Wake up and Smell the Gun Smoke

Words: Julie Mondor

Sage Francis

It seems that when Sage Francis leaps to a chair (as good a soapbox as any), it’s so that his audience can take in more of his commanding presence. However, one look into his wide, peering eyes, suggests another reason for this high-angle perspective. As he looms over the crowd, it is as if he wants to see as much of us as possible. In fact, a listen to his new album, A Healthy Distrust, shows him taking in the world with the same omniscient gaze.  Politics, love, family, the environment, sex, art—and even God—cannot escape his scrutiny.

It has been almost 10 years now since Sage recorded his first demo tape. Within two years he had a live band, Art Official Intelligence; a weekly radio show, True School Session, on WRIU; and a recording project with friend Joe Beats. This project yielded the Non-Prophets 12”, which was released on Emerge records in 1999 and, with little promotion, ended up spinning on a few thousand turntables. And, 1999 was the same year Sage won the Superbowl MC battle in Boston. After a few months, he took the illustrious 2000 Scribble Jam freestyle title.  He subsequently spent some time spinning beats and performing at various slam poetry events.

Somehow, during this time, Sage managed to obtain two university degrees in Communications from Massachusetts’ Dean College and a B.A. in Journalism from the University of Rhode Island.  He doesn’t think his education was important to him as a rapper at all, but it did buy him some time.  That purchase of time, he admits, was pretty damn expensive, but it afforded him the opportunity to broaden his social horizons: “It was very good for me to meet different kinds of people with different backgrounds and different passions. It was refreshing because I come from a very homogeneous community. Growing up with a town full of Irish Catholics really gives you a warped perspective of truth. It was great to involve myself in activist groups and have access to a college station and run a poetry reading. College was great for a lot of reasons, none of which were included in my tuition.”

Though Sage appreciates his higher learning, he doesn’t endorse college per se. Rather, he supports people who are modest enough to know that they need back-up plans to their dreams: “what is important about getting a degree was the safety net it provided me in case this music thing never took off to a degree where I could live off of it. Music careers do NOT take off for most people. I've seen many people ruin their lives because they were so self-absorbed and they didn't even consider a plan B. Dip sh!ts. False confidence is a mother.”

 
Sage’s 2002 album Personal Journals, released on Anticon Records, was his huge clip to “false confidence.” Rather than filing along in a queue of battle rappers, Sage stepped out of the line and eschewed the empty pursuit of ego. Run-of-the-mill d!ck jokes and insincere props were dismantled; this rapper took his unmatched ability for wordplay and deconstructed his own reality over 18 soul-rending tracks.  While his work might be called confessional verse, the other label ascribed to Sage, which crowns him the father of “emo-rap,” is trite and unfitting. Listen to “Inherited Scars,” a track that brutally explores family ghosts and self-abuse, and you will sense that this man has seen enough pain to make him hard as nails.

Hope, the Non-Prophets’ 2003 full-length album released on Lex records, showed us that despite his meanderings, he hadn’t walked away from the traditions of the  hip hop that raised him. This album came back to the classic allusions and wordplay he learned from the likes of Chuck D.  The move from Personal Journals to Hope also illustrates how Sage is able to work within and without a genre, escaping any labels placed on him.  Clearly this multiplicity is shaped by his broad taste in music: “there are artists in almost every genre of music that I enjoy just as much as my favourite  hip hop musicians. Ranging from classical music to folk rock to hardcore to blues.”

While writing comes first for this wordsmith, music helps Sage escape a claustrophobic world of language: “I am soothed by music. I usually prefer to listen to instrumental music or music with less happening in the lyrics. I just think I have consumed too many words and I need a little break.”  Such a break is evident in “Sea Lion,” which appears on his newest album, A Healthy Distrust. This track is a Beck-like country-rap hybrid that features a chorus touched by Will Oldham’s melancholy guitar playing and aching southern vocals. This verse releases Sage and his audience from his frantic word games.

A Healthy Distrust is a product of Sage’s signing with punk patriots, Epitaph Records.He is their first  hip hop artist to sign. Sage doesn’t sweeten his words when describing how this signing frees him from having to conform to what the mainstream  hip hop labels are disseminating: "it was completely liberating on many levels. I would never sign to a  hip hop label unless they bent far over and let me explore their pain cave with my vein stick. F*ck them all."

The band touring with Sage right now also shows a refusal to conform to the expectations of genre. The Sol.illoquists convey a refreshing hybridity that caught Sage’s attention. From Orlando, Florida, this metal-meets-rap-meets-jazz group handed Sage a live recording of one their shows when he was on the F*ck Clear Channel Tour: “I get so many demos and usually end up tossing them out the van window, but this one was impressive. I asked them to come play a benefit concert I was throwing so that I could see them perform in person, and they stole the show hands down. I had them stay at my house, and it turns out a lot of our politics and lifestyles are similar and they all are trustworthy and genuine people, which is most important to me. So I asked them to come out on tour with me and I feel privileged to have presented this entire nation with what I consider to be the best and most unique  hip hop show in a long time."
 

As for Sage’s latest album, here he is at his most earnest and forceful, and Dangermouse, Sixtoo and Reanimater paint his words black with haunting, ominous production.  This album asks us to scrape our ears from the sugar slime left by pop beats and tune into Sage’s growling lyrics, which interrogate our complacent existence with vehemence. In “The Buzz Kill,” we see how his art form aggressively shakes us out of our submission to mainstream music culture: “I disassociate the actions with their meanings/Songs from “ends justify their means” mentality/Plus I’m bleeding/Give me a bandaid/a band that can play/a fan base with hearing aids and a voice like a hand grenade/I pull the wool over their vision/Pull the pin and push it in ’em.”

While pop fans might not be blissful in their ignorance, Sage feels that pop culture is designed to cater to people who prefer sugar over substance. However, he feels that he can contribute to breaking the cycle that enslaves music listeners: “I feel the cycle comes and goes in waves. We save as many as we can. The rest are miserable or content in their ignorance. All I can ask is that if people FEEL within that something is wrong or missing in the life they have been presented with, they have other options. There is actual substance in this world that is just waiting there for them to grab it.” That said, if you want to leave a show feeling like you just woke up from a long, dreamless sleep, tickets to a Sage Francis concert are definitely worth grabbing.