SAUL WILLIAMS – Robot Slave
Saul Williams doesn’t do small talk on “Robot Slave”, the new single from his upcoming album Leap Life, out August 28 via Big Dada. He starts with a history lesson: the word “robot” comes from a term for forced labor, tied up from the beginning with fantasies of a servant class that does the dirty work without complaint. Williams draws a straight line from that etymology to the deliberate denial of education to enslaved Africans, both driven by the same fear: what happens when the thing you’ve subjugated starts to think for itself.
That’s heavy territory for a song, but Williams has never been shy about making his music carry an argument. “In this song I weigh the possibility of communicating with our ancestors whose land and fossils power our technology and how they might aid us in our revolt,” he says. It’s a strange, specific image, ancestors literally embedded in the fuel and minerals that run our machines, and Williams treats it less like metaphor and more like a real question worth sitting with.
This drops alongside “Mazahua”, a second Leap Life single featuring Aztlan Underground’s Yaotl singing in the Mazahua language. Williams wrote that one the day the Gaza ceasefire was announced, drawing connections between indigenous struggles across continents.
