The Dead Emcee Scrolls (4 page)

Surreal, almost supernatural, things would occur every time I read aloud from the manuscript. I'd watch the words, themselves, settle into the minds of the audience and how they would leave inspired, almost as if they had witnessed something
extra-terrestrial. And even within myself, the energy that would swirl within and around me as I deciphered and recited these poems is practically indescribable. But even stranger things began to happen. People began to respond as if it were their personal mission to see that these writings reach the masses. After one reading, at New York's reputable Nuyorican Poetry Café, I was approached by Marc Levin, a director, who had an idea of how these poems could work their way into a film. That film was
Slam
, which ended up winning the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival and the Camera D'Or at the Cannes Film Festival in France. Paul Devlin approached me and other poets from the 1996 Nuyorican Grand Slam team with plans of making a documentary of our touring experience. That film was called
Slam Nation.
One of the slam team members, Jessica Care Moore, had self-published her own book of poetry and approached me about publishing mine. That book became
The Seventh Octave
, a pre-mature collection of parts of the manuscript that I was secretly deciphering, and my own poetry, inspired by the ancient text. Next I was approached by legendary producer, Rick Rubin, who encouraged me to sign to his label, American Recordings, and record what became my first album,
Amethyst Rock Star.

It took much longer than I would have imagined to decipher the text in its entirety. Each “poem” often left me in such a bewildered state that I could never guess what would follow. My process of deciphering remained the same, yet the text became increasingly difficult, as sometimes I would have to attempt a passage as many as thirty times before it became clear. It often
seemed that I could not decipher a text until I was ready to understand it. I often took long breaks between working on the manuscript for the sake of digesting what I had already deciphered. About three years into it I began deciphering the poem entitled “Co-dead language.” The long list of names baffled me. Most startling was that the writing seemed to be a direct response to the death of the hip-hop icons Notorious B.I.G. and Tupac Shakur. I had found the manuscript before either rapper had been killed, and even though I had been comfortable with the idea of this being an ancient text that had somehow fallen into my lap, when it spoke this directly to our times, I must admit, it frightened me. That fear propelled me to read it aloud as much as possible. I put it to music. I read it on TV. I couldn't listen to hip-hop the same way. I felt personally attacked whenever I felt an emcee was misusing his power. I grew angry at the way capitalism and violence was being romanticized. Then I started working on the final scroll.

I had saved the longest scroll for last. This was to be the seventh and final “poem.” From the start, the tone of this page was completely different. It felt raw, unpolished, even gangster. My difficulty in deciphering it lay in the fact that I was completely surprised by the direction in which it seemed to be heading. And for a long time, I guess I wasn't ready for it. More than any of the others, I could feel its direct connection to hip-hop. The style in which it was written felt more like a rhyme than a poem. It was hardcore. So hardcore, that I abandoned it for over a year, while busying myself with other projects. Had I abandoned hip-hop too? It's true that I was listening to less hip-hop than I ever
had. The growing romanticism of gangsterism and heartless pimpery had left me somewhat confused and more than a little angry. It felt like hip-hop was further off course than it had ever been. The have-nots of the African American ghettos had seemingly bought into the heartless capitalistic ideals that had originally been responsible for buying them as slaves. It felt hopeless. Hip-hop was dead. Misogyny and ignorance prevailed. Hip-hop seemed to be running the same God-forsaken course as the American government. Diamonds were as fluid as oil while the violence and corruption surrounding African diamond mines became just as overlooked as the number of dead women and children in Iraq and Afghanistan murdered in the name of American greed: the crudest oil of all. It hurt to hear emcees rapping about pointing guns at each other rather than at real enemies facing our communities and children
(, Said the Shotgun to the Head).
It felt senseless.

Slowly my senses returned to me. Through the growing popularity of southern hip-hop, “crunk” music, “trap” music, chopped and screwed, etc., I was reminded of the original passion embedded in hip-hop music. It's not that the subject matter was any more uplifting; rather the context that shifted surrounding it. Suddenly, through hearing Southern rappers voicing their desire to once and for all “put the South on the map” I was able to see that hip-hop was still voicing a centuries old desire for respect. I was also able to realize how much of a product of America it is. This cry for respect allowed me to lose my impatience with hip-hop's overall infatuation with gangsters and realize that even that was simply a cry for power and
to be recognized. Like so many, in cases when the oppressed regain a sense of power, the initial intent is to express or abuse that power in the same way that it was used against them. Men have used this sort of manipulative power over women for centuries. In hip-hop, as in America, misogyny still prevails. But that misogyny is ironically rooted in an intense and undeniable love of women. How can we uncover those roots? I slowly began to trust that I would not be shocked by my findings with this last poem. I went back to deciphering it. Sure enough, I believe that that is what the last poem (actually the first in this collection, NGH WHT) is aimed at. The problem with poetry or scripture is that even after all my deciphering, there is still much to be deciphered. Phrases must be picked apart, dissected, meditated on. There are layers of meaning.

In the bottom corner of the final page I found the last few words. What I found, I initially thought funny and quite witty. I decided to use those words for the title of the entire manuscript,
The Dead Emcee Scrolls.
Of course, it is first a reference to the ancient Judaic texts that were found in the 1940s in caves near the Dead Sea. The Dead Sea Scrolls are often confused with the Nag Hamadi, other ancient texts that were found in Egypt around the same time that claim to be, among other things, the secret teachings of Yeshua (Jesus). Both findings, along with a few others, have been of growing popularity since the pop explosion of
The Da Vinci Code
, a novel that uses factual historic data to bring light to ground-shattering truths which may have been suppressed by the early Christian church. I also believe the title to be a reference to the two hip-hop icons
whose deaths have served as an example of what can happen when the power of hip-hop is misused or simply over-looked.

