bored, because I wasn't allowed to use the word.” I'm not sure if that’s why. I was changing toys constantly. The biggest toy I was playing with was my imagination. A sheet instantly became a cape. A stick instantly became a spear.

[00:11:27] LW: Were you into Star Wars and all those things we all were? Because we're all the same age, so were you watching movies and stuff at that time?

[00:11:35] SW: Deﬁnitely, but peripherally. I mean, I was into Star Wars enough to have Return of the Jedi curtains and debate for those. To have Empire Strikes Back sheets. I was also very much into Shazam. When I was eight, I was really into Spider Man. I had a spider man birthday party. I had an R2-D2 themed birthday party. When they used to sell that spray that you could attach to your wrist and shoot as Spider Man. I was collecting quarters from the couch crevices and buying little toys from those things in the supermarket, from those machines, like a little rubber ball or something. Jack's.

[00:12:25] LW: We could do a whole podcast just on the toy collection, of all the different interests. That's interesting. Go ahead.

[00:12:33] SW: Yeah. Erector Set, though. Erector Set was probably the thing. I did my Lincoln Logs and my Erector Set. I love constructing.

[00:12:44] LW: Okay. You have two sisters, right?

[00:12:47] SW: Yeah, two older sisters.

[00:12:49] LW: Are you playing by yourself? Or were you guys all playing together for the most part?

[00:12:52] SW: I was playing by myself. My oldest sister is seven years older than me. The next one is four years older than me. They were always into their own thing. I was playing by myself, up until a certain point when my cousin, who's the same exact age as me, moved in with us. My

© 2021 At the End of the Tunnel 5 ATEOTT 49 Transcript cousin, Dennis. That was after begging my parents, “Can't he come stay with us?” He moved from Haiti, where he was living with my grandfather before he passed, to live with us. He lived with us when I was in third grade. Then he went back to live with my grandmother, and then back in sixth grade, and he stayed with us from sixth grade on to the end of high school. Then I had someone to play with.

[00:13:33] LW: Interesting. Talk a little bit about your family heritage. Because for my family, I don't really know what happens beyond two or three generations before me because you have the whole slavery thing in there. So and so is a doctor, so and so was the ﬁrst this and the ﬁrst that. What was that conversation like in the Williams household, to make you proud to be a Williams?

[00:14:00] SW: Well, ﬁrst a bit of background. My mother's side of the family is Haitian. They arrived at Ellis Island from Haiti, my great grandmother and great grandfather arrived in 1917 in Ellis Island, at Ellis Island and moved from there, moved to Brooklyn. Both my parents are born and raised in Brooklyn. Now my great grandmother, Amelie Charlemagne, who was on that boat, I remember her as a kid. She was a 80-year-old woman taking ballet classes in Brooklyn. I was enchanted by, ﬁrst, how old she was. There's that side. There's the Haitian side.

My mother had nine brothers and sisters, all born and raised in New York. Most of them served time in the armed services, or the Air Force. My mom was the first of her family to go to college. Okay. She went My dad while she was in college. My dad, born and raised in Brownsville, Brooklyn; his mother, my Grandma Mabel had, basically, run to Brooklyn. This is interesting. I've been thinking about this a bit, because of the pandemic. During the first influenza –

[00:15:22] LW: The 1918 pandemic?

[00:15:24] SW: 1918 pandemic, my grandmother lost her mom, two sisters, and father, and became the only survivor of her family in Smoaks, South Carolina, and so decided to save money and catch a bus to Brooklyn. I grew up knowing that grandmother as well. She raised my dad alone. His father, who I also knew was an alcoholic and they had separated by the time she was – my dad was ﬁve or six.

Here comes the pride parts. My dad sang, and when he was nine-years-old, he was cast on NBC show called Star Time Kids, and where he would sing opera. He was paid $36 a minute, and would tell us stories about how he would try to stretch the notes so he might be paid a little more. He did that show and then ended up in the School of Music and Art, which became LaGuardia High, which is the famed School of Fame, the ﬁlm and TV show. My dad went to that school. One of his classmates was a painter by the name of Billy Dee Williams. Tons of other people.

However, when my dad was 19, he was called into the ministry. From that point forward, he went to seminary and then became a pastor. I grew up in the church. There was a great deal of pride and lineage that didn't necessarily connect to the Williams or Charlemagne skeet clan but that connected more so to Black American culture and its relationship to the church, and what it represented, particularly in relationship to our struggle in connection to spirituality, but very much connected to the Civil Rights Movement. Both my parents were activists and involved in that movement. That's how I was introduced to so many ways of looking at the world in relationship to our progress as a people, as a community.

I watched my parents do the work, and grew up in a church community where I could guarantee on any given day, there were about 90 old people that were praying for me, speciﬁcally, who would tell me on Sunday like, “I'm going to be praying for you this week. I heard you have an audition. I'm going to be praying for you.”

[00:18:03] LW: Was that photo of your mom being arrested at the protest? Was that up in your house somewhere? Or was that stowed away in some scrapbook? Did you guys talk about that?

[00:18:13] SW: The thing is, with that now famous photo of my mom, we grew up hearing about this photo. We grew up hearing that my mom was arrested at this protest. The protest was about, at the time, New York City had not integrated any of the construction jobs, none of the bus drivers, none of that stuff. There was a movement to integrate in New York City, in the north, like, you should be hiring Black construction workers. You should be hiring Black bus drivers and allowing Black people to work on the subway and all this stuff.

She was protesting that. We grew up hearing that my mom had been arrested and that it was the front page of the New York Times or whatever, or the New York Times Herald, but we had never seen it. Until about ﬁve or six years ago. The photographer was selling the photo on eBay. My cousin found a photo and was like, “Isn't this Aunt Juanita?” It hit us all so hard, because my sisters and I had grown up hearing about this happening, but my parents had not kept a scrapbook. It was just a story we were told. Seeing that photo was crazy.

[00:19:30] LW: You had decided that you wanted to be an actor at a fairly young age. I think you were eight-years-old. What did you experience that planted that thought in your head?

[00:19:41] SW: Well, I guess it's this. One. I told you, my father had a background in opera. My mom was a school teacher. Both of them growing up in New York had a huge, huge love of theater. I mean, as time passes, I realized how blessed I was in the sense that my parents were always like, at least once a month, sometimes more, we're going to go see this play.

[00:20:08] LW: In the city.

[00:20:09] SW: In the city, on Broadway. Off Broadway. Always. Also, because my dad pastored a fairly large church, the producers of plays would often send free tickets to the pastor's family, because they knew that if they got the pastor into the play, that they might arrange a bus trip.

[00:20:28] LW: Very clever.

[00:20:30] SW: Very clever. As a result, there were always these tickets. We got invited to go see this, that, whatever, Your Arms Too Short to Box With God, Seraﬁna, Tap, all of these things. Anything, especially anything Black that hit off Broadway or Broadway, we had tickets. Before I even made that decision, I was going to plays regularly, on the edge of my seat.

Secondly, my mom, and her relationship to music was another thing in terms of like, she was a concert goer. She would bring us to concerts. In fact, you may have read this, but my mother was rushed from a James Brown concert to give birth to me.

[00:21:14] LW: Oh, wow. She went there at 38, 39 weeks pregnant.

[00:21:21] SW: Exactly. She was there with my two sisters. I started kicking. One of the security guards at the concert, happened to be a member of my dad's church. She left my sisters with them. The ambulance came to the venue and brought her to the hospital. Yeah. I had this relationship to seeing performance. I saw The Wiz when it was on Broadway, with Stephanie Mills. I mean, I saw the Jacksons as a kid. We went to shows. Not to mention, the gospel concerts as well. My dad's church always had one of those choirs.

[00:22:04] LW: Was it a Black church? Fully Black church?

[00:22:07] SW: Fully Black Baptist Church. That was between a crack house and a brothel.

[00:22:12] LW: People were catching the Holy Ghost and the whole nine.

[00:22:16] SW: The whole nine. The whole nine. Yep. Yeah. In fact, short story is that my father had been – so I grew up in Newburgh. My father had actually even called to pastor one of the oldest Black churches in Newburgh, called Ebenezer Baptist Church. They were really run by old people.

One of the ﬁrst things my dad did was he started a gospel choir in the church and the old people got so mad at the fact that the young people were singing gospel, which is something that people don't even remember in church history. The old folks were like, “The gospel is devil music. We were supposed to be singing spirituals. Y'all are getting too into this gospel stuff.” The church split in two and my dad ended up founding a different church with all the young people, yeah, because of gospel music. Yeah. That’s when I was like six, seven.

[00:23:13] LW: Was Pete Seeger coming to sing at that time at the new church? Or was he coming to the old church?

