Thursday, July 12, 2007

The Genius of Saul Williams and The Dead Emcee Scrolls






Saul Williams is a master. We know this. But I didn't expect the Dead Emcee Scrolls to be something like a Bible for me.

Saul begins this book of pure verbal magic describing a process of traveling the inner city subways with a fellow tag artist, in the era when grafitti was street cred and currency.
On the tracks there was a hollowed out bottle of spraypaint. Within it were the yellowed pages of a scroll.

Wanting to translate it, he found it a daunting task. The symbols used were an undiscovered alphabet. So he waited, eyeing the scrolls on his shelf, until perhaps by osmosis he began to translate them into a poetic journey that classifies him as one of the great forces of our time.

The Dead Emcee Scrolls will change lives. Already has, and will live on for generations of scholarly study.

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