Fresh Air

Slug of hip-hop group Atmosphere wants to change the world.

“We are attempting to get children to stop wearing visors,” he says of his God Loves Ugly tour, currently roaming the East Coast. “Sometimes they wear them upside down. We gotta get kids to stop wearing them; they’re ridiculous.” With the growing audience the Minnesotan emcee now commands, such a noble cause may yet come to fruition.

Easily among the boldest and most refreshing voices in the underground, Slug, who performed at the Middle East last Friday, is helping to push independent hip hop firmly into the public consciousness. The renaissance at the fringes has been winning over critics and fans alike, ranging from the lo-fi sampler virtuosity of Madlib and MF Doom and seething electronic grime of El-P (the anti-Timbaland) to the obtuse bohemian leanings of the Anticon clique. Though he’s flexed his lyrical muscles with nearly all of them, Slug brandishes his own critic-approved designations: “emo rap” and its unfortunately named cousin “smart rap.”

“I think it’s kind of funny because I’m not really that smart,” he says flatly. “When people peg me as an intellectual rapper, I think that’s hilarious. When I think about it, Tupac was the king of ‘emo rap’—so if people want to put me in the same category as Tupac, I’m honored.”

He’s far from gangsta infamy—but to tens of thousands, Slug is already a hero. It’s perhaps indicative of the current hip-hop climate that so many youths have latched onto his brand of reflective lyricism. While most mainstream and independent emcees seem perennially obsessed with the exterior—be it ice, skills, intelligence, or hip-hop itself—Slug raps about what eats at him inside. Check “Shrapnel” from the new Atmosphere album, God Loves Ugly: “Check your mail, climb your ladder / Count the pieces you’ve managed to gather / Does it matter? What you trying to achieve? / Let go of your throat if you’re dying to breathe.” Riding producer Ant’s skeletal boom-bap, Slug spits each carefully sculpted rhyme with a clarity and understated resolve that unfailingly drives his thoughts home. The results can be poignant and oft-disturbing, but nearly always manage to captivate.

Atmosphere’s hip hop looks past hollow braggadocio, reviving the music’s original impulse to reach out rather than push back. Slug sees no future in battle rhymes: “You can’t feed your kids with a battle rap. You can make your kids think you’re the dopest battle rapper in the world, but you can’t feed them.” Instead, he aligns himself with conscious emcees KRS-One and Chuck D, as well as songwriters like Tom Waits and Stevie Wonder.

“My revolution was a little more personal [than KRS-One’s],” he explains, “but it was still the same kind of revolution. I’m just trying to save my ten square feet.” The difference being that “I might, instead of talking about the government, be talking about some girl that makes me want to kill people. But I’m going to give you [the full story], so that you might be able to take from it and somehow apply it to your life.”

Any doubts to the full impact of Slug’s work were quelled as the God Loves Ugly tour hit the Middle East. Brushing off notions that he is the rap equivalent of a whining emo boy, Slug lit the stage like a firecracker and had the hoodie-laden audience at his fingertips from the get-go. Sharing the limelight with fellow wordsmiths Blueprint and MURS (of Living Legends fame), he tore through a carefully orchestrated set of Atmosphere classics old and new, with the crowd belting out the choruses right along with him. The obligatory freestyle cypher was almost an afterthought, serving to remind how Slug paid his dues before returning to more songful material.

Yet all the raucous energy couldn’t bury a profound vulnerability that offset the testosterone on display. There was something endearing (and surreal) about these grown men—backed by DJ Mr. Dibbs, who could probably shatter a turntable with his forehead—pouring out their hearts in the most confrontational, hoarse-throated manner possible. Lyrical prowess and mic charisma became tools for assuaging fears of dull futures, wrecked love and artistic failure. That songs such as Atmosphere’s tinkling piano ballad “Abusing of the Rib” and the startlingly mundane anthem “Like Today” could incite such gleeful abandon is an achievement that surely cannot be overlooked. It was as if hip hop’s towering wall of machismo had been doused with a bucket of water, leaving a shivering mess and a newfound urgency in the process. For a few hours, the music seemed like the most important thing in the world again.

Slug is riding the crest of a wave to success, and he knows it. The next Atmosphere album, Seven’s Travels, is said to be a happier affair, his “De La Soul-ish” record. But he’s staking his ambitions one at a time. “Some day I just want to inspire some kid to be a really good rapper instead of a really good coke dealer, you know?”

He has little reason to worry.