I was walking through SoHo with my homegirl Elsa Mehary on our way to Peasant three summers ago when we passed a series of posters. They were plastered up around downtown Manhattan advertising nothing in particular (rare), and I took a minute to point them out to Elsie. A despondent shot of Marilyn Monroe was centered in the middle of text that read, “THEN IT HIT ME. I’m not going to be famous. I won’t get to be a rock star. I am going to be stuck on the payroll doing work that doesn’t interest me for a very long time.” I could’ve shuddered, that someone (an artist named Marilyn it turns out) went out of his way to imprint this kind of a message on the minds of unsuspecting, superaspirational New Yorkers walking down the street.

I meant to post about the poster months ago but forgot. It came to mind somehow when I found out today that my old-school college acquaintance, the poet Saul Williams, got married four months ago to Girlfriends actress Persia White. (Congrats!) She’s got an album coming out this summer that’s partially produced by Tricky, by the way. I’m not totally sure why my mind is connecting the two yet, but I figured I’d throw it out there.

Not to get all expat snooty, but it’s such an American attitude to live life assuming you’ll be famous one day, or feeling your life has less value when it doesn’t happen. Reality TV and, yeah, even blogs are all part of that fame-game syndrome. In my wide-eyed innocent early twenties (everyone has them), I wanted to become the hiphop James Baldwin, which for me meant 1. publishing books, 2. living in Paris for a while, and 3. getting well-known enough in the hiphop media to where I wouldn’t have to keep introducing myself to Nelson George and Greg Tate every time we met. That all happened eventually; I’m happy. And when I started thinking seriously about marriage, I knew I wanted a wife who didn’t have the faintest idea who Damon Dash was or couldn’t name any of Diddy’s babymamas. Obsessed as I used to be with pop culture, I didn’t want to talk that to death with my mate too, especially in front of our seeds. And I got that. There’s French hiphop lovers of course, but my Christine in particular doesn’t know Lil Wayne from Lil’ Kim (and, great).

Still, I imagine it’s not every day someone you know marries a TV star, depending on what kinds of friends you have, I guess. It’s a good minute to pause and be thankful for what I have, a delayed little Father’s Day moment maybe. Carry on.

The Village Voice ran my Wu-Tang Clan’s 8 Diagrams, one of like three or four pieces they seem to have run on the album if you include their critique of the new Ghostface, The Big Doe Rehab. I make the point in the rev that 8 Diagrams – maligned in the press by three of Wu-Tang’s own members (GZA since recanted) – is at least as good as what Jay-Z and Kanye West put out this year. I just read my man Shaheem Reid’s year-end list over on MTV.com, with Jigga, Ye, and no Wu-Tang but 50 Cent! (We once worked at Vibe together… peace Sha!)

For my money, the most interesting news in hiphop all year was that Trent Reznor got behind the boards for the latest Saul Williams record, chockfull of trashing, headnodding Public Enemy/NIN hodgepodges. As 50 Cent studiously pieced together Curtis for his multiplatinum fanbase, what seems to have escaped him is that his audience consists of mostly white collegiate wannabe-downs of the type that bought over seven million Vanilla Ice albums 17 years ago. (That crowd eventually started buying The Source, dumped their MC Hammer CDs and quickly got hip to what’s really good in the hood.) It’s not an audience to be that proud of, as arrogant as the SoundScan-killa businessman acts about the whole thing.

That’s all.

On his MySpace page, poet-actor-MC Saul Williams dropped some interesting details today about next week’s release, The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of NiggyTardust! (The title is, duh, a play on David Bowie’s 1972 concept album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, which I always found overrated, though I love Bowie.) Produced by Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor, Saul follows last month’s download-only Radiohead model by offering the record at NiggyTardust.com for five bucks or for free—the choice is yours.

Saul and I met around 1990, we went to Morehouse together. Saul was always handing out fliers for things I never supported; he used to dance for an eclectic rap outfit called K.I.N. (fronted by the first Chris X I ever met, now known as NiggyTardust collaborator CX Kidtronik). The first performance I almost went to was a Pearl Cleage play running near Little Five Points in Atlanta, with Saul in a starring role. When he went to NYU for acting, I was in law school at Fordham, and we caught some shows in-between classes: Common and the Beatnuts at the Limelight, Gil Scott-Heron at SOBs. I finally saw Saul do his thing at the Brooklyn Moon during I guess what’s now the spoken-word renaissance of the 90s, around the time he and painter Marcia Jones had baby girl Saturn. (Marcia and I met in the mythic year of 1988, Clark College dime-piece that she was.)

I realize folks don’t know Saul like they know Lil Wayne. It’s hard for me to get a handle on how he’s perceived generally because we know each other; I hope he doesn’t fall into the kind of “alternative hiphop” chasm for people that, like, MC 900 Ft. Jesus or Basehead used to back in the days. In a fairer world, Saul Williams could shift the hiphop paradigm as forcefully as Bob Dylan did for the counterculture of the 60s. Well, I preordered my NiggyTardust for the five bucks. Saul’s a certified furthermucker.