Aging & Wisdom Quote by Saul Williams

“Hiphop is too young to put a definition on it” is Saul Williams refusing the museum label while the paint is still wet. Coming from a musician-poet who’s lived at the boundary of rap, spoken word, and activism, the line isn’t a shrug; it’s a warning. The urge to define is rarely neutral. Definitions get drafted when an art form becomes valuable enough to be sold, policed, taught, and “protected” by people who didn’t build it.

Williams is pushing back against hip-hop’s early canonization: the moment when a living culture gets flattened into a checklist (boom-bap drums, certain regional slang, certain “authentic” subject matter) and then used to gatekeep everyone else. “Too young” implies not just time but volatility. Youth means mutability, growth spurts, bad decisions, reinvention. It also means vulnerability to adults in the room - critics, labels, institutions - who want clean categories because clean categories are easier to market and easier to control.

The subtext is political. Hip-hop began as a local, Black and brown, working-class technology for survival and style under conditions that didn’t offer many microphones. To define it too early is to domesticate it: to treat it as a product rather than a practice, a sound rather than a social force. Williams leaves hip-hop deliberately unfinished, insisting it remain a verb - something people do to reality - instead of a noun that reality does to them.