After much procrastination, I finally finished an entry on Atmosphere's Slug (pictured above in maximum lameness--a My Chemical Romance t-shirt? No wonder fourteen year olds love this guy) for Brandon Soderberg's Biographical Dictionary of Rap. I'm not a huge Atmosphere fan ( I had to buy his first Felt album with MURS to help write the entry), but I feel like I did the man justice, or at least blogger justice.
"At heart, I think Slug wants to be a singer-songwriter, not a rapper. He's got a record label offshoot of Rhymesayers for signing rock bands, he name checks Tom Waits as an influence in interviews, and he raps about how, as a kid, he hated when LL Cool J started rapping about girls, even though any rap fan knows LLs been rapping about the ladies from the beginning. In this article, Slug says that a Cage song sampling Built to Spill's "I Could Hurt A Fly" was " one of the first hip-hop songs that touched me in a way outside of me wanting to bop my head or punch a cop." I'm not trying to make a federal case here, but isn't it odd that a guy who raps for a living would associate hip-hop with exclusively those two reactions?"
Please check out the entry, as well as the other entries on Beanie Sigel, J-Dilla, and Masta Ace. Brandon's idea is an awesome one and I think it could be a really exciting way for bloggers to come together to talk about hip-hop on the Internet without gay-baiting each other or using "U' for "you."
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