Shawn Setaro
[The musician, poet, and actor Saul Williams recently sat down with hip-hop personality and SOHH correspondent Shawn Setaro on his popular “The Cipher” podcast to talk about his brand new album MartyrLoserKing. Listen to the full interview and check out five gems Saul dropped during the Q&A.]
On why the 2014 Broadway show he starred in, Holler If Ya Hear Me, that used Tupac’s songs as a backdrop for a story about gang and police violence, closed after only a month of performances:
“I believe it was an extremely powerful piece, and the politics of the moment didn’t lend itself to the politics of the play. What I mean by that is, that play ended a week or two before Michael Brown was killed, and we were talking about all the stuff that was borne out of that murder. But I think that when people are traveling to New York as tourists, it’s rare that they make a decision about what they want to see if they’re told that it’s a bit of a downer or full of politics.”
On the celebrity-focused entertainment culture of the U.S.:
“We’ve done something in this country over the years, aligning entertainment and escapism. It also has to do with our celebrity fixation. At some point we’ll look back and go, the same way you see the Roaring Twenties and all those era and epochs in American and global history, you’ll look at this past time of American Idol, The Voice, the Kardashians, and all this shit, and be like, wow, it’s an interesting moment in the American aesthetic.”
On David Bowie’s passing:
“I think, like myself, everyone was kind of surprised at how much gravity came at that moment – the realization that the rock and roll dream is dead, in a sense. You look at the popularity of hip-hop, you look at the types of artists that are now mainstream, you look at the fact that there are very few fucking amazing rock bands at this moment, except for the ones that have been around for a long time. There’s a few, but it’s not a strong moment for rock and roll, really. In terms of art, Bowie represented something that was loved by everyone, whether they even realized it or not.”
On the mix of Central African rhythms and digital technology that makes up the sound of MartyrLoserKing:
“To me, those ideas are compatible because coding is based heavily on repetition. There’s something trancelike even in coding itself. And that’s what I get out of Central African rhythms as well, is this trance-inducing, repetitive, polyrhythmic idea, where you’re starting to hear something within the thing that you’re hearing. There’s all these hidden layers between sounds, but yet it’s also really simple. The way that it latches onto the beat, it’s like a working engine, like when you see a clock and how those two sides connect. I hear that in the music, and I see that in the working of a circuit board.”
On the time and the calendar:
“The way that we practice time is artificial. The Gregorian calendar, which is the browser that we all use, is this falsified thing that the Catholic Church successfully implanted in all of our minds, and thus structured the framework of our thinking. So we say, ‘Oh, happy new year. It’s 2016 years since the death of Christ’ – which makes even non-Christians operate off of this Christian calendar. The Church is like Google. I call the Church the original startup. Their effect, especially by controlling the calendar, really laid the framework for what thinking outside of the box, and thinking inside of the box, is. They built the box.”
