Shooting off at the mouth

"Every morning I rise and face the firing /squad / every morning there is one who holds his fire / his dilemma is my system of belief."

These lines, in the rhythmic and virtuoso hip-hop English of Saul Williams - the poet who appeared in Tel Aviv on Friday - are memorable not only because they were the first to have been fired from his mouth at the performance (after them came an unstoppable verbal barrage that went on for nearly an hour).

They are also memorable because in three short lines they captured the essence of this wonderful and special artist. The fervor, the drama, the individualism, the political awareness, the blend of reality and fantasy, the attraction to images of sawed-off 45-millimeter guns, the aspiration to make the world a better place and the belief that, despite everything, it is possible to do this.

A thousand soldiers open fire, but if one soldier stops to think, casts doubt, asks himself and his commanders what - this world has a chance for salvation. At least this is what Williams thinks, and from within this profound inner conviction come the strong words; the first soldier who pauses to think is of course Williams himself.

The lean man with the afro who stood on the stage of the Comfort 13 club and gave a electrifying spoken word sermon was a fascinating and complex bundle of contradictions and considerations. He grew up, as he said, in the world of the black church but he realized that religion did not answer his questions. So he left the church but his language remains imbued with a preacher's rhetoric.

He found his way into the world of hip-hop but when he made fun of the rapper cliche "Keep it real," he made it clear what he thought of contemporary hip-hop.

If you're constantly saying that you are real, you apparently know that you are fake.

It wasn't easy for this reporter to follow Williams' chaotic English. At a certain stage I let go of the need to try to understand every word, and even every idea, and just flowed with the music of the words.

But as Williams himself said before he left the stage, "How long can you stand and listen to a person talking?"

Kudos are due the Tabac group of DJs and party promoters who brought Williams to its third birthday celebration last weekend. But during the performance it was impossible not to think about what a blast it would have been had there been an ensemble backing Williams, or at least a DJ.

Williams was the main attraction on the second evening of the two-day Tabac celebration, but in terms of the evening's continuity, he was the opening act in a long night of electronic music, a night that began very enjoyably but became weaker as it went along (thus breaking the cardinal rule of creating a perfect party).

Sampler artist Digital Me, who came on right after Williams, wisely dropped heavy beats of hip-hop sewn together with a great deal of humor on the audience's head. The young Austrian Dorian Konzept cut away from hip-hop to genre-bending keyboard games. He was a little creative, a little cute and a little annoying. The next artist to come on, Mega Zoid, was compared by the organizers to the great DJ Shadow but his set was pedestrian and the floor emptied.

At the end of his performance Saul Williams had said that he might come back later on and collaborate with one of the DJs. By 3:00 A.M. that hadn't happened and in light of Mega Zoid's mediocre set there was no strength to continue to fight the tiredness.

Saul Williams, Comfort 13 in Tel Aviv, November 27