I have yet to fully comprehend why these texts came to me. Maybe my training as an actor, and until then, untapped talent as a writer, prepared me to write and recite them in a way that would garner the attention they now desire. I believe this release to be a part of the original author's plan. I have stopped concerning myself with the question of who wrote them and have simply found peace in knowing that “it is written.” Yet, these writings have also had a profound affect on me. In fact, I will go so far as to say that they have made a poet of me. Before encountering them I had certainly dabbled with emceeing and poetry. Shit, I never lost a battle. But my rhyming and writing before encountering these texts could have easily been aligned with many a braggadocious emcee. This manuscript changed me. It forced me to decipher my own life and purpose. Subsequently, my books,
She
and ,
Said the Shotgun to the Head
, were exclusively written by me. Most of the poems and songs on
Amethyst Rock Star
and the self-titled
Saul Williams
album are my own writing.

I have decided to share some of the effect that the text had on me, personally, by including some journal excerpts in the second half of this book. As I mentioned, once I encountered these texts I began to listen to hip-hop differently. I began to think differently. The journal excerpts will give you a glance into the seven years of my personal life when the majority of these texts were deciphered. They are a personal offering in light of the impersonal nature of
The Dead Emcee Scrolls.
Through reading them you may gain insight into the way these texts helped me find my voice as a poet, emcee and artist.

Well, I guess that's it. Enjoy it. Read it to yourself or out loud to a friend. Try it over a beat. Whatever. But spend time with it. If you're an emcee, double that time and let it inform your lyricism. In many ways it probably already has. You may be surprised to see other emcees referenced either by name or by quote. Who's quoting whom? There's no explanation. Perhaps I was not the first to find this, but by some amazing grace it has found me and now I present it to you.

As for the scrolls themselves, I've kept them tucked away in hopes of one day being able to arrange some sort of exhibit. I am uncertain of the will of the “author” and, thus, have learned to sit back and allow things to unfold as they will. This has been my finding's greatest lesson to me: patience. The changes that I have wanted to see in hip-hop, American society, the black community, and the world at large, can only unfold at the rate of our evolving consciousness. People ask me why I think poetry has become popular among the youth again. I respond that we cannot achieve a new world order without new words and ways of articulating the world we'd like to experience. The youth of today are using poetry slams and open mics as a means of calling our new world into order. Hip-hop has aided our generation tremendously in helping us formulate the ability to articulate our desires and dreams over beats and in our daily lives. Word up. It is only a matter of time before we realize the importance of these times. And in the words of Victor Hugo, “There is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come.”

S
AUL
W
ILLIAMS

I think that NGHs are the best of people that were slaves and that's how they got to be NGHs. They stole the cream of the crop from Africa and brought them over here. And God, as they say, works in mysterious ways. So He made everybody NGH, 'cause we were arguing over in Africa about the Watusi, the Baule, the Senufo … all in different languages. So He brought us all over here, the best, the kings, the queens, the princesses, and the princes, and put us all together and made us one tribe, NGHs.

—
RICHARD PRYOR
, from
Wattstax
, the film

 

Fellas … I want to give the drummer some of this funky soul we got here. You ain't got to do no soloing, brother, just keep what you got. We gonna turn it loose! 'Cause it's a Mother.

—
JAMES BROWN
, from “Funky Drummer”

BCH NGH. Gun trigga. Dick's bigga. Why

fuck? Killer. Blood spiller. BCH stealer. Mack

truck. Bad luck, fuckin with this black buck.

Bigger Thomas, I promise. Leave a corpse in

the furnace.

NGH WHT? I'm complicated. Down to my

strut. Like the way I hold my gat, flat on its

side, like a pup. And I'm tickling the trigger.

Make it laugh from its gut. You would think

I'm a comedian the way it erupts.

NGH WHT? I represent the ashes and dust.

All the soot up in your chimney. Got you

stuck in a rut. You could fire, hold your fire,

son, I'm smoking you up. You could withhold

your desires. Even Buddha got snuffed.

NGH, now, I'm standin' on the corner of wow!

Exclamations pointed at me, ‘cause I'm gattin

these nouns. Got these kids inventin adjectives.

I'm gaining renown. Because I am, NGH! I am!

NGH please. The earth, the air, the fire, and the

seas. Third dimension. Fourth dimension, Fifth

dimension, with ease. All that shit you never

thought of. Got you smokin them trees. At your

front door with my sawed-off. Got you snortin

them keys.

NGH WHT? Boy I ain't gonna knock. Open

up. When it's time to meet your maker, ain't

no changin the plot. You're an actor in a series.

NGH, I own the lot. And I'm here to serve these

royalties like gold in a pot.

Callin haves and have-nots, every cell on the

block, every NGH with a trigga: empty barreled

or cocked. Marchin like parade of scars if you

been stabbed or shot. Son, we smokin these

batons right in front of these cops.

Callin out to the kids, all my NGHs with bids.

Whether suited up or booted up or stuck in the

mid. You can download it or boot it up. My pupils,

un-lid! All my students of the underground with

record store gigs.

Callin out to the girls. The inventors of worlds.

The intelligence of relevance and elegant pearls.

Pour like nectar from the lotus, big bang opus in

swirls, down the sweaty back of hair weave tracks

and dry Jheri curls.

Callin out to the pimps. Hat-cocked, slump, with

your gimp on your wrist with just a twist of lime

to go with that limp. Hold your cup up so this

ancient rain can find its way in. Let these NGHs

know the cost of reachin heavenly bliss.

Here it is! The contents of a balled-up fist. All the

density of matter could never add up to this. Here's

the secret of the energy transferred by a kiss. Yes,