Music: The liberation of Saul Williams

Fiery spoken-word artist Saul Williams will always have a place in his heart for Niggy Tardust. Nearly two years ago, the alter ego grew into a sprawling concept album, "The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of Niggy Tardust." On Sunday, Williams will bring the Niggy Tardust Experience to Minneapolis, for what he describes as "a final goodbye to a character I had so much fun bringing to life."

Initially, Williams had used Niggy as a provocative e-mail address. He liked the way the moniker simultaneously tweaked racial epithets and David Bowie's alien rock-star persona from the '70s, Ziggy Stardust.

It was Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor who busted Niggy out of his cyberspace cameo. Reznor, the king of industrial-rock anger and anguish, took a shine to the way Williams had cross-pollinated slam poetry with hip-hop, theater and rock on his first two recordings, and invited him to open NIN's arena concerts in 2005. While on the road, the odd pair discovered, as Williams puts it, "how cool it would be to try and put a project together.

"Trent is a classically trained musician well versed in musical theory. His being a mentor helped me come closer to writing a song, vs. a poem with music. I had a lot of demos, so it was easy for him to meet me halfway and help shape the vision I had as we started sharing files back and forth. He slowly started trying to convince me that this character I had been talking about should be the title star. I started writing more and more lyrics fitting into an idea of what Niggy Tardust represents."

The answer is in the title: Niggy represents the freedom to be whatever, and to criticize all comers, from racists to those who use race as a crutch. Barriers are broken with a confident swagger, musically as well as lyrically, in a hybrid of electronica, industrial, metal and hip-hop grooves.

Niggy's liberation became a self-fulfilling prophecy for Williams, too: "He was created to be flamboyant in some ways and to express a level of confidence that I have been finding in my everyday life."

Now it is time to say goodbye to Niggy because Williams is "chest deep" in a new album, one that is "about what I have found in that freedom, which is peace and exuberance."

He'll preview some of the new tracks with his four-piece band Sunday.

Writing vs. rock stardom

By commercial standards, sales of "Niggy Tardust" were disappointing. (Initially, it was an online download with an optional cost ranging from free to $5.) But for Williams, whose core identity is as poet and cultural provocateur, the album enabled him to reach more people than ever on his own terms.

Last year, Stanford University let him create his own poetry course, and he frequently gives lectures and readings. He says this literary side of himself is "crucial, the spokes of the wheel in the way I have learned about art and myself.

"I never imagined I'd be able to have these different parts of my being and personality -- to be working in the schools and to be hanging with rock stars. There are so many things I want to accomplish as an artist and a writer and a thinker. Keeping reins on that ambition poses its own issues. I have found some footing in the mainstream to instigate discussion, but to do that I need to find peaceful restraint."

Creating Niggy Tardust brought some peace. So did a recent move to Paris, where Williams answered his phone with a hearty "Bonjour."

"I moved here from Hollywood, where I'd been for the past 10 years. I felt my values shifting, and I thought it was time to move and reevaluate my art, and so why not spend a few months living in this great museum?" he said.

And after that?

"I have no idea," he said happily. "I have this new album almost finished, a new book, I'm writing a play. I guess I'll go where the projects take me."