Atmosphere

The Village Voice said his music conjures “images of pussy-whipped young men,” while Rolling Stone called it “overeducated nerd rap.” But that didn’t prevent Slug from recording “When Life Gives You Lemons, You Paint That Shit Gold,” another articulate album about feminism, sex, and working-class people.

Slug, who along with producer Ant makes up hip-hop duo Atmosphere, is probably the only songwriter in contemporary hip-hop who writes about a woman who is “gonna pay all day but never get away from skinny white dick.” Slug is not the dawg in his songs; he’s more like the commiserating best friend who says, “I know you feel like you can’t live without him” and ends up not getting any. But as previous albums have established, and as this one will only reinforce, when Slug talks about love he’s often self-deprecating. Rapping about his love affair with a woman in “Me,” a song teeming with autobiographical references, Slug claims “he feels like he stole the best years of her life.”

Slug’s feminist awareness rises to a new level with “Dreamer,” which is dedicated to a single mom whose baby has a no-good father. Slug sounds like he’s borrowing from a LIfetime special: she “worked it and built her own nest to live.” With working-class hero lines like “she still dreams after she woke,” Slug could have easily been writing songs for Marianne Faithfull.

It’s surprising, then, that Marianne Faithfull may be the only artist in history whose actual music doesn’t get referenced in “When Life Gives You Lemons.” “Your Glasshouse” starts like a Depeche Mode song, and “You” has an underlying tune reminiscent of The Smiths. On “Puppets,” Slug sings from the Beastie Boys’ “Sabotage.” Atmosphere even has a song called “Wild Wild Horses,” for God’s sake (God is Keith Richards, in this case). These allusions confirm that Atmosphere is an ultra-intelligent group, both lyrically and tonally. But do they have the courage to sample something ridiculous like “The Young and the Restless,” à la Mary J. Blige? Well, not in this album, anyway.

Then again, the kind of writing and music that Slug and Ant produce makes you seriously wonder whether they’ve ever watched a daytime drama. I doubt they would even get the cultural reference should they listen to Blige’s “No More Drama.” For a glimpse of what’s going on in their heads, listen to “The Waitress,” which describes the daily routine of a waitress from the perspective of a homeless customer who’s getting maltreated and wants to die and “come back as a cockroach in [her] tin cup.” If nothing else, “The Waitress” shows fans that Slug spends his days empathizing with homeless people looking at waitresses in cafés, while producer Ant is busy conjuring up ways to work flutes beautifully into hip-hop tunes.

But don’t think that Slug’s completely selfless; some of his brightest lines come out when he sings about himself. Fully aware of the relatively late age at which he earned recognition, he told Minneapolis’s City Pages, “You can’t be a 27 year old ‘rapper’ just breaking in.” His sentiments are echoed in “Guarantees,” where he states his deepest fear: someone might “kill me in my 30s in the name of progress.” Unfortunately, the brilliant line is forgotten as the song collapses into an unforgivably tacky conclusion, “The only guarantee in life is a life worth dying for,” a line that stands out awkwardly for its dowdiness in a brilliantly written album.

But “Guarantees” is buried mid-album, and by the time you get to the concluding “In Her Music Box,” you forget all about it. This last track discusses the world from a little girl’s point of view while sampling a music box. Atmosphere knows what they’re best at, and by the end of the album, they want to make sure that we know, too: unusual social messages, music that fits the lyrics like an Italian suit, and, above all else, story-telling qualities that put you inside another person’s mind—for approximately four minutes.