Saul Williams
Name of Album: Amethyst Rock Star
Ratings: Personal - 1 General - 2
Release Date: October 23, 2001

Comments:
Hated it! (did you see my arm-fly?) Saul Williams is a rocky road between Jill-Scott Heron, KRM, and Public Enemy, without any of the success of either departure points or destinations. There’s even a hint of Tom Waits thrown into this bad mix, but without the functional—albeit discordant—rhythm. All I could think about was a cacophonous chaos—random molecules of word and sound spinning recklessly, richocheting off the walls of sanity, leaving irratating pock-marks for no reason.

Touted as a star from the indie film “hit” Slam, Saul Williams’s publicist writes that he is an “up and coming renaissance man” —I beg to differ. I give you chanteuse Jill Scott as the right person to refer to as a renaissance-anyone; Willams is more like a courtside Dark Age idiot. He presents an undergrad all-night thesis of babbling adolescence - the product of a college mid-life crisis masurbation making a transition from pretension and discovery —painfully believing that enlightenment starts and ends in his nubiant mind. As record sales certainly need a boost, it is certain that Saul is not the signpost leading to the road to recovery. In sum, it is painfully certain that this rabid attempt at rap-rock could not possibly find a wide enough audience to build much a following, or at least make a run for the charts significant enough to have any record industry executive suspend his belief.