Saul Williams

Trent Reznor's paw prints are all over this. Guitars moan, synths squirt static and a skeletal drum kit keeps jittery time. But despite the industrial embellishments, Niggy Tardust remains raw, confrontational and relentless hip-hop, inhabiting the same agitprop space as Public Enemy or Paris. This is militancy as pageantry, a revolution of abstraction. The towers don't fall -- their shadows do. And out of that illumination, a hero emerges, exhorting, "When I say Niggy, you say ... Nothing." This isn't so much a dialogue on race and aesthetics as it is a broken and beautiful rant.