Saul Williams

A fixture on New York's spoken-word scene long before he entered the recording booth, Saul Williams made a name for himself in the late '90s with a series of incendiary 12-inch singles and as the star of the movie Slam. His commanding baritone evoked the stylings of a chastising preacher, and his moral and intellectual certitude made him an impressive, and unusual, musical force. By the time über-producer Rick Rubin got to him, Williams decided he wanted to be a rock star, and his debut album, Amethyst Rock Star, is a bizarre long-form concerto on post-rap confusion, featuring turntable wizardry, psych-roch guitar runs, boom-bap percussion, and viola workouts. It's an ambitious, sloppy, dense, and utterly unaffected album, if not an unpretentious one. But when Williams breaks down into pure love-lost squall on "Fearless," or tongue lashes naive young hip-hoppers on "1987," it's hard not to ride with him, even if the car sometimes crashes. (JON CARAMANICA)

From 2004's The New Rolling Stone Album Guide