omgwtf!

Okay so this has very little to do with Nine Inch Nails, but the little bit it has to do with them is absolutely vital. Also, I’m feeling rather chatty, so don’t say you weren’t warned.

As you know if you (for some reason) regularly visit this space, I went to go see Nine Inch Nails on the first of October. It would turn out to be drummer Jerome Dillon’s last show (he’s got heart problems that he’s had to drop out of the tour temporarily to address), so I got pretty lucky in that regard, because he’s a monster fucking drummer. Aside. Anyway, for this leg of the tour, they have a three band set. In the US, it’s pretty much been Autolux and Queens of the Stone Age, who I lambasted pretty soundly as being one of the shittiest bands alive. I still dont know if that’s entirely true or if they had a spectacularly bad night when I saw them; suffice to say it was the first time since Yngwe Malmsteen in the late eighties that I seriously considered walking out of the show to wait until NIN came back on. I did walk out on Malmsteen, but stayed for QOTSA because the stairs were giving me an ulcer attack.

Trent Reznor is in the enviable, and rare, position of being a major artist on a rather independent label with enough power to pretty much run his own show, whether it’s live or in the studio. He is well known as a major control freak, and he also is well known for pushing his favourite artists. He routinely chooses acts that are his personal favourites to accompany him on tour.

Okay so this has very little to do with Nine Inch Nails, but the little bit it has to do with them is absolutely vital. Also, I’m feeling rather chatty, so don’t say you weren’t warned.

As you know if you (for some reason) regularly visit this space, I went to go see Nine Inch Nails on the first of October. It would turn out to be drummer Jerome Dillon’s last show (he’s got heart problems that he’s had to drop out of the tour temporarily to address), so I got pretty lucky in that regard, because he’s a monster fucking drummer. Aside. Anyway, for this leg of the tour, they have a three band set. In the US, it’s pretty much been Autolux and Queens of the Stone Age, who I lambasted pretty soundly as being one of the shittiest bands alive. I still dont know if that’s entirely true or if they had a spectacularly bad night when I saw them; suffice to say it was the first time since Yngwe Malmsteen in the late eighties that I seriously considered walking out of the show to wait until NIN came back on. I did walk out on Malmsteen, but stayed for QOTSA because the stairs were giving me an ulcer attack.

Trent Reznor is in the enviable, and rare, position of being a major artist on a rather independent label with enough power to pretty much run his own show, whether it’s live or in the studio. He is well known as a major control freak, and he also is well known for pushing his favourite artists. He routinely chooses acts that are his personal favourites to accompany him on tour.

I didnt like QOTSA, but I totally respect the fact that they are one of Trent Reznor’s favourite bands. I love to discover new music, and even if it’s not a genre I get into, I’ll give it a chance when it’s recommended by someone whose music or musical tastes I really respect, and Reznor is one of those people. Even though QOTSA made my flesh crawl that night, I’ve still downloaded their music off Rhapsody, and I’m still going to give it a try to see if I like it or not. All fine and dandy.

Here comes the point of this post. Reznor raised quite a stir among his fan base in Europe when he chose an artist named Saul Williams to open his shows. Maybe I’m out of the loop; I dont think so, but it’s always possible. Maybe everyone knows about Saul Williams already. But if they did, they’ve been really, really quiet about him, because I never hear shit about this guy.

Saul Williams is routinely billed as a hip hop act. I dont listen to hip hop or rap; I am not what you’d call an admirer of either genre…and they are two distinct genres even as much as they are the same genre. Regardless, a lot of people thought it was a bad or at least questionable move to have a hip hop act open for NIN. I didnt, really; this is a typical Trent Reznor thing. He never has given much of a shit for toeing a line or maintaining a status quo. He does precisely what he wants, no more, and no less, and that’s why he is who he is, and that’s why nobody else has been able to touch what he does. He is unique in the musical firmament. A mechanical Mozart, as far as I’m concerned, and as such, he can do whatever the fuck he wants. Would you question Michelangelo’s palette? Not if you had a brain to think with, or eyes to see with, you wouldn’t.

