leftleaning's review
4.0
A find in the free pile at @bandungbooks, the great @saulwilliams poetry. An ode to hip hop, remembering its roots and the politics that shaped it & its ongoing cultural inventions "Phillie blunts, Oakland Raider
jackets, 'X' Caps, Spike's Joint, and a bunch of shit that became corny overnight.”
heypretty52's review
4.0
Openly political in nature, Williams herein interprets the inherent value of hip-hop culture, as well as the difficulties in its evolution. Another volume grabbed hungrily from the shelves of a local bookstore. I can only hope for more.
xterminal's review
2.0
Saul Williams, The Dead Emcee Scrolls: The Lost Teachings of Hip-Hop (MTV, 2005)
I was really impressed by , said the shotgun to the head, the first Saul Williams book I read, and so I reached for this one as quick as I could get my library to loosen its taloned grip on it. Pity that, because The Dead Emcee Scrolls has all the things I didn't like about , said the shotgun to the head and none of the things I did like about it.
Oddly for a poetry book, the best parts of The Dead Emcee Scrolls are its prose. (Save the obligatory tip of the hat to 9/11, which seems omnipresent in today's American poetry books.) Williams starts us off with a thirty-page tale—how tall it is is left to the reader to decide—about how he came upon the Dead Emcee scrolls, which he asserts are not his work. In fact, he tells us, he found them rolled up in an empty spray-paint can while on jaunt through the abandoned subway tunnel of New York City with a friend. It's a great story, and becomes even better when he starts talking about his travails in deciphering the coded language found therein (anyone who's ever tried to puzzle out graffiti tags will be able to identify). Then, in the rest of the first half of the book, he presents us with what he came up with. I started doubting the veracity of the story early; there are a few cultural references that come from more recent events than Williams' supposed discovery. As well, Williams tells us, these are hip-hop lyrics (and unlike Williams, I do make a distinction between hip-hop lyrics and poems). True, that, at least mostly. There are a few times when the poems do veer off into the realm of actual poetry, or at least something approaching same, but for the most part they conform to Williams' analysis of hip-hop; these are, in his words, cries for power. The obvious logical leap there is that in these pieces, the message is more important than the medium; if you've read any random three poetry reviews I've written in the last twenty years, you know exactly what I have to say about that without my saying it, so I'll leave off flogging that particular dead horse for the nonce.
But the prose? Luminous. Williams is one hell of a storyteller, and he's also one hell of a media critic. The second part of the book consists of journal entries from the years he spent transcribing/translating/writing/etc. (1994-2001) as well as an essay about hip-hop occasioned by a chance meeting with Hype Williams in 2001. Saul sees himself and Hype at opposite ends of the hip-hop spectrum; Saul is interested (and invested) in the golden-age rappers like Run-DMC, KRS-One, and the like, while Hype, in Saul's eyes, personifies the new, greedy, violent age of hip-hop (he was, after all, the producer of the film Belly, and the mogul behind such new-school rappers as Jay-Z and DMX, both of whom Saul specifically name-checks here). “[Hype:] asks me if I listen to hip-hop. I tell him that I study it, but that I cannot listen to it in most cases for the same reason I don't eat meat: I don't like how it feels in my system....He wants to know if I remember Public Enemy, KRS, Rakim...I tell him that I have difficulty listening to contemporary hip-hop because I can't forget.” (168-169)
About that I can give a whole-hearted “Amen”. With two exceptions (Boo-Yaa T.R.I.B.E. And Dirty Wormz, both notable for actually having a band to go along with the DJs), the hip-hop in my music collection over the years began with Run-DMC's King of Rock and ended with NWA's 100 Miles and Runnin'. Yeah, they were angry young men with a message, but it was a message that they knew how to get across; the whole more flies with honey thing, you know? Run's braggadocio was always humorous, Eazy-E was a storyteller as much as he was a rapper. (“8 Ball” is still my favorite NWA track.) And Williams (Saul, not Hype), when he's declaiming on the state of hip-hop in America at the dawn of the twenty-first century, is dead on. I could read a whole book of Saul Williams' music criticism, and I'd probably be thrilled with it. Here, though, there's not enough to balance out the verse material, which is banal. **
I was really impressed by , said the shotgun to the head, the first Saul Williams book I read, and so I reached for this one as quick as I could get my library to loosen its taloned grip on it. Pity that, because The Dead Emcee Scrolls has all the things I didn't like about , said the shotgun to the head and none of the things I did like about it.
Oddly for a poetry book, the best parts of The Dead Emcee Scrolls are its prose. (Save the obligatory tip of the hat to 9/11, which seems omnipresent in today's American poetry books.) Williams starts us off with a thirty-page tale—how tall it is is left to the reader to decide—about how he came upon the Dead Emcee scrolls, which he asserts are not his work. In fact, he tells us, he found them rolled up in an empty spray-paint can while on jaunt through the abandoned subway tunnel of New York City with a friend. It's a great story, and becomes even better when he starts talking about his travails in deciphering the coded language found therein (anyone who's ever tried to puzzle out graffiti tags will be able to identify). Then, in the rest of the first half of the book, he presents us with what he came up with. I started doubting the veracity of the story early; there are a few cultural references that come from more recent events than Williams' supposed discovery. As well, Williams tells us, these are hip-hop lyrics (and unlike Williams, I do make a distinction between hip-hop lyrics and poems). True, that, at least mostly. There are a few times when the poems do veer off into the realm of actual poetry, or at least something approaching same, but for the most part they conform to Williams' analysis of hip-hop; these are, in his words, cries for power. The obvious logical leap there is that in these pieces, the message is more important than the medium; if you've read any random three poetry reviews I've written in the last twenty years, you know exactly what I have to say about that without my saying it, so I'll leave off flogging that particular dead horse for the nonce.
But the prose? Luminous. Williams is one hell of a storyteller, and he's also one hell of a media critic. The second part of the book consists of journal entries from the years he spent transcribing/translating/writing/etc. (1994-2001) as well as an essay about hip-hop occasioned by a chance meeting with Hype Williams in 2001. Saul sees himself and Hype at opposite ends of the hip-hop spectrum; Saul is interested (and invested) in the golden-age rappers like Run-DMC, KRS-One, and the like, while Hype, in Saul's eyes, personifies the new, greedy, violent age of hip-hop (he was, after all, the producer of the film Belly, and the mogul behind such new-school rappers as Jay-Z and DMX, both of whom Saul specifically name-checks here). “[Hype:] asks me if I listen to hip-hop. I tell him that I study it, but that I cannot listen to it in most cases for the same reason I don't eat meat: I don't like how it feels in my system....He wants to know if I remember Public Enemy, KRS, Rakim...I tell him that I have difficulty listening to contemporary hip-hop because I can't forget.” (168-169)
About that I can give a whole-hearted “Amen”. With two exceptions (Boo-Yaa T.R.I.B.E. And Dirty Wormz, both notable for actually having a band to go along with the DJs), the hip-hop in my music collection over the years began with Run-DMC's King of Rock and ended with NWA's 100 Miles and Runnin'. Yeah, they were angry young men with a message, but it was a message that they knew how to get across; the whole more flies with honey thing, you know? Run's braggadocio was always humorous, Eazy-E was a storyteller as much as he was a rapper. (“8 Ball” is still my favorite NWA track.) And Williams (Saul, not Hype), when he's declaiming on the state of hip-hop in America at the dawn of the twenty-first century, is dead on. I could read a whole book of Saul Williams' music criticism, and I'd probably be thrilled with it. Here, though, there's not enough to balance out the verse material, which is banal. **
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