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Why shouldn't rap be esoteric, able to take in current events, history and criticism? I guess it's this old idea of containment - that rappers, because they're black, can't and shouldn't aspire to look outside the ghetto for influence.

Saul Williams

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Saul Williams
Age: 52
Born: 1972
Born: February 29
Actor
Composer
Film Actor
Musician
Poet
Rapper
Screenwriter
Singer
Television Actor
Voice Actor
Writer
Newburgh
New York
Saul Stacey Williams
Look
Outside
Aspire
Looks
Events
Rapper
Take
Influence
Rap
Idea
Current
History
Currents
Containment
Black
Shouldn
Rappers
Able
Criticism
Esoteric
Ideas
Guess
Ghetto

More quotes by Saul Williams

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The role that theater has placed in enhancing consciousness and moving systems ahead. I think of what South African theater meant for the apartheid movement, for example. I think of what music has meant for so many social movements across time.
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I feel pretty vulnerable all the time.
Saul Williams
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There is no music more powerful than hip-hop. No other music so purely demands an instant affirmative on such a global scale. When the beat drops, people nod their heads, “yes,” in the same way that they would in conversation with a loved one, a parent, professor, or minister.
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If we're gonna progress as a people we are going to realise that, as one of my favourite poets says, the other is a lie. There are no other people. Race is a social construct.
Saul Williams
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I surrendered my beliefs and found myself at the tree of life injecting my story into the veins of leaves only to find that stories like forests are subject to seasons
Saul Williams
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I was fed by the music I listened to as a kid. Hip-hop fed me psychologically, spiritually, politically. I learned from that music.
Saul Williams
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I've always been inspired by a lot of work coming out of the UK
Saul Williams
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Dying is something you have no control over. Why waste your life being afraid of it?
Saul Williams
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I hear the weed is really strong in California.
Saul Williams
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The music aids the message, it's there to punctuate and abbreviate and shape the silence
Saul Williams
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Сommercial hip-hop is not youth rebellion, not when the heroes of hip-hop like Puffy are taking pictures with Donald Trump and the heroes of capitalism - you know that's not rebellion. That's not the street - that's Wall Street.
Saul Williams
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the greatest Americans have not been born yet they are waiting patiently for the past to die
Saul Williams
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When I wake up in the morning, the first things that I see are the clouds. They're right there. I look out my window now and there's always, always a black bird of some sort on the ledge there. Usually I wake up and look at the birds.
Saul Williams
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I dance for no reason, for reasons you can't dance, Call me an activist of intellectualized circumstance You can't learn my steps until you unlearn your thoughts Spirit, soul, can't be store-bought.
Saul Williams
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When I finally decide that I'm ready to get out of bed, it could be the sunlight, it could be the fact that I'm awake, and, OK, first of all, I wake up in the morning because I have to go to the bathroom.
Saul Williams
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I don't really believe in writer's block or anything like that. If I'm not feeling words, I may pick up an instrument and play with sounds or delve into different types of creativity and expression.
Saul Williams
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What I'm aiming to do within hip-hop is to point out that the music itself is powerful it reaches so many people.
Saul Williams
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I want to connect music to its highest power - which is heightening consciousness and affecting people's reality. That can't be done in normal ways, not according to my experience.
Saul Williams
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I'm a very sensitive person at times. Not just to words that anybody says, but in relationships for example, the people that you open up to, you listen to, you hear - you know? So a lot of times, the key to some of my vulnerability is just through things, simple things - or critiques or whatever - or could be very simple things that are said.
Saul Williams
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I can't say that I always want to get out of bed, you know.
Saul Williams