[00:23:18] SW: Both. Both. I grew up with Pete Seeger as a regular fixture in my life, just because he was a neighbor. The first time I remember meeting Pete Seeger, once again, I'm probably five or six. Now, another thing that you remember, but I'm sure a lot of people don't is

© 2021 At the End of the Tunnel 9 ATEOTT 49 Transcript that before Black History Month was celebrated nationally and before Martin Luther King Day was a national holiday, we used to skip school on Martin Luther King Day.

I remember skipping school and going to a Community Church event on Martin Luther King Day, and Pete Seeger would show up. He would always be there, and talking about his relationship to the movement and singing. Yeah. Him and my father were close. Then he would come to my father's church regularly. I was always, as a kid, because we sang some of these songs in school, I was always like, “We have this great choir. Why are you asking this white dude to sing these school songs?”

[00:24:23] LW: “We shall overcome.”

[00:24:27] SW: He’d be like, “If I add a hammer,” and all these types of shit. Half of those school songs, I didn't realize, he had written. Or inherited through the folk tradition. Yeah, that was just a beautiful thing.

Anyway, in answer to your question, so I was highly exposed to the performing arts as a kid. Also, one more thing, because I was bored in church half the time, I could enjoy a good choir or a good sermon, but the long prayers, I would be strumming through the Bible and looking at maps in the front and the end of the Bible and all this stuff.

I had an afﬁnity for the language in the Bible, like this is hilarious how this is written, the Old English King James Version of the Bible that we were using. Then, at eight-years-old, I discovered Shakespeare. I went to a magnet school, and they had a class called Shake Hands with Shakespeare that I took in the afternoon. We were responsible for the school plays. I got cast in Julius Caesar. That is the ﬁrst Shakespearean play that I read.

That year, I read everything Shakespeare, partially because of the similarities and language between what was in the Shakespeare books and what was in the Bible. What Shakespeare would talk about and the jokes he would make versus the jokes that were not in the Bible. I found it interesting. Anyway, it's during that ﬁrst rehearsal of Julius Caesar that I come home, I'm eight-years-old, and I’d say, “I want to be an actor when I grow up.”

[00:26:11] LW: What does your dad say to you when you told him that?

[00:26:14] SW: My dad, verbatim, directly, dinner table was, “I'll support you as an actor if you get a law degree.” My mom said the craziest shit immediately, which was like, “Then you should do your next school report on Paul Robeson. He was an actor and a lawyer.” That was the beginning of me learning about Paul Robeson. Literally every time I was given a biographical school report to do from third grade on, I always chose Paul Robeson and I'd study another aspect of his career. It wasn't about cheating, or having a report that I already did. It was sincere interest in this –

[00:26:56] LW: Going deeper. Yeah.

[00:26:58] SW: Going deeper.

[00:26:58] LW: Your dad also encouraged you to take tap classes.

[00:27:01] SW: Yeah. Yeah. That was a beautiful weird thing. Yeah, my dad came from that old school singing opera in the late 40s and early 50s in New York. It was like, “If you want to be an actor, you have to know how to tap.”

[00:27:16] LW: Yeah. You felt some way about that ﬁrst tap class.

[00:27:20] SW: Yeah. I convinced them to not go back. As I came back, and forgive me, I'm going to say what I said, so you know. I was trying stuff out. I’m nine-years-old.

[00:27:31] LW: Eight-years-old. Right, right, yeah.

[00:27:33] SW: Yeah, eight or nine and I'm coming back and I'm like, “I'm the only guy in that class. They’re making us wear a leotard. I feel like a faggot.” My father said, “Hey. Wait, wait, wait, wait. What did you say? I don't want to ever hear that word come out of your mouth again.” He was like, “Look, you told me you want to be an actor, an artist. Listen, you need to start now and understand that not everybody is attracted to the same type of person. You will be surrounded, as you already are, as a matter of fact, because let me tell you a little something

© 2021 At the End of the Tunnel 11 ATEOTT 49 Transcript about your godfather. Maybe you haven't picked up on it. Let me tell you something about your sister's godfather. Let me tell you something about [inaudible 00:28:16].” The only thing he didn't say is, “Let me tell you a little something about me,” which we found out years later.

[00:28:30] LW: Everything made sense after that point.

[00:28:34] SW: It was beautiful because it starts at a young age. I had no feelings, one way or another. It was something that I picked up on from little boys, just homophobic rant, this thing that I picked up on from little boys at school, ﬁtting in. That speech that my dad gave me was – I mean, I'll never do it justice, whatever he said and how he said it. From that moment forward, it was clear to me that we were wide open, on this planet, and how we were to experience life and desire and our relations to each other and all of this stuff, to the point where I eventually challenged my dad on not in relation to that, but just in terms of like, “Well, how do you belong to one religion? God doesn't belong to one religion.” All of this stuff. That was a prime moment for me in terms of letting go of the socialization process that was just beginning, and realizing, “Oh, that's just some bullshit that you don't actually have to entertain.”

[00:29:44] LW: Did you take that into your friend circle or into your classrooms? Did you challenge your teachers? When your friend said the word nigger or faggot, did you challenge anybody as a young kid? Do you remember?

[00:29:56] SW: In terms of faggot, yes. In terms of nigger, no. The only time I would challenge anybody with the word nigger was if they were white. That challenge was usually physical. That happened. In terms of nigger, no. Because we weren't allowed to say it, because we were too young. It was like cursing. My dad used the word nigger beautifully. Many of our dads did.

I’d walk out in the morning and he’d be like, “Hey, little nigger. You’re doing all right?” That was my name, little nigger. That was a lot of our names. I was dying to be of age to use the term nigger the way that I was hearing it in the community and what have you. I couldn't wait to be of age. When I eventually became old enough, it was deﬁnitely my go-to in terms of the ﬂowering of my language. I was certainly using it quite a bit. Yeah, that had to do with age. It wasn't like, don't ever say it. It had to do with age. Faggot, yes. Not just the word, but in terms of homophobia at large.

One of my best friends growing up, and this is one of the hardest, crazy dudes, Malik, his name, who had two moms. Like, I guess, I imagined that Jay-Z situation or something. It was just prevalent in the community, as it's always been. There were no jokes to be made there. There were no jokes to be made there.

There were full out trans kids in my high school. I mean, I guess, part of it had to do with growing up in New York. We were very exposed. It would take a lot to shock us. Then we were spending a lot of time in The Village and what have you. We were, I guess, cultivated, in that sense to just be open. Yes, it was something that we would challenge if we were confronted by it. Of course, we groom to hear it even differently as time progressed, because you still would hear guys say what they would consider as a means of deriding someone, like stop acting like a pussy, or some sort.

It came embedded in a lot of language. It was only with time that I started hearing that and started challenging that, which is something I practice to this day, even in relationship to darkness and the way that certain things are embedded in the language.

[00:32:51] LW: As someone whose imagination was one of their favorite activities, as a teen now, how did you imagine your life unfolding? You had this acting interest. Did you see yourself becoming famous, or big actor, or movie star? Making your $36 a minute? How did you envision your life playing out?

[00:33:13] SW: Interestingly, for me, I had the fame bug wiped out of me really quick. In terms of the timeline, so by the time I'm 12, I guess, is when maybe The Cosby Show and stuff is happening, which is holding auditions in New York. I'm like, “Parents, can I go audition for this?” I remember my dad being like, “Look, the type of exposure you'll get in that world at this age is bothersome.” I remember him using Drew Barrymore as an example. “Look at her. Look what they're saying in the news about this young girl. She’s in rehab. She's the same age as you.” All this stuff.

“I'm not trying to discourage you from acting. Instead of taking you to auditions, why don't we sign you up for an acting school?” When I was 12, I started traveling to Greenwich Village by

© 2021 At the End of the Tunnel 13 ATEOTT 49 Transcript myself every weekend and taking classes at HB Studios. Then, at 14, I started at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and HB Studios on Saturdays. Every weekend, I'd be in the village taking acting classes.

Being in those acting classes, it shifted me from wanting to be famous to wanting to be good, because that's what we were ﬁguring out in class was, when our performances were torn apart by the acting teachers who were like, “I didn't believe you. You look like blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” We would spend so much time breaking down a performance that the thing that was most important to me was shining on stage and getting it right.

[00:34:52] LW: Did you know you were good when you were good in those moments? Or did they have to tell you and you're like, “Really? That resonated with you?”

[00:35:00] SW: I might have been overconﬁdent, because I have more memories of thinking I was good and being told that I wasn't. A good example is when I'm 14 at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, I did that Raisin in the Sun monologue. “Willy ran away with the money,” I started the monologue up here. I thought I was good, because I was emoting loud. I was screaming.

