Atmosphere interview

“I like driving,” Slug tells me, his enthusiasm near bursting at the seams. “It’s just like a real life video game and I’m really fucking good at it. High score and everything!”

I am standing in a side alley in Camden, North London with Slug - one half of prolific hip hop duo Atmosphere. The setting is something he requested before the interview so as he could smoke.

Compromising of Slug AKA Sean Daley as MC and Anthony “Ant” Davis as producer, they have been making records out of Minneapolis, Minnesota for the past 15 years. Most commonly known for Slug’s raw, emotive and highly personal rants about women, alcohol and fatherhood, they have been branded as kings of their own sub-genre of ‘emo hip hop’.

Now on their sixth album, entitled When Life Gives You a Lemon, You Paint That Shit Gold, they have created a much mellower, less angst-ridden sound focusing more on story-telling and social commentary. Says Slug: “We just wanted something not so in your face, something more that you had to pay attention to it to really hear.”

Along with this new approach, accompanying the album is a kid’s illustrated story book written by Slug himself. But he is keen to stress that it is not for kids, more for adults who haven’t grown up yet.

“It’s kind of a sarcastic middle finger to people who would say the album is dumbed down,” he tells me. “It’s like saying ‘Nah, it’s not, but now because you’ve said that, I am going to dumb it down.’ And a kid’s story is about as dumbed down as it can get. I hate to admit that but then when I started writing it, I had fun. It ended up turning into something way better than it was originally supposed to be.”

Curious as Slug’s thinking is - altering his actions in response to imagined criticism - it is merely an indication as to the depths of his introspection. But with this, he is disarmingly honest about such behaviour. As with his rhymes, he talks frantically about his own issues, explaining his thought-processes before humbly apologising for “rambling”.

“I don’t really think about the listener,” he says in his sharp yet friendly tone, “I’ve never been very good at that. If I did, I would probably rap better. But I do what I do for my own selfish reasons. The songs are fictional but are torn from different parts of my world.”

It’s exactly Slug’s deeply personal and open nature that has attracted such a loyal following of fans. But this new direction has attracted a hoard of criticism from disillusioned fans via their MySpace page, of which Slug personally handles the correspondence.

“You’re always going to have people who identify a lot with what you do so when you start to steer away from that, it hurts their feelings. I understand that but I have to say back that I can’t fucking tip toe around their feelings,” he tells me, flicking his second cigarette into the gutter. “I like to have MySpace so when a kid says ‘Fuck you, you’ve sold out’ I get to vent and do like fifteen paragraphs saying ‘Here’s why I’m not a sell out, you fucking internet dork!’ I like to nerd out, get on message boards and talk shit!”

One particular point of angst that Slug has become synonymous with is ‘Lucy Ford’ – a fictitious female character and one of which bore the brunt of many of Slug’s particularly vicious verbal attacks.

“It was just me projecting my issues towards women, but it was also tied to alcoholism. A lot of people go through that, it’s just that I rapped about it.”

But ‘Lucy’ is conspicuously absent in the new album. She is something Slug believes to have grown out of.

“Now I take responsibility for all my flaws, and all of my err.. good things!” he says with a laugh. “But I’m not going to point the finger at beer, cos I still like beer. It’s just too much of anything is a bad thing.”

As we finish the interview, the mic check inside booms through to the alley. He mimicks it, repeating it over, and adding new words, flicking from the real world back to the immense world inside his head. The whole ‘driving/real life computer game’ thing seems to make a lot of sense.

When Life Gives you Lemons, you Paint that Shit Gold by Atmosphere is out now.

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