#66, "Wine," Saul Williams (2001)

150 Favorite Songs: #71, “Wine,” Saul Williams (2001)

When I was young, and trying to make a name for myself in the world of slam poetry and spoken word performance, I was both very into Saul Williams and very shy about how into Saul Williams I was. I guess it’s the same thing anywhere—if you asked a cross-sample of Americans if they could name a performance poet, the vast majority of them would say “I have no idea what you are talking about,” and the tiny handful who could provide an answer would say Saul Williams, because he was the only one who was ever anything resembling famous. If you’re really into something, your taste tends to grow more specific, because you’ve been exposed to more of it—a casual football fan might say that Tom Brady is the greatest player of all time, but someone who is more into the game could name Barry Sanders or Jerry Rice or Walter Payton or Reggie White, and they wouldn’t be wrong.

Saul Williams was Michael Jordan, in other words, and it’s not that interesting to be into Jordan. As time has passed, and my interest in performance poetry has gone from an active ambition to a more distant appreciation, though, I don’t feel compelled to assert that Talaam Acey or Amalia Ortiz or Sonja Sohn is actually my favorite; I can be basic.

That undersells Saul Williams, but it’s also true that none of those people ever got a chance to make an album like Amethyst Rock Star, Williams’s 2001 debut album. For starters, it was produced by Rick Rubin, who is one of the heaviest thumbs anyone can place on a scale for a musician working between, say, 1984 and whenever you are reading this. His work on Amethyst Rock Star came in between producing Johnny Cash’s American III and American IV, shortly before he did “99 Problems” for Jay Z, shortly after producing his eighth Slayer album, around the same time he produced Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s final studio recordings and rescued metal from the pits of nu-metal with System of a Down’s Toxicity. I’d love to imagine what Amalia Ortiz would have done with Rick Rubin.

Still, what Williams did with it was fascinating. The album was divisive among critics; Pitchfork gave it an 8.1, while AllMusic gave it a single star and a half. It was also divisive between Williams and Rubin, who had competing visions for it. Rubin, who had produced some of the most important rap records ever made (early Run DMC, Beastie Boys, Public Enemy, LL Cool J, and Geto Boys albums among them), had been mostly a rock dude in the years leading up to Amethyst Rock Star, and he missed it, so he wanted to make a pure hip hop record with this one. Williams, who was not particularly invested in Rick Rubin’s ego, had a vision for an album that swirled with Hendrix-style guitars and live drums. That tension led to some challenging moments—there are some songs where it feels like the competing visions served to undermine each other—but it also leads to the album’s most satisfying moments, where Williams does everything he wants to do on top of Rubin’s canvas.

“Wine” is the showiest version of that. The song is long—if you’ve already started listening to it, you may have come to a lull around the six-minute mark, but it’s a false exit! If you’re still in line, stay in line, this baby clocks in at 11:05, longer than “All Too Well” or “November Rain” or “The Trapeze Swinger.” It does that because it builds and moves extremely patiently.

It starts with the strings, which are all over this album, and with Williams’s voice. It sounds different here than how you might be used to it. These days, Williams gets a decent check by dropping a few lines of wisdom on rap and pop albums that want to add some gravity to a song by deploying his poet’s voice, where he says a few profound lines and then getting out of the way (Joey Bada$$, Denzel Curry, Vic Mensa, and Janelle Monáe have all used this trick). Here, though, Williams sings a slow-tempo three-minutes where he is mostly on-key, full of the sort of wordplay, puns, and self-serious profundity he’s enjoyed throughout the rest of the album (“how much must you age before you’re ageless? / align yourself with the divine / allow your inner sage to burn you rage-less”). The track builds slowly, the drums starting as a distant echo that more evoke the feeling of a drum than sound like something getting hit, before emerging as a stuttering, stomping thing that start to eventually feel like part of a proper song. It goes on like that for a while, a three-minute verse in which Williams sings about vague spirituality, until he finally hits the chorus, the drums come up in the mix, the guitars swing around, and everything gets huge and epic in a way that delivers on the promise of Saul Williams and Rick Rubin making a record together.

And then, snap, Williams’s slow-tempo crooning gives way to a pure rap verse, where he shows off that he’s capable of making the kind of record Rubin wanted him to. Williams is a better at rapping than he gets credit for. He’s obsessed with rhyme and meter and very punctual in his delivery, with satisfying internal rhymes (“I got a daughter and son / that’s like a bible and gun / pea-cocked and ready / aiming steady / as a ray of the sun / my ammunition intituition, full eclipse of my lung / son, you could never guess what planet I’m from”) and something to say, where he takes on a role he enjoyed throughout the early and mid-aughts, as the scolding conscience of hip hop culture. “don’t give a fuck now / i’d be the first one to player-hate / the eye of the needle sets the record straight,” he raps to other rappers, boasting that his emcee name is his birth name and he’s not from their block, that he was scared of the people they pretend to be on their records, and that talking about that is his way of keeping it real. He ends the verse by invoking “Welcome to the Terrordome” by Public Enemy, rapping “never question who I am, god knows” the way Chuck D did, before bringing it back to the spiritual frame of the song—“i know god personally, in fact he lets me call him me,” he raps twice, and then the drums disappear and he drops the layered rap vocals he was using so we just get his voice again, and he changes the line. “in fact, she lets me call her me / in fact, she lets me call her me.” It’s a subtle shift, but redefining spirituality as a feminine power that he can access is also Williams being clever—it’s consistent with the calling-out he did earlier in the verse, and also reminding the listener that this is a spiritual song. It’s a very impressive turn, and then the song trails off. For twenty seconds of silence.

But it’s not over. Fuck no. Williams’s voice returns, singing that chorus mostly a capella, some guitar accompanying him and then a rebuild, cymbals sparkling behind him and then toms properly thumping, and his voice ringing clear. He’s not a great singer, but he sings it with his whole chest, and the feeling it creates is that we’re observing a movement, that Saul Williams still has more to say, and maybe these choruses are him clearing his throat a bit, and bringing it back to the cosmic-spirituality the song started with. At which point we’re down to the drums and the strings again, and he delivers a spoken piece that is exactly what you think of when you think of Saul Williams’s music (if you think of it at all)—carefully intoned words delivered with clear diction, wordplay throughout. “earth seeds root me / poet-tree,” he intones as he talks about the act of writing, of creation, as a form of travel between earth and space—an idea explored by Coltrane and Sun Ra and George Clinton, among others—then undermining it with a pun (“maybe i’m too sirius”) before landing on its conclusion: “i’m a star / this life’s the suburbs / i commute.”

It’s all enormous and maybe a little exhausting, deeply pretentious in a way that also says “you know what? I deserve to take up this much space,” which is a sentiment I really admire. It’s his record, you know? It could well have been the only one he got to make—it’s not like slam poetry was a growing market—and the idea that taking up space can come without taking it away from anyone else is very much at the heart of the song. Space is infinite, after all, if you go up instead of just out. “Wine” sounds like Saul Williams trying to live on a star to me, coming back to earth to share the view. I will always have eleven minutes for that.