I remember, and the class, all the students [inaudible 00:35:31]. The teacher was like, “That was bullshit. You started here, meaning you had nowhere to go. You have to ﬁnd – every monologue. Everything is going to have a clear beginning, middle, and ending. There has to be an art. You have to take us somewhere. You can't just come in.” I remember learning more so of the ways in which I thought I was doing something good and being told, “Actually, you're cheating. You're cheating yourself and the audience of an experience.” It was more along those lines that I was learning, because mind you, from third grade, every year, there's normally two or three school plays. I was in every school play from third grade, till I ﬁnished high school.

The other thing, maybe the reason why I didn't dream of being famous is because my dream surrounded theater is really surrounded theater. I was hardly thinking about movies at all, or movie star type shit. I was thinking about theater. Not until maybe Spike Lee came along, did I go in my late teens, where I was like, “Okay. I got to do a move.”

[00:36:44] LW: That's interesting, because you're surrounded by all of these inﬂuences. You're exposed to these classes. I get the historical signiﬁcance of going to Morehouse, because obviously, I went to Howard. My brother who you know, went to Morehouse. It doesn't seem like that's the place you would go. You're already an hour from the center of acting on the East Coast. Why do you go to Morehouse for four years when you have all that talent and all that potential and all those connections? You're already going to the city every weekend as a teenager.

[00:37:17] SW: That thing was never an option in my life. I’ll tell you what else wasn't an option. My sisters and I, we had to go to a Black school. We had no choice. My parents were clear from the time we were little, “I'm only paying for your education if you go to a Black college.” Neither of my parents went to Black colleges. They just insisted that we did. Okay. I only applied to one school, Morehouse. I thought that that was okay. I knew I wanted to go to Morehouse when I was in elementary school, but that was on some Martin Luther King shit.

By the time I graduated from high school, my decision to go to Morehouse was very much on some Spike Lee shit. I was like, “Well, if he was able to ﬁgure out, I'll be okay.” I had to go to college. There was no question about that. I had to go to a Black school. I was just really clear. Then after years of watching the different world and knowing, there's always a ﬁght. Is it based on Howard? Is it based on Morehouse, Spelman, Hellman? Either way, I was going to Morehouse. Yeah, it wasn't an option, the idea of I'm going to go straight into the business thing.

[00:38:34] LW: How was the quality of the acting program there? Because I'm surprised you didn't go study with Al Freeman at Howard.

[00:38:40] SW: Yeah. Well, one, the acting program at Morehouse when I was there was non- existent. There was no acting program. It was at Spelman. I took 100 percent of my – I have a BA in acting, a 100 percent of my acting courses at Spelman.

[00:39:01] LW: Now it makes sense. For the listeners, Spelman is the all women college, historically Black college across the street from Morehouse.

[00:39:09] SW: Yes, that changed. That changed everything, because the women and men that I studied under there, immediately made that intersection between Black art, Black expression, womanism, feminism, progression. All of that was all bottled together. I had a playwriting class with Pearl Cleage, who went on to become – she's an amazing playwright and an amazing – she's always going on Oprah's book club and all this type of stuff.

She had just come out with a book called Mad at Miles when she was my professor, about how – it was a book of poetry and essays that was pretty much about how she had refused to listen to Miles Davis because, when she heard his muted trumpet, she could hear the muted screams of Cicely Tyson being abused by him. I remember, I was at Morehouse Spelman when the chronic came out.

I remember the chair of the department, Glenda Dickerson coming into class one day and being like – I don't know what we were supposed to be studying. I remember her saying, “Excuse me. Excuse me. I'm sorry. To see women on this campus, blasting a song. Did I hear correctly? Bitches ain't shit, but hoes. Did I hear correctly?” Yo.

To be in that environment for that moment and being surrounded by so many amazing young thinkers, activists who, at parties, were like, “I'm not dancing to that song, because listen to what the fuck he's saying.” We were hip-hop heads. We were dancers. To not dance was hard as fuck. The critical listening, that critical gaze was enhanced so much by studying acting at Spelman. Yeah, I did it at Spelman, actually, under Glenda Dickerson there and numerous other amazing teachers at Spelman.

[00:41:13] LW: Then you return to New York. Now you're in your master's studies, NYU Tisch School of the Arts. That's where you ﬁrst encounter Brooklyn Moon Cafe. Talk about how that all went down. Were you living in Brooklyn? You’re living in Fort Greene?

[00:41:31] SW: Yeah, I lived in Fort Greene. I think it's my junior year of Morehouse, my friends and I decided that we're all hanging out. We're all artists, we’re photographers, historians, poets – I didn't identify as poet at all. I was an actor.

[00:41:48] LW: You had Black Stacey under your belt. You'd written that in high school, I believe, right?

[00:41:53] SW: Yeah. Because I was a rapper. I always identiﬁed as a rapper, until – well, not always. I stopped when I was 16 or 17, because I ﬁgured I was too old to rap.

[00:42:10] LW: All right.

[00:42:10] SW: Yeah. I was trying to get signed when I was 14. I sent a demo to Rick Rubin and Russell Simmons when I was 14. They didn't respond. I was like, “Fuck. I give up.” At 17, I quit. We started a magazine when we were in Atlanta, called Red Clay. In that magazine, I decided I was going to have a section called, ‘Huh?’ I would start my section with a poem, and then follow it with an essay, which would be about social commentary or something. I point that out only because I had started writing poems. Not to read.

I didn't know anything about really, reading poetry aloud too much. I had started writing poems and essays for my magazine that my friends and I started. Then, I moved to New York to go to grad school at NYU, for acting there. That ﬁrst year there, school started in August, I guess. That October, I met some other young artists in my neighborhood in Fort Greene, who were like, “I'm shooting a short ﬁlm. You're an actor. I need an actor. Are you interested in being in it?” Maybe it was to a friend of my sister or something.

I ended up meeting a few other young artists. One of them was a girl who like, “Was my boyfriend's a poet. You should come here and read.” I was like, “Okay.” I don’t have shit to do. I didn't know anybody really, except for the 17 people in my acting program and my family deep in Brooklyn, but I didn't have any peers in the city per se. I was like, “Sure.”

That October, I went to a poetry reading and was blown away. Because – so this is 1994, October 1994. It's right at the beginning of really what they started to call backpacker hip-hop, because The Chronic and all that shit that came out in ’92, there's the heavily exploited commercial hip-hop, which has gone really gangster, One Direction. Biggie, all this shit is happening, my people. All this shit is happening and we're in New York, so we're feeling all that. The De La Soul tribe side of things is –

[00:44:18] LW: Right. Pharcyde, all that.

[00:44:20] SW: Pharcyde. It's now becoming called backpacker or underground.

[00:44:24] LW: Digable Planets.

[00:44:26] SW: Yeah. Digable. All this shit, right? There's a world in between that. I show up at this poetry reading in October ’94 and I'm like, “Oh.” Because I'm seeing a bridge between the literary arts that we come from the tradition of, the Mary Maracas, the Sonia Sanchezes, the Maya Angelou’s, the bell hooks, all these Audre Lordes, all this stuff, and the hip hop. I meet all these – I don't really meet them, but I see all these poets perform this night and I'm like, “Wow, that's crazy.” I would love to read at one of those things.

Cut to March 1995, right after spring break from NYU, I had spent that spring break hanging out with some friends from the forest and outside of Seattle, Washington State. I ﬂew back to Brooklyn and took the train. I don't know. I took the train home from the airport somehow. I don't think that line existed. I don't know how I got back home. I know it wasn't a taxi. Dragging my bag home, I pass a window, the Brooklyn Moon Cafe that's just foggy. I'm like, “Must be a lot of people inside. I'm going to put my bag down and come back and see what it is.”

On that trip, I had written one poem called ‘Amethyst Rocks’. I'd written it on this trip. With that poetry reading I saw in October in mind, if I ever encounter reading again. I put my bag down. I go into that cafe and it's packed. It's a poetry meeting. That girl's boyfriend, who I went to meet that ﬁrst time is the host. He's like, “Do you want to read something?” I'm like, “Put my name on the list.” I was the last name put on the list. I debuted that poem.

The people I met that night, I mean, those are – that's Jessica Caramore, that’s Yasiin Bey, it was Mos Def, [inaudible 00:46:19], muMz the Schemer. All these people who are still in my world, I met them all that night, March 16th, 1995. I remember it, because I read that poem. I had a little Urban Outfitters Journal. Urban Outfitters used to have these dope little, fake Moleskin journals that fit in your pocket. I'd written that poem there. The amount of time that I'd spent writing it, when I got up on stage, at the end of the night, I was like, “I know this thing.”

I put the journal away and just recited it. In fact, that wasn't happening a lot at the moment. I read that poem. When I ﬁnish, one, as I'm reading, I noticed this girl in the front seat, front row crying. Then I ﬁnish and the poetry reading is over and a person comes up to me and is like, “Hey, Allen Ginsberg is going to be reading at NYU next month. I'd love you to open up for him.” Someone else says, “Nikki Giovanni and Sonia Sanchez will be doing a reading at Medgar Evers College next month, we'd love you to open up for him.”

