Slug interview

[Block]

Atmosphere rapper Sean Daley - or Slug as he's known on the mike - says he has noticed that people often are confused when they meet him and he makes a stupid joke or doesn't brood enough.
They expect him to be as dark and serious as the heavier rhymes on such classic alternative hip-hop releases as "You Can't Imagine How Much Fun We're Having," "God Loves Ugly" and "When Life Gives You Lemons, You Paint That S- -t Gold."

But more often than not, he's rhyming for the art.

"I don't do this to put myself out there so much as I do it to make a great album," Daley says. "At the end of the day, that's my main focus. Being Sean in the public and showing all the facets of my personality, that's not as important to me as making a great record."

We caught up with the rapper to talk about Atmosphere's latest great record, "The Family Sign." Here's what he had to say about the album, Eminem and the friendly tug of the war he has been having with Anthony "Ant" Davis, the other half of the Atmosphere equation.

Question: Could talk a little bit about the name, "The Family Sign," and what it means to you?

Answer: I wanted to incorporate the word family into the name somewhere because the band is kind of acting like a family. Me and Anthony were letting the other guys have a little bit more input into the actual creative process, whereas before, they were just kind of hired guns that did what we told them to do. So I wanted a title that sort of reflected that.

And when they started turning in music to me to write to, I was just like "OK, we are definitely onto something here" because the concepts and ideas I was coming up with to go with their music were all kind of family-oriented. And "The Family Sign" seemed cool because it reminded me of Prince, and I'm from the land of Prince. I also liked the way it didn't really nail it down. It was ambiguous enough to be an Atmosphere title because a lot of our titles are open-ended like that.

Q: Most songs seem to take a dark spin on the family theme.

A: It's easier to paint with dark colors, and I've been a sucker for that my whole life. I end up taking dark spins on most topics. I don't know why. Maybe it's because I'm lazy and it's easier. Ant always gives me a hard time about that. He's the one I'm quoting when I say, "It's easier to paint with dark colors." He's always trying to challenge me to make songs that are a little more lighthearted. And every time I do, he's like, "See? I told you. Everybody loves that f- - king 'Sunshine' song." And I'm like, "Dude, but if you listen to the song, it's about a hangover. It's still dark." It's our little tug of war. He's always trying to push me to write music that's a little more, I guess, happy. But it's harder to write a happy song that's convincing.

Q: How much are you drawing on personal experience?

A: There's a lot of personal stuff on there, but there's also a lot of stuff that's not. I think that because of the amount of personal stuff I've made, people have a tendency to try and look for everything to be personal, to take all of my songs and go, "Oh man, I can't believe he wrote about that" without considering that some of this s- -t is fiction, too. People have a tendency to think I'm being autobiographical all the time, and that's not the case. It's really probably only autobiographical maybe 20 percent of the time, if that. The rest of the time, it's fiction.

Q: Is it hard to get inside a story like "The Last to Say," where you look at an abusive parent, long enough to write about it?

A: I have a lot of experience with that topic, just from my life, my experiences, my surroundings and my people. I know people who have had to deal with that situation. I'm not saying it was difficult to write it, but I'll say it's rare that a song that I made will bring me to tears. And when I start to feel an emotion that's strong like that when I'm making a song, that's when I know, "I love this f- -king song." And that particular song is one of the ones I really, really cherish. I'm really