New Yorker Saul Williams is often called a hip-hop poet, a revealing tautology that speaks volumes about the wearying conventionality of what was once America's most radical and creative music. Once described as the "black CNN", so much of hiphop now offers only a rigid backbeat to the dreary doggerel of sex, money, ego and brittle urban romance. With a breathless, galvanising energy, Williams reclaims hiphop's poetic power. This is light years beyond a simple news flash: it's a hyper-literate visionary polemic.

Sure, this is only one man with a microphone and another (the marvellously named Thavius Beck) manning a box of tricks that produces beats, bass and noise, in a cellar in London. But contained in this tiny space is an electrical storm. Harnessing punk's angry noise and the irresistibly lithe rhythms of dancehall and even drum'n'bass, Williams' songs are as thrilling and inspiring as the combination of words and music can be. He's also sharp enough to pierce the restrictions of a self-confessed "middle-class existence", delineate a wry kind of existentialism and quote Public Enemy's Black Steel without seeming shamed by the company.

In Black Stacey, he recalls the racist attitudes of palerskinned blacks to him as a child, and challenges the stereotypes through which the black community plays itself: "Ain't from the streets of Compton," he declares, "Ain't from no prison yard."

In a world where, as he has it, "no one listens to no one", Williams' brilliant gambit is not to play to the gallery, to set the bar high and dare - or trust - his audience to leap with him.