Someone else says, “The Fugees and KRS-One are performing at Union Square Rock Against Racism, we'd love you to open up for him.” Someone else said, “The Last Poets and Gil Scott are doing a show at SOB. We'd love you to open up for him.” I had one poem. March 16th, 1995. The friends I made that night are, like I said, still my friends and the doors that opened are the doors that I walked through.

[00:47:49] LW: Did you know that you killed it after the point was over? I know you say you saw the woman crying. Did you feel that, like we were talking about earlier, where you had the overconﬁdence and all that, but your teacher talked to you into taking people on a journey. It sounds like you had all the skills that all came to a head that night, right? You put the thing away. It's just your script, essentially. You gave a monologue. You probably started low. You went up high. You took them through that journey and then it's just like, everything just paid off in that moment.

[00:48:18] SW: Very much that in the sense that what was unique about that night and about that experience was that, by that time, I had already done at least 20 plays, more. I was very comfortable on the stage but surrounded by poets, not all of whom were comfortable on the stage. Some were sharing very vulnerable work that they were scared to share. Me, I was literally studying acting and was really comfortable in terms of performance, per se. That moment, is best described by the ﬁlm, The Matrix, that moment where he leans back and you see the bullet in slow mo.

I saw the words coming out of me. The way that I related to it at the time and I think it's the same way I relate to it now, has a lot to do with the fact that my dad was a pastor and that he had always referred to his profession as a calling.

I'd always had to defend myself from old ladies at church with who would be like, “Are you going to follow in your father's footsteps?” Which I always thought was crazy anyway, because I was like, “Isn't it supposed to be a calling? You can't make that decision. Not for the ministry. That's supposed to be a calling? What are you talking about? Were you paying attention in church?” I have that in my head. I would always defend myself by saying, “Well, no. The stage not the pulpit is my calling.”

That night, I remember reﬂecting on the idea of calling, because I had also identiﬁed as a rapper for a long time. I had been in Battle MC, of course, as an actor, but here I was in this new role reciting a poem that I had written and I felt more empowered and felt I was touching people and myself in ways that made me excited to write more and to explore more of myself. I felt that I was on the precipice of calling that night. I did feel, like what you said, was that all of these things were coming to a head. All the time spent reading and rereading works by Shakespeare and studying plays, because what studying theatre does to your – the type of attention you pay the literature is golden, because you're there, breaking down like, what does the author mean? What does the character mean? Where in the middle of this sentence does the character change their mind? They changed their mind in the middle of this phrase.

They say it’s this, and then they start to – Look at the stage direction. When do they change their mind when they were saying this? You're really getting into the nitty-gritty of what's between the lines when you're studying what other people have written as an actor. When you go to write, suddenly, all that studying pays off, because now you know that if someone were to sit with your work, they would be doing the same thing and that intention, that research, all that psychological work goes into the writing process.

It was interesting, because I was excited. I was more so excited about writing more. Performance was like, “Yeah, yeah. Of course. Of course.” The fact that here was a way in which I could perform things that I had written and it wasn't that I was dreaming of becoming a writer. It was more so that here was a unbuilt bridge that we were tasked with constructing, between our literary heroes and our hip-hop heroes. Fusing these worlds because, in fact, I remember thinking quite intensely about the fact that our heroes for our generation had been primed differently, because we had grown up listening to hip-hop, because we have listened to

Loddie Doddie and [inaudible 00:52:17], all the stuff, where we were just like, paying attention like, “Did you hear what he said? Wait, rewind that.”

All of that type of special attention that we paid, had us tuned in and primed for the spoken word movement that was to come there, because we were listening like that. To takeaway the music, which is also something that had been part of my practice, because I spent a lot of time writing rhymes as a kid. I spent so much time writing rhymes that when I would be in a battle and the beatbox, I always felt like half these beat boxes were slapping me. Because I’d be like, “No beat. No beat. No beat, yo. No beat. Just listen.” I’d go in like that. Just words. I was already in the mind state, when I was a rapper of, “No beat. Let me do my shit, so you can hear the word play.” It was really all of these things coming to a head.

[00:53:17] LW: How did you manage the ego component of being someone who could get up there, off-book, and deliver a poem that would have people crying, and then you get all this adulation, all these invitations? Did you feel, “I’m the shit in this community. I'm brand-new to this community, but I'm already –” Were you around all the time after that night? Or would you make yourself a little scarce? What was your relationship with all that leading up to Slam?

[00:53:48] SW: I was a 100 percent there. I was never thinking in terms of making myself scarce. I was scarce, because I couldn't come until after – I was always in play practice until 11 or midnight. I arrived at every poetry meeting late, because I was coming straight from play practice. That's a fact. That was just what it was.

[00:54:07] LW: You weren't trying to be cool.

[00:54:09] SW: No. I wasn't trying to be cool. It was like, I had play practice. I also felt like that play practice primed me. There's a stage in this motherfucker. I know, we're all writers here. We did it on stage. It wasn't ego. Although, there was the thing of like, I felt I had – I was building up my chops. Jazz musician would talk about just building up their chops from just playing every night. I was playing every day at school, and then going out at night and playing, so I was just in the thing. There was really no place for ego in any of that. There was no place for ego really.

The way I became frightened – and this is the other thing. Because with the poetry community and with the work that we were doing then, I knew exactly what I was doing when I wrote a poem that was different from what I was doing when I was writing a rap. One of the things I was doing, and it starts with the poem, ‘Amethyst Rocks’, it was a conscious decision. That braggadocio, that conﬁdence as a rapper can go a long way. I’m the coolest motherfucker. All this shit can go a long way. I decided that, if I'm writing a poem, if I'm going to use I, then that I has to be us and I have to brag about us, and our relationship to spirit, our relationship to the inﬁnite. I have to excuse myself from it, if it's going to be a I.

There was already a checking of the ego that was happening in the writing practice from the jump. Also, because there was no poets were going up there writing poems about why they were the freshest. We were writing poems about how we had been traumatized, or had fallen in love, or what we dream for our community, or blah, blah, blah, blah. There was really no room for that. It was just a great movement to be a part of.

[00:56:07] LW: You also mentioned that you saw the poetry as an algorithm, or you saw it as coding. What did you mean by that?

[00:56:14] SW: Well, that realization started there. “I stand on the corner of the block slinging Amethyst Rocks, drinking 40s of Mother Earth's private nectar stock, dodging cops.” All this shit had to do with slang and terminology that anybody who grew up in hip-hop would identify with immediately. Put on a page, or alone without music on the stage for someone who was not coming from that reality, it may have sounded like, “The fuck. Yo, this is science ﬁction. This is crazy. What is this?”

That thing about the algorithm and all that, the coded language and what I realized we were playing with was essentially a few years later, when I started getting invited to universities to present my work and realizing that, at that time, I felt like a traveling salesman who was there to show the new efﬁciency and language that we had found. Here's how you can say this now. You've been looking for a way to say that we are connected to the all. That our struggle, which is not over, is opening a gateway in our consciousness and awareness. Whereas, we see all that we've been and all that we are, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, all this shit.

I'm like, oh, this is how these poems essentially, like, we're hacking into and ﬁnding shortcuts and saying stuff, one, that we all knew or felt in the sense of the Black experience. Here's a quicker way to say it. It's just like the term nigger in a sense, which is like a ﬂash drive that has all these things in it, that carries so much in it. Yes, at the time, I was talking about the idea of the algorithm and the coding and decoding was that we were and are using language in a way that abbreviates the experience for the sake of progressing it to the next chapter.

This is what language does. This is what language does. When you're able to – like the Dao says that naming is the beginning of all particular things. Of course, when something is named, well, one, there's something that is potentially lost by being named. Then there's something that abbreviates the experience, because you no longer have to talk around the experience. You can just call it what it is and keep moving. That's some white supremacist bullshit, and keep moving.

Being able to label things can allow us to – that's the lyrical hopscotch that we were playing at that moment, as those of us who were branding ourselves as the children of Octavia Butler, who were branding ourselves as the children of Audre Lorde and Assata Shakur and all this stuff and trying to make sense of the aversion that we had. Because the other thing that was very special about the poetry movement at that time is that this is at the moment where the Black capitalists of hip-hop were exploding and being celebrated for those capitalistic choices. The poetry scene was very much like, that's not what I'm here to talk about.

[00:59:43] LW: It's interesting. I was just going to mention that, because you obviously have the anti-capitalism message in a lot of your work today. You're also being sheltered, because you're still pretty much in school at that time. When you get into the “real world,” you got to pay your bills, you got to pay your rent and all of that. You're getting offered all these things. How much were you thinking about the exchange, or the transactions at that time? Or were you just saying yes to everything, because you knew that was going to lead to more exposure and give your message a lot more weight?

