The concept of ‘Niggy Tardust”, the alter ego performed by Saul Williams on his third album, The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of Niggy Tardust, stems not only from a desire to subvert the materialist minstrelsy of the gangster-thug rapper image, but also from David Bowie’s 1970’s sexually ambiguous, morally excessive, glam-rock, alter-ego Ziggy Stardust.
Bowie’s messianic alter ego was an alien from space, who came to Earth to liberate humans from banality by having them bear witness to his excessive lifestyle. It was a superfluous performance that he also rendered off stage and eventually resulted in an inability to differentiate between his real self and performed self. The alter ego had to be ‘killed” as it became too self-destructive and mentally threatening to Bowie, hence the The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust.
In his latest album Williams appropriates and changes the title. Williams’s Niggy and Bowie’s Ziggy occupy different territories in history and now.
Niggy subverts the contemporary and historical images of black minstrels and challenges the stereotype of the macho hip-hop male. On one of the advertising posters for the new album he stands baring his slim torso (unglossed), adorned in obviously inexpensive jewellery. Around his neck and on his right hand he wears plastic pieces bearing the letterings ‘niggy” and ‘tardust” and holds a black kitten with an eye patch — an interesting departure from the aggressive pitbulls often seen posing with gangsta rappers. Thus he reveals the performance aspects of the rapper character and of the ideology-making media industry.
The name Niggy is, of course, a direct play on the contentious, racially charged word nigger.
This shift from Saul to Niggy is reminiscent of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man where the invisible man realises that he is in a ‘suit” (his skin colour) that makes him invisible. Upon realising his invisibility, he figures that the more sambo-like he behaves, the more attention he can acquire from people in power.
The Niggy alter ego assumed by Saul is, therefore, not as thin as it might appear. Its performance is quite close to that of a fool, a court jester. Fools were usually used in royal courts as entertainers and as those who were given the leeway to criticise and mock people in power. But this was not a complete freedom as there was always a line that could not be crossed. The fool would not really be a fool at all. He would use riddles and know how far to go in his mockery. The ‘liberation” of Niggy Tardust refers to Williams’s attempt to take that notion further, as it refers to the manner in which the album was released.
Taking his cue from Radiohead’s In Rainbows album, Williams has opted to release his album solely online, with an option to download it for $5 (in support of the artists involved in the creation of the music) or get it for free. Though inspired by Radiohead, Williams says his decision for the internet route was a gesture to make the middleman much poorer, as he aptly puts it on his website www.niggytardust.com, but also a way to communicate with his fans, using his website as a direct portal.
Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails handled much of the production on the album. He believes the music industry is stuck between models of dissemination and has been experimenting with alternative methods of releasing music, which include leaving USBs in bathrooms and coded images in T-shirts.
Commenting on the concept of the album to Billboard, Williams recently said: ‘The name [Niggy Tardust] came about as a joke, but there is definitely a strong concept running through the record. I created the character because I felt there was nothing that was speaking to my experience as an African American. In the end Niggy Tardust realises that his only enemy is himself and that he has to overcome the boundaries before him to become liberated.” — Additional reporting by Blek Bhimbi
The Rise and Fall of Niggy Tardust, released on October 31 via the Fader label, can be obtained on three download formats: 192 kbit/s MP3, 320 kbit/s MP3 and free Lossless audio codec (FLAC).
The album can be downloaded from the website www.niggytardust.com.