Review: Saul Williams, The Lantern

Saul Williams is an artist that defies categorisation. A writer, musician, actor and performance poet, he’s become a cult figure since emerging in the late ‘90s with tracks like Twice The First Time and his role in the film Slam. Tonight’s breathless performance at The Lantern makes a strong case for Williams as one of the world’s most compelling cultural agitators.  

Opening for your heroes can be a tough gig, and so it seems tonight. Nadinne Dyen is a former Bristol Poetry Slam winner and she’s good company and a capable performer.  Using the metres and cadences of hip-hop (one poem was written to a Tribe Called Quest beat) her reflections on objectifying relationships and working with young people are affecting and heartfelt. For all her metaphysical leanings, though, there’s little in the way of knockout imagery, and her critique of conventional thinking is more self-help manual than revolutionary treatise. 

MartyrLoserKing – Williams’ latest album and one of his strongest to date – tells the story of a coltan miner in Burundi who uses his self-taught coding skills to subvert the system.  Its central theme – the hacker as artist – is a neat reverse analogy for Williams’ own work: a torrential flow of wordplay and juxtapositions that deconstructs the “coded language” preserving the status quo.  

Taking to the stage wearing a king-for-a-day cardboard crown, Williams immediately wanders off to perform Groundwork from the middle of the crowd. Equal parts Rakim, rock star, radical preacher and raconteur, he’s intensely charismatic. Tonight his Bristol fans cheer Bernie Sanders, boo Donald Trump and hand-clap along to the new album’s Justin Warfield-produced beats.  They also laugh (a little self-consciously) as Williams announces, “a lot of my heroes came from Bristol, and not just the ones who profited from slavery”. If Coltan is cotton, maybe Colston fits into the picture somewhere too. 

Warfield is a versatile producer, and tonight’s MartyrLoserKing selections draw on genres as diverse as hip-hop, afrobeat and industrial rock. Highlights include the soaring synth-pop of The Bear and Horn of the Clock Bike, built around a hypnotic, tumbling piano loop. Warfield isn’t here in person, but backing duties are performed admirably by long-term Williams collaborator Thavius Beck.  

While the bulk of the set comes from the current record there are selections from throughout the artist’s career. Tao of Now and Untimely Meditations are drawn from his 2001 debut Amethyst Rock Star, while Grippo and List of Demands first appeared on 2004’s Saul Williams. Musical numbers are interspersed with spoken word pieces such as the majestic Saturn’s River, which opens with the vintage Williams one-liner, “her newborn cyclops had my eye”. There’s also a great riff on the journals of Christopher Columbus, a fanatical Christian convert who claimed to have discovered an island inhabited entirely by women. 

As the set concludes with a triumphant DNA we’re reminded to keep our heads up. It feels easier after an hour or so in the company of Saul Williams. 

Photography by Albert Testani