[01:00:14] SW: Well, being me, I was thinking about this stuff all of the time. All of the time. First off, I should start by saying that that summer of 1995 during that March 9th –

[01:00:34] LW: March 16th. Yeah.

[01:00:35] SW: I randomly, by saying yes to a bunch of stuff, was able to pay my New York City rent that summer from poetry gigs, all of which I had accepted without realizing that I was being paid. I remember arriving to the ﬁrst one, doing my thing, blah, blah, blah. I told my mom about it, then I got offstage. The person who invited me, Bob Holden, was like, “Here's some money for you, da, da, da.” I was like, “What?” I had no idea. I didn't expect it. Then I was asked to do a reading for NYU medical school Black Doctors Organization, all this stuff that ﬁrst summer. They'd be like, “Here's your –” I’m like, “What? What, what, what?”

It was just shocking to me, but that is my own naïveté. Because I mean, even when I was in undergrad and I had done my ﬁrst professional play at Atlanta, I remember auditioning and getting the role in the South African play, My Children, My Africa, in 1992 and being told that I was going to be given a salary of a $150 a week. I remember being like, “Well, wait. You don't have to, because actually, I'm in school. I have a scholarship.” I don't know. I was trying to save the theater money. I have no idea. I was like, “You don't understand. I love acting. I will do this for free.”

The fact that people would pay me to do something that I love just struck me as ludicrous at the time. There was a level of naïveté on my part. Then, of course, becoming the ﬁgurehead of the movement and being offered money non-stop, yes, it had me questioning stuff. I came across a column a few days ago, going through an old journal, and the poem, I paraphrase, but I know it began with, “They are preparing to introduce me to their God.” Then I was talking about money. I know there's a line in there like, “No gold is gold enough to tempt the darkness from these minds.”

I think that might have been when Slam was heading to Cannes, the Film Festival there or something. I had this sense of, I had to be very careful. I had to be very careful, because I felt like what happened in March of ’95 and everything that had happened had only happened because I had opened my mouth to talk about particular things in a particular way. That's what had to lead the way.

I mean, all of those thoughts were embedded in the ﬁlm Slam. I should preface this by saying that it’s in October 1994 when I began meditating, when I began the practice of sitting for meditation, which is to say before that March. I was already in a meditative practice, and had gone through a horrendous breakup, and had discovered this inner world and its connection to the all.

I carried my journal in one pocket. I carried the Dao in another, every day. I was superstitious about it. I carried the piece of Amethyst in my front left pocket, which is where the opening line of “carrying amethyst rocks” is because I was like, I would hold it as I was walking down the street, trying to stay centered and grounded. The question of ego and all of these things, because I felt – I had already felt as if my ego had led to this sort of – what I had deemed as a betrayal in a relationship and all this type of stuff. The role of ego. I was already in the practice of questioning. Those early years were very much about remaining centered from the beginning as these things were coming and going, “Yeah, yeah, yeah. I see.” Whatever.

[01:04:44] LW: Talk about – I know there's a story floating around out there that you were offered an opportunity to write for the movie Slam, but then you somehow finagled your way into acting in the film. What's the story behind that?

[01:04:59] SW: Yeah. March 1995. Come one year later, in March, April 1996, I make my ﬁrst trip to the Nuyorican Poets Cafe. Because my friend, Moms, who just passed recently, had ventured there and was like, “Yo, they have these slams there. It's a competitive –” I'm like, “Competitive?” Because we were at the Brooklyn Moon doing open mics. There was no competition. It was more like church of the irreverent. We were just trying to give each other the spirit and hyping each other up and all of this type of shit. The idea of competitive was weird.

He was like, “Yo, they do give you 50 bucks if you win. We didn’t have to pay bills.” He's like, “I saw a dude who did it get a publishing deal.” Paul Beatty. I was like, “What? Let's go check it out.” I went in March the following year, a year into doing poetry, and won. I found out that the night that I won was the last night to qualify you for the yearly competition. Because I won that night, I was now going to be in the semi-ﬁnals. I went again that March 1995-96, and won that, which then meant I was going to be in the ﬁnals in April of 1996.

Now, mind you, during that time, things are happening. Not only am I in school, my daughter Saturn is born in April 1996. That April before – yeah, I guess the night of the Grand Slam, there's a New York Times journalist there who asked a few questions, whatever. It was interesting. The whole time. Now, I will say this, you asked about ego and da, da, da. Did I ever think I was the shit? No, never. From that time in March ’95, the magic in the room for all of us was felt.

There were always people showing up with cameras and like, “I want to make a documentary,” and all this shit. We knew that we were on the cusp of something crazy. We felt like, we were the new lyrical Octavia Butler meet [inaudible 01:07:19]. We knew as a collective that we were on the cusp of something crazy. Erykah Badu was there. Like I said, Yasiin Bey was there. None of these people were famous. All of these people were there, and all of them were like, “Yo, what the fuck are we participating in? This is wild.”

There would be the occasional famous rapper, Common or Pharoahe Monch, or Wu Tang or De La that would show up and be like, “Yo, you guys are doing something crazy. Have you thought about adding music?” We knew that. When I say that there was a New York Times journalist a year later, by that time, I was already used to the fact that we knew that we were on the cusp of something with poetry and we're used to journalists from Denmark and Norway and all over the place coming in like, “We want to capture this new spoken word craziness in New York.”

I remember talking to some [inaudible 01:08:15]. Anyway, I won the grand slam that night. That was on a Friday. That Sunday, I wake up to a call from my dad, which is already weird, because my dad's in church on Sunday. He's a pastor. “What are you doing on the phone? Aren’t you supposed to be in the pulpit?” He's like, “Your poem’s on the front page of the Sunday Times.”

Sure enough, I'd run out and get a New York Times. I've seen my poem on the front page of the New York Times, an excerpt of a poem. Sure enough, that day, or that Monday, I have tons of calls from literary agents, lecture booking agencies, all this shit. I'm still in school. I have a daughter that is three-weeks-old. Yes, I do strongly have that sense that this thing and this is what I tried to capture in my book, The Dead Emcee Scrolls, this thing that we're writing about, it's only happening because of what we're talking about in our poetry. We are just the vessels. My cat wanted to make a cameo.

[01:09:23] LW: That was awesome.

[01:09:27] SW: There was a very protective space around making sure that we were putting our all into what we were saying and not misleading anyone and making sure that the text was open and progressive. It's like creating the site and making sure that it's open source and all this type of stuff. All of that stuff was in embedded in the work intentionally. As all these other things came, there was a sense of yeah, yeah, but of course. I get it now. I get it now.

As soon as we tuned into that thing, it always brought me back to that Rakim lyric, where he was like – they'll be like, “Yo, we had to get together last week. We know everyone was there, except the Black sheep.” He says, “It's one thing I don't need as a spotlight, because I already got light.” That sense with the poetry was that as soon as we tune into our inner sense of worth and greatness and our connection to each other, and the all in all of this, then of course, the outside world will be like, “Hey, hey, hey, hey. That's interesting, buddy. That's interesting.”

It was like, “Okay. I might be interested,” but I'm protecting this thing. Marc Levin, the director of Slam was in the grand slam championship that night. He didn't approach me, though. That's April ’96. I didn't meet him until September of ’96. Between April and September, I did a dozen other poetry meetings. I didn't know it, but he was at each one. When he meets me in September of ’96 and invites me to his office, saying, “I have a film concept I'd like to talk to you about.” The first thing he does is he presses play. One, I'm impressed by this. Now, I'm in acting school still. I'm in my second year now. I'm in acting school. This guy says he's a film director. He invites me to his company's office. It's a huge fucking – they have the entire floor of this huge building in New York with film posters, Robert Downey, Jr, all this shit.

All the time, I'm like, poetry brought me here. It’s very protective of this thing. He hits play on this thing. On the screen, it's footage of me and all these different performances between April and that September, in Montreal, all this shit. “What the fuck? This a stalker?” He's like, “I've been watching you.” He tells me his story of doing these documentaries on prison life and gang culture, and that he had been reﬂecting heavily on what some of the kids in gangs had said to him. He had done this documentary called Gang Bangin’ in Little Rock, which was maybe the ﬁrst time there was ever a footage of a drive-by in a documentary of some shit.

He was like, “When I asked the kids, when I spoke to the kids, they will always be like, “When are you going to do a real movie?” He's like, “This is a real movie.” They were like, “No. Like the one they show in the mall.” He decided he wanted to do a picture. He was like, “And I've been watching your work. I really would like to ask you to co-write this thing with me.”

