The Dead Emcee Scrolls Read Online Free Page B

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.
    â€” RICHARD PRYOR , from Wattstax , the film
    Â 
    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.
    â€” JAMES BROWN , from “Funky Drummer”

NGH WHT

CHAPTER 1
    BCH NGH. Gun trigga.