So, I went around and did a little hunting for some Saul Williams and heard a few snippets here and there that had a very heavy hip hop thing to them, and I shrugged my shoulders and considered it a shame. I didnt think a guy like Trent Reznor would be into hip hop, but hey, there’s no law that says I have to agree with everything he says or does. I mean, the beginning of Sunspots annoys the hell out of me, but I still bought the new album.

I belong to the NIN fan club, “The Spiral,” largely because A) it’s new and B) Spiral members get presale tickets (yowza!). I joined as a standard member, but I’m going to upgrade to premium because C) Spiral members get a special entrance and you get to go in early and D) you get to attend sound check and have a fuck and suck (meet and greet) with the band before the show, which might be goddamn dangerous so I might skip that last bit there. I dont know if I would be able to control my libido, and I dont wanna spend all that money only to get thrown in jail for first degree lascivious assault. Although now that I come to think about it, I might be far too busy abusing him for that stupid fucking meathead haircut he’s sporting nowadays.

Trent Reznor occasionally posts to the forums in the Spiral message board from the bus. He responded to a post by a guy who had a few comments to make about the show he’d just seen, and in that thread I commented as well, to say that I loved that goddamn curtain they are using this time around (a lot of fans don’t like it because it obscures the stage and therefore, the band, but man, that’s what the NIN live show is; it’s production, not just Lemmy behind a mic), and also to comment about how awesome I thought it was that he put forth the artists he really admires a lot as his opening acts. Even if I think they suck, I said, I still appreciate the fact that the guy doesn’t…and would never…walk a corporate line.

Well, someone responded to my post, saying that Saul Williams was as far as your general, run of the mill hip hop as you could possibly get, and that NIN having him open their shows was “practically a fucking public service.” She felt, she said, incredibly fortunate that she got to see the show (I’m assuming she here because of the member’s name, but eh, who the hell knows for sure?). The response she made to my post was so passionate that I replied saying that I’d clearly have to give this fellow another go, because apparently what I’d heard was not what I should have been hearing.

I did just that. I went straight to Rhapsody, which only crashed about 11 times before it let me download the man’s music, and then I clicked play. This may have been the worst possible thing I could have done on a Sunday, which is my double work shift day. Billing Saul Williams as a hip hop act is…is an almost criminally inadequate description of this fucking guy. I listened to a few songs before I had to throw my headphones off and take a break for fear of my brain exploding…in a good way.

There are definite undertones of hip hop in his music. There are beats there. But there is so much more than hip hop in his music, there is such a tapestry of sound and word in this man’s artistry, that I am left breathless with the impact. This is one fucking righteous dude. He seems to consider himself a hip hop artist, and if so, then that’s what he is, and I guess I have to admit now that at last, after decades, I actually admire a hip hop act…but I dont consider him hip hop at all. I dont know what I consider him. He fits no single genre, he resists all attempts at categorization. If this guy is immense, where the hell have I been that I haven’t heard about him before now, for fuck’s sake?

He’s a New York boy; he gives a shout out to Brooklyn in one of the songs I listened to that made me proud and homesick. Apparently he’s a well respected beat poet. Between that and the hip hop classification, that may well be why I haven’t heard of him before, but there’s the political and outspoken aspect of his songs that makes me feel that maybe I haven’t heard from him because hyperintelligent, well spoken, self-respecting, uppity Negras are not really the kinds of people that make the corpulent White society that is America’s ruling class sleep comfortably in their soft, undeserved beds at night. He’s from New York and he opens the European shows? That should have totally clued me off right there…the Josephine Baker syndrome.

Anyway, the guy has a lot to say, and he says it in a powerful, overwhelming way. Yeah, there’s hip hop there. But man, there is so much more to him that it makes the hip hop aspect seem only cursory; it’s like an underlying thread in a vast embroidery of noise. He is the NIN of hip hop, without the depression.

I would never have heard of him if it weren’t for Trent Reznor. But more importantly, I would never have given him a second chance if it weren’t for that other Spiral member from Czechoslovakia who stepped up smartly and gave her unwavering opinion of this man’s craft. I can never thank her enough for that.