Now, I had been writing for myself for the stage and I was dreaming of acting. I was in grad school for acting. My initial response was, “Right, you understand that I'm on my lunch break right now from the grad acting program at NYU? It's hard to get into that school. I'm an actor, yo. Right?” He was like, “Yeah, yeah. I know. I know. You're a great writer. I don't know if anyone's told you, but you're a great writer and a great performer, I see. Great performer. Your writing is really –”

I wasn't ready to hear anything about my writing separated from performing. That came as a shock. I was pretty point blank with like, “I don't know if I can agree to writing something without performing in it, honestly.” I think that week, it was Bones Malone who got arrested and thrown in prison. Maybe was already in prison. No, Bones had been in prison already. Since April, he had been in prison and had said to him, “Yo. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. You should let that kid act.” He reached out to Bones and he was planning on having Bones Malone be the main character. He's like, “No, no. You should let that kid act. If I get out in time, I'll be in the ﬁlm. You should let that kid do it.” Thanks to Bones Malone –

[01:13:59] LW: Being arrested.

[01:14:02] SW: Yeah. He was open to me acting in the ﬁlm. Then I could write.

[01:14:06] LW: Did he make you audition?

[01:14:09] SW: No, no, no, no, no. What he did is he connected me to Sonia [inaudible 01:14:12], muMs the Schemer and Beau Sia, all poets that he had encountered by spying at the poetry meetings. He brought us together and said, “You are the four poets that I’d love to help piece this thing together.” We have an idea of a story, let's talk.

We spent nine months, a lot of times doing improv in front of a camera, surrounding ideas, then watching the tape and going, “Oh, that works. That works.” Writing down what worked from the improvs. We ended up with a 35-page outline, as opposed to a script, of the story that we all worked out together. Then we went to shoot and we shot the ﬁlm in nine days. We shot it at [inaudible 01:14:55], as you probably know.

[01:15:13] LW: Obviously, it won Sundance, it won Cannes. How did you deal with the notoriety? I mean, this is what you've been working your whole life to become is this known presence in entertainment. Obviously, you got a lot of attention. I don't know if having the attention ever really matches the expectation of what it may feel like when you get all that attention. You have a lot of attention now, obviously. When it was ﬁrst starting beyond the poetry cafes and whatnot, I saw that ﬁlm in – wherever I was. I think it was in New York, or wherever I was at the time. I saw it by myself. I was completely spellbound when I came out of there and told everybody they needed to go see it.

Then I would run into you in New York City from time to time. I was always like, “Oh, wow. That's Saul Williams,” on the subway with his daughter in the baby carriage, or at this restaurant, or whatever. I will start going to these poetry readings. I'm just one of many people coming up to you, probably all the time. How did you handle that for yourself?

[01:16:15] SW: The poetry was the star. It was interesting. I handled it strategically. What I had realized around that time was that like, this is right around the time when – it seemed the only young Black male actors that were getting work were rappers. They were taking all the work from the – The fact that I was a trained actor wasn't really helping me.

They'd be like, “You sound like a trained actor. Can you sound more –” which was some bullshit. Anyway, but it was part of the thing that made me go, “Well, maybe I should focus on making an album, since that's the gateway into getting more acting jobs. Maybe I should do that.” Plus, I knew that if I did, I felt like if I made too much buzz as an actor, it would be weird. I'd never be taken seriously as a musician.

I then focused my attention immediately on the other things that I wanted to do, so that I could do them all at the same time and it would go like that. I ended up signing with Rick Rubin and

© 2021 At the End of the Tunnel 29 ATEOTT 49 Transcript doing a book deal with Simon and Schuster right, I think both before Slam even came out. I was focused on drum and bass. I was just like, “Okay, okay. I got to make sure that I make headway in this world as well, so that none of them grow faster than the –” I was just busy being strategic, having fun.

The main thing was this, though. This is the most crazy thing in terms of ego, was that with the music question, that was the ﬁrst time I really got confronted by ego, personally, where I was questioning, is this purely an egoic, if that's a word, pursuit? Am I only doing this for ego? Because the main thing was this, was that at that moment with Slam and every moment that followed was the sense that we were living in a state of emergency. The same way that we'll feel it now. It may be hard for people to comprehend. We felt the same exact way then. There were police murders. There was all this craziness in society and systemic. It was crazy.

Slam, which was about the criminal justice system and the war on drugs, which is the same exact shit that we're focused on right now, it felt crucial to spark that ﬂame and to keep on attacking those big questions through the work. I remember, for example, after Slam being asked to do something in theater and being like, theater feels like a delicacy right now, which was the weirdest thing for me to say, because I grew up in theater, loving it. Suddenly, I'm like, “No, it's a state of emergency. We have to do something that's going to hit more people and not just people who can pay $80 for a ticket.”

There was a state of emergency that I felt at the time. With music, when Rick Rubin came into play, because that's the ﬁrst time that a lot of money started popping up, money that I'd never heard of. You get offered a record deal and that's a large amount. Then the next day, the manager is like, “And you're being offered a publishing deal for the same amount.” I’m like, “Wait, what is that?” Having to learn what music publishing is and contemplating doubling what I already thought was lot, all this shit. You know I'm saying? Thinking, “Okay, this would be the moment where I would get fucked up if I'm not careful.” This is when I'm bumping into you at Whole Foods, or some shit, right? At that time, it would be Erawan.

[01:20:09] LW: Right. The old Erawan.

[01:20:09] SW: It’s back to Erawan now. The amount of meditation, the amount of reading, the amount of wanting to be mindful and not waste any opportunity, I always felt it would be crazy to take any opportunity and be like, “Okay. Look at how fresh I am,” when I could use that same opportunity to say, "Let's think and talk about this.”

[01:20:37] LW: Right. You've also talked about how you're not really creating content, music, whatever, for now, as much as you're creating it for 30 years from now, the next generations because, admittedly, your whole presence and what you talk about, you're almost like a provocateur. It's very confronting for a lot of people. That's intentional, right? Because you've been accused, of course of being weird and strange, but you're like, “No. Weird and strange is what's normal.” What's not normal is trying to ﬁt in and say the right, the politically correct thing. How intentional was that? When did you feel like you started down that very, very intentional path in your work?

[01:21:19] SW: That too is all in. I'm operating to this day off of a number of Tiffany's and glimpses of whatever that all circle around this moment that you're asking me about. It's all from that. There were conﬁrmations around all along the way. I mean, the ﬁrst time I met Rick Rubin. He's like, “Your poetry, wow,” and he brings me to his house. I mean, his house, fucking hell.

[01:21:52] LW: Shangrila out in Malibu?

[01:21:54] SW: No, this is before that. This has been, it's on Miller Drive right behind what used to be the Tower Records, on Sunset. There's this huge 12-foot Buddha. Literally, he brings me into his house. He has this recording of Kabir. Like, who is it? Robert Frost reading Kabir with a sitar? He presses play on this recording, crosses his legs, and closes his eyes. For the next 45 minutes, we just sit there in meditative stance listening to Kabir and the sitar. That's our ﬁrst meeting. Then when the side of the cassette is over, he goes, “So, are you ready to make an album?”

We're just like, “Yeah.” I was like, “Well actually, I sent a cassette to you when I was 14. I think it's taken you,” at the time, I'm probably 26, “I think it's taken an extremely long time for you to respond to that cassette. Sadly, in the meanwhile, I would say that hip-hop has changed a lot and you've gone on, you're doing the Chili Peppers and all this stuff. I think you owe a debt,

© 2021 At the End of the Tunnel 31 ATEOTT 49 Transcript actually, to come back to hip-hop,” and blah, blah, blah, blah. It was this weird conversation, but it started with meditation. I'm forgetting your question in terms of I want to circle back to what you’re asking. Do you remember that question?

[01:23:25] LW: Yeah, which was about you having this very intentional focus on pushing the envelope and getting people, provoking people, confronting people, and getting them to look at their own level of self-actualization, or lack thereof.

[01:23:41] SW: Yeah. I mean, I think –

[01:23:43] LW: I like the Rick Rubin story. I want you to ﬁnish the Rick Rubin story.

[01:23:51] SW: There’s so many Rick Rubin stories. What happened?

[01:23:53] LW: Did you guys create something at that moment in time?

[01:23:56] SW: No. The next thing that happens is, at that time, I'm living in New York, but I'm visiting LA because I had a concert. He picks me up from the concert and takes me to his house. That happens. I ﬂy back home. We decide we're going to do this, the lawyers and managers and da, da, da. We're going to do this. He's in New York for the weekend with Chris Rock, I remember that him and Chris Rock show up at one of my weird art gallery shows.

