Rating:
  Review Date: May 13, 2007
  Website: Sage Francis Website
  Label: Epitaph

Sage Francis “Human the Death Dance” Album Review
I received my first ever “your website sucks” email this week. Right around the site’s two year anniversary, too. Early one morning, some kid wrote a huge email talking about how underground hip-hop sucks “because it’s emo.” He said that sites like this one made kids erroneously think that it is “okay to be the Beastie Boys.” He asked if it ever occurred to me that “maybe hip-hop is supposed to be raunchy, dirty and kinda stupid.” And he said that rappers such as El-P, Slug of Atmosphere and Sage Francis, who he referred to as “crackas on the mic,” aren’t really hip-hop … they’re just “emo punk bands.”  

Underground Hip-Hop is Emo
I pretty much just laughed it off, deciding to ignore the letter at first, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t angry. I packed up my work bag, put my iPod on Sage Francis’ “Human the Death Dance,” which I had just received in the mail the night before, and jumped on the J Train to Manhattan. The first cut on Sage’s album was an interesting lyrical play-by-play of his music career, and I was taken aback when he seemed to respond to the email I had received that morning. The chorus of the song went:

Pop pop goes the weasel, the weasel
Drop drop goes the easel, the easel
This is hip-hop for the people, the people
Stop calling it emo

That was the second time that day I had heard hip-hop that I considered dope shit being characterized as “emo,” and I didn’t even know what the fuck “emo” meant. So when I got to the office, I looked it up on the Internet. Emo is a slang term used to describe a range of fashion, music and attitudes that stem from the punk rock subculture. The emo personality is often stereotypically characterized as one that is overly emotional, depressed, angry and lonely, and emo rap or emo hip-hop is basically hip-hop music that contains emotional lyrical content. When cats say that today’s underground hip-hop is “emo,” they are essentially poking fun at the artists for being a bunch of self-obsessed crybabies like the ones that supposedly make punk rock.

Hip-Hop & Punk Rock
This interested me, because I never considered hip-hop and punk rock to be even remotely associated with one another, at least not to a point where a term that had been created to characterize punk rock was now being used to describe underground hip-hop. To me, punk rockers were just some spoiled ass English-wannabee rich kids, who decided to dye their hair blue, get a bunch of tattoos and play the electric guitar really loud because mommy and daddy wouldn’t buy them that new Beamer or something. And that type of mentality is not at all hip-hop. Therefore, I decided to do some further research on punk rock, and what I found out completely amazed me. In reality, hip-hop and punk rock are quite similar from both a historical and an ideological perspective.

Although there seems to be some major debate over whether punk rock originated in the United States, Australia or the United Kingdom, most sources claim that punk rock developed in the mid-1970s in the United States, primarily the borough of Manhattan in New York City. Punk bands at the time were very anti-establishment, and attacked mainstream rock with short, fast and hardcore music, loud instrumentation and overwhelmingly political or nihilistic lyrics. The music was so influential that it led to an associated punk subculture that expressed rebellion, distinctive fashion styles, a do it yourself (DIY) attitude, and a group of varied social and political ideologies, most based around an individual’s right to freedom which included concepts such as free thought, peaceful ethics, individualism, anti-authoritarianism, and even political anarchism.

Wow. That is not at all what I thought it was. And even more so, I couldn’t help but notice that while all this was happening, another cultural movement was being born just north in the Bronx. Just as punk rock was a backlash against mainstream rock music, hip-hop was a backlash against Black radio stations’ switch to disco formats. Just as punk rock music was characterized by new and innovative sounds, speeds and instrumentation, hip-hop created it’s own sounds using percussion breaks, audio mixers and turntables. Just as punk rock gave birth to the emo fashion styles, hip-hop gave rise to styles that have taken the world by storm. And just like punk, hip-hop has led to an associated subculture with its own social and political ideologies. That seems like more than similarities to me . it seems like the same birth process experienced by two near-identical cultural movements.

Stop Calling It Emo
This all made me think about my website’s critic and his use of the word “emo” to describe underground hip-hop. I was no longer angry about it … instead, I started to realize that the shot he had taken at underground hip-hop was really a compliment. If saying that underground hip-hop is “emo” means that it is like punk rock music, then that means underground hip-hop is a backlash against that bullshit you hear on the radio. And that’s what I want it to be. If saying that underground hip-hop is “emo” means that it is like punk subculture, then that means hip-hop really is a culture of rebellion, individualized social concepts and anti-establishment political ideologies. And that makes me proud.

But most of all, if saying that underground hip-hop is “emo” means that it is spontaneously and strongly emotional, I think that is the best compliment of all. For some reason, our hyper-masculine American society seems to think that it is un-cool to show emotion; un-cool to show that you have feelings; un-cool that you experience love; un-cool that you feel pain and uncertainty and confusion. Instead, the rappers considered cool are those that are flat out liars; those that lie about being gangsters; those that lie about being thugs; those that lie about who they really are. And that’s not what’s cool to me homie.

I want to hear hip-hop made by real people; hip-hop about real feelings and real events; hip-hop about real life. That’s the type of music people can relate to and be inspired by, regardless of what the majority might think about it. With this in mind, I am proud to be the hip-hopper to say that it is “okay to be the Beastie Boys.” It is okay to be Sage Francis or El-P or Slug. It is okay to be you. Or in the words of Sage Francis, “the powers of suggestion suggested I be what I’m not, and that’s not me ever.”

If society thinks that is “emo” … then fuck society. If you think it is “emo” … well, then fuck you too you hyper-masculine motherfucker. But from here on out, I’ll never again take the use of the word “emo” to describe hip-hop as an insult. Because in reality, it’s probably the biggest compliment you could give me. Peace.