The next day, he's like, “Meet me at my hotel at Central Park West,” whatever. I meet him and we're walking through Central Park. Jessica Care Moore had just published my ﬁrst manuscript, called The Seventh Octave, which had been a conscious choice, which points to what you're talking about. All these offers had come after my poetry was on the front page of the New York Times. My friend, Jessica, was starting a publishing company on her own. At the time, I decided to keep it independent and to publish through a friend, as opposed to dealing with a major, because I didn't think that it was the right time. It was choices like that.

Here I was walking through Central Park with Rick Rubin. Rick is holding my book, The Seventh Octave. He goes, “Saul, you're a great writer.” Then he pulls from his pocket, a double CD of

The Beatles White Album. He goes, “Saul, you're a great writer. This is songwriting. Learn the difference. When you have 20 songs, we'll go into the studio.” That's that.

The next day, I live in Brooklyn at the time, I don't know, about $10,000 worth of equipment shows up at my house; keyboards. Actually, this keyboard and some other shit that I no longer have, but this keyboard. I have never made music before. I've only written raps. I'm like, “I’m about to make music.” Yeah.

The next year, within a few months, I moved to LA. I would invite into my house to hear – like, “I got eight songs. You need to come hear these.” He come by the house, and he'd be very critical, “That's not a song. That's just a very long chorus.” He'd be going on about song structure and I'd be playing him music. We'd be in his car and we'd be exchanging stuff. I play him Portishead and drum and bass shit, none of which he had heard before. He'd be like, “Interesting.” Then I'm like, “Do you like Jeff Buckley?” He's like, “I love his voice, but I hate his song structure.” I’m like, “Who is this guy? What the fuck?”

Eventually, eventually, we agree on the songs that I've written that are songs. That ended up making the album. Anyway, yeah. Rick, I was going to say though, was someone who was very much into meditation.

[01:27:08] LW: Veganism, too.

[01:27:10] SW: Veganism. All these things that were also a part of my world and that I thought was crucial to protect the sacred space of what was being created, I felt very much like he was about that. At the time, I wasn't ready for all that he was presenting. There were some ways in which I thought he was trying to throw me off my path, which I realized now that he wasn't, but I just wasn't ready, because I was too naively protecting my work.

What I mean by that, for example, is that at the time, DJ Screw was alive, Chopped and Screwed stuff from Houston. He sent me 20 DJ school mixtapes. He was like, “Think about this.” I only heard some of the lyrics. I was like, “What are you trying to get me to think about?” About the fact that he was checking nine – Mike Wall and all this shit, the popularization of

Chopped and Screwed shit is the mid-2000s. It's the late 90s. He's trying to get me to do some Chopped and Screwed shit as my poetry, when I wasn't ready to hear it, unfortunately.

[01:28:17] LW: Well, you've evolved into – it's almost you have your own genre of music. That's what it sounds like to me. Something that I'm very impressed with. This is one of the reasons why I like Kanye West. A lot of people don't like Kanye. I love Kanye West. I love his production value. More so than that, I love his storytelling. You can play with any one of his albums from beginning to end and you hear a story.

You take it to the next level. It's almost like, you approach it like a screenwriter, or an actor where you come up with the whole backstory of this character and these sub-characters and these plots and sub-plots. Then you create from that space. Was that something that you were very intentional about when you ﬁrst started your music production? Or is that something that it evolved into? Because it's almost like, you brought in all of your acting experience into your music.

[01:29:15] SW: Yeah. It's something that –

[01:29:18] LW: Including a character that you create for each album.

[01:29:21] SW: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, it's something that I've been – because it's also in the poetry books, too. In my poetry books, I've tried to – it's trying to get closer and closer to writing a novel or a screenplay. I did decide early on, around the time of the earliest poems, that I wanted to tell a new generation of folk tales, a new generation of storytelling, and what have you. Yes, it is intentional, in that I've worked to conceptualize these stories, and to challenge myself more and more in terms of how much of a story we can tell and share through a medium. That really comes from the fact that I really come from musical theater. I know we're not going to talk much about where we are now.

However, I will say that I've spent the past seven years writing a musical, which I shot last year, and ﬁnished shooting right before the pandemic began, in Rwanda, and have spent the entirety of quarantine in post-production for my ﬁrst musical, which will for anyone who's followed my

© 2021 At the End of the Tunnel 34 ATEOTT 49 Transcript career, will make all the sense in the world when you see it, in terms of the storytelling, the performance and I’m not in it. The performance, the music, all of this stuff. Then it's like, okay.

I came to realize that all of that stuff was to prepare me for what I'm doing now. What I'm doing now is that and working on a series of graphic novels. It's all illustrated word and all of this stuff. Yeah, it was intentional. Yes, I'm with you in terms of loving storytelling and music. I mean, earlier today, I went for a walk before we spoke, but before I went for that walk, I had music on shufﬂe and Jimi Hendrix ‘Machine Gun' came on. I don't know if you're familiar with that recording, but Jimi Hendrix ‘Machine Gun’ is recorded – it's only recorded live. There's no studio recording of it, and it's recorded the year that he died.

He's singing about Vietnam. At some point, he makes his guitar sound like machine guns. It's crazy, but he's painting a picture with sound that is a movie, which got me into thinking about and then listening to another one of his songs, which is called ‘1983’, which has that beautiful moment, “so down and down and down.” It's all sci-ﬁ, mermaids and all this type of stuff.

In fact, my favorite musicians, storytellers, but particularly in music, do just what you're talking about. When I think of Nina Simone, whether it's ‘Four Women’, or ‘Pirate Jenny’, which is adapted from the Bertolt Brecht song, like their storytelling there. Fela. One of my favorite Fela songs, ‘Cofﬁn for Head of State’, which is him telling the story of how he carried his mother's cofﬁn to the president's house and said, “You motherfuckers killed her. You bury her.”

It's so meta, because he wrote a song to perform for the carrying of the cofﬁn, about the carrying of the cofﬁn, about how they killed her, and about what he's demanding of the presidency and it's happening. The music has the story. The text tells the story. It's concept building and world building that is just on a level. Yeah, I'm into that.

[01:33:22] LW: You've also said a couple things. We're going to wrap up in a second. You said a couple of things that really stood out to me in my research, when someone once asked you about the Nike commercial that used your song, ‘The Reparations’. You said, “Look, I didn't do a Nike commercial. Nike did a Saul Williams commercial, right?” Which speaks to the idea of shifting what we consider to be mainstream.

Then you also talked about how your love for different genres, it's not that you explore these various genres to balance yourself, to feel balanced, it’s that you get balanced from the genres. I may be butchering that a little bit. What I love about your work is that you take this – it's not a contrarian view. It's almost like, this is what reality actually is and everything that we've grown accustomed to as reality is what we really need to be questioning.

You have your presence, and the wardrobe that you wear, and the lyrics that you have, and all of that. It's causing us to really think about what we have normalized, including what you said about capitalism and about the perpetuation of this idea that in order to, I guess, catch up with white people, or be successful, we need to emulate the same level of capitalism. We need to acquire things. You made a point in one of your talks about how the people who made the biggest changes didn't really have anything.

[01:35:01] SW: Yeah. They had a lot, but the thing that they were counting wasn't necessarily money.

[01:35:05] LW: Materially. Yeah, exactly.

[01:35:07] SW: Well, ﬁrst when you talk about that sense of the mainstreaming of ideas, or of ideology, I guess, I feel part of that, because my observation has often been with this cyclical nature of the popularity of poetry itself. Here we are on the precipice, once again, of a poet being on the cover of Vogue and Time Magazine, and all this stuff since the inauguration, the amazing poet, Amanda Gorman. There's that spoken word moment that you remember that we've been referring to from the late 90s and 2000s. Before that, there's Gil Scott Heron and the last poets.

It seems like every 20 years, poetry makes its way from the periphery to the mainstream. It seems like, when it does, part of the poet's job is to say, "The periphery is where it's at.” Like, "There’s shit that you're calling the mainstream is really just the oil slicks on the ocean. Go deeper. Go deeper.” That process of participating in that observing, that happening, and being very careful about what we share and what is mainstreamed in that process, because of course, the industry just needs to regurgitate and recycle in order to feed itself. We are hoping to deliver

With the Nike thing, I remember quite simply reading the Dao once again. The Dao said, the master does her work and walks away. The people will marvel and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, but the master doesn't really get to experience that, because she's onto the next task at hand. It's always been about the work. I think, at the end of the day, my justiﬁcation with the – and I've done a million collaborations with – I just ﬁnished doing a Louis Vuitton campaign, where I was asked to write and then, eventually, asked to perform.

At the time with the Nike thing, which was 2008, the thought was simply that they didn't ask me to write anything. They asked, could they use something that I had written, that I already knew what I had embedded that song with. I knew every amount of energy. In fact, I wrote that song in this room. This very room that I'm talking to you from right now. I recorded that song in this room. I know what's in this room. I literally have been in this room that long.

Then I saw it is a challenge. What do you think is going to happen? Are they going to put that in a commercial and people are going to run to see what they're selling, or they're going to run to see what I'm singing? What do you think is going to happen? I know it's in my song. I don't know what's in your shoe. At the time, it felt like a no brainer. I was like, “Sure. Sure.” It would probably be a completely different thing that they had asked me to write something at the time.

[01:38:32] LW: You've mentioned that your kids, you credit your kids with your success. You have a daughter, you have a son. What did you mean by that?

[01:38:39] SW: Well, what being a parent, before any of this stuff happened, did was just get me thinking in a less selfish way. Although, I have to follow that up by saying that by being an artist, I was consumed with career and all this stuff. I think that there is always going to be a level of selfishness. I think it's a great challenge to be the child of an artist, when parents are wrapped up in their creative work and [inaudible 01:39:07], or touring in my example, or whatever that is. I think there's a lot of selfishness, in a sense, involved in that, a lot of stuff that kids have to make sense of.

In terms of the content, I was always writing with the sense that, “Oh, my kids are probably going to listen to this.” I would always put in secret messages, or very open messages in my work for them for whenever they encounter it. Like you said, 30 years down the line, or whatever. It was always like, at some point, you may encounter this and I'd like you to be enriched by it and feel like, “Oh, but whatever.” My work has always been seasoned and peppered with the sensibility that comes from the fact that I know younger ears are listening.

Which also, I guess, maybe, in a sense, may have – I don't know. I don't know if it forbids me from going certain directions, or what have you. I mean, we know a lot of artists with kids who say and do all types of shit. My work is a representation of what I also was consciously thinking, this is for you at some point to check out and go, “My dad was weird. My dad was interesting. Or my dad was toxic.” They got to do that.

[01:40:34] LW: You got this movie coming out, Akilla’s Escape. It was supposed to be released, I think, before the pandemic, right?

[01:40:41] SW: No. No. I did Akilla’s Escape in the spring of 2019. In the summer spring of 2019, before I left for Rwanda to shoot my film. It's been a natural progression that it ended up in the Toronto Film Festival, the filmmaker is from Toronto. Ended up in the Toronto Film Festival in September, I think that was. I can't remember. I think that's September. August, September. Now, it's slated for release in June in the states. I don't know what month in Canada, in the UK, in France, but it has theatrical releases in all those places. I also did the score, and the soundtrack of that film. I collaborated with Massive Attack, the score and soundtrack of Akilla’s Escape. That was really cool as well.

[01:41:32] LW: You've been nominated for some stuff that's been winning some awards. I just saw the trailer. It looks like some Liam Neeson Taken type of storyline. I could be wrong. I don't know what it's about, but it looks amazing. You're doing some ﬁght scenes and –

[01:41:47] SW: Yeah. That was the funny thing for me is that it gave me a personal excuse to – all the excuse I needed to insist upon having a personal trainer. Yeah. I mean, my kids – not all my kids have seen it, but the ones that have have been cracking up about seeing me in ﬁght

© 2021 At the End of the Tunnel 38 ATEOTT 49 Transcript poses. Yeah, I've known the director ever since that came out and we've talked about this. It's a really amazing thing for him to have this opportunity. His name is Charles. It's extraordinary.

[01:42:28] LW: He's been working on it since 2010, apparently. It sounds like a labor of love for him as well. Awesome, man.

Well, look. I just want to loop this back around to childhood. Because here's the thing, I've done a lot of these conversations. What I ﬁnd is that a lot of times what people are most curious about as a young person usually ends up playing a role in what they end up becoming passionate about in their adult years. You just, in your own words, your imagination being your favorite activity and imagining that the acorn was a grenade, and the sleigh was a weapon. It’s obviously a masculine trait to be combative and to –

[01:43:18] SW: Have war.

[01:43:19] LW: – want to ﬁght. It's really about wanting to challenge convention. That's what war really is. The status quo is not working for me. I want to do something different. I want to impose my idea of how I think things should go on to whatever that conventional thing it happens to be.

[01:43:39] SW: That’s a very generous reading of it, Light. That’s very generous – Because I think I’m just trying to blow shit up.

[01:43:48] LW: I don't know, man. You look back, and it does – Like Steve Jobs said, you can't connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking back. You haven't said anything in this conversation that I feel hasn't come into play at some point in a crucial way, in a crucial way, in a divinely timed way that has moved the storyline forward of who Saul Williams is in his own personal evolution, and who you are in the evolution of our society. You've deﬁnitely made that impact with your imagination, with your execution.

Because it's one thing to imagine. It's one thing to imagine, “Oh, I want to say this. I want to do that.” It's another thing to actually get in front of people and to put the thing in your back pocket and to just let it rip. There's not a lot of people who are able to do that in a way that can make as big of an impact as you've made.

I want to acknowledge you for showing up, man, and going back to the Brooklyn Moon Cafe that night, just investigate the foggy windows and insisting that you write that movie Slam, and just all of the things that you had to do in order to – turning down the music deal with the big publishing company and going independent. I mean, that stuff is not – any one of those would be a lifetime decision for a lot of people. It's inspiring. I just can't wait for people to hear the backstory behind all of the wonderful things that you've done, because I think that gives it so much context.

I hope that you guys listen to this. Go back and listen to your entire discography, which is what I did, because I'd be honest, I wasn't as familiar with all of your music. I've heard some of it, but I went back and listened to all of it. Honestly, I can't wait to listen to all of it again and just have it on shufﬂe because it's really, the body of work itself could be one big, mega album. You wouldn't be able to tell really which one is from which piece. There's one from 2020, it's you and this other guy. What is that? Because that's amazing. It's on Spotify. Here, I'll pull it up.

[01:45:55] SW: Is it Rohn?

[01:45:56] LW: it's Ted Hearne. Ted Hearne Place. What is that? It's amazing.

[01:46:06] SW: I was commissioned to write Libretto for an opera oratorio on gentriﬁcation by the LA Philharmonic, along with Ted Hearne. Ted Hearne was commissioned to as a composer and he turned to me as his [inaudible 01:46:24]. That is the libretto of a piece called ‘Place’, which is about gentriﬁcation, that was scheduled to go on stage at the LA Phil at the Disney Concert Hall last May.

Now, I think it's going to be there in March 2022. That's something that was sidelined by the pandemic. It veered at them and then was scheduled to start this whole thing that was sidelined by the pandemic. Yeah, Ted and my collaboration was for this the libretto of this opera oratorial place. Yeah, it was nominated for Grammy. Yeah, just these past Grammys and all that. That's that. Pretty crazy. You got to see it on stage. I mean, that recording is the recording of what's happening on stage. The stage is crazy.

[01:47:19] LW: Beautiful. Man, thank you. Thank you, again, for making the time to have this conversation. I really do appreciate that. So great to connect with you again.

[01:47:28] SW: Thanks, man.

[01:47:28] LW: It's been a while. Yeah. I look forward to crossing paths again, at some point soon when all this is –

[01:47:35] SW: Indeed.

[01:47:36] LW: – is over. Cool.

[01:47:37] SW: Yup. Forgive my meandering mind.

[01:47:42] LW: No, that was awesome, man. I really do appreciate it, brother.

[END OF INTERVIEW]

[01:47:47] LW: Thank you for listening to my interview with Saul Williams. If you have not watched his ﬁrst movie, Slam, which, unfortunately, the subject matter of that movie about the prison industrial complex is still just as relevant today as it was back in 1998. In fact, I have a relative who spent some time in prison. He's a lawyer. He said that he's never seen such blatant examples of legal malpractice as when he went to prison and he spoke to a lot of the prisoners about their cases.

In other words, most of these guys are in prison for 10 and 12, and 15 years for non-violent offenses, simply because they had no representation, or they didn't have good representation. I would also recommend checking out Saul’s discography. I ﬁnd his music to be incredible. His message is powerful and potent. Again, I think you'll ﬁnd it to be an inspiring listen.

To get the show notes and a transcript of our conversation, you can go to lightwatkins.com. While you're there, you can also sign up for my daily dose of inspiration email, and you can pre- order my next book, which is coming out in May of 2021. It's called Knowing Where to Look: A

108 Daily Doses of Inspiration. Super excited about it. I think that you're going to get a lot of value out of that.

Please don't forget to leave your review, so you can help other people ﬁnd these inspirational stories. Who knows? Your words could inspire someone to give this episode a listen and that could end up changing their life for the better. Again, thanks in advance for doing that. I'll see you back here next week with another amazing story from the end of the tunnel.

In the meantime, keep trusting your intuition. Keep following your heart and keep taking those leaps of faith. If no one's told you recently that they believe in you, I believe in you. Have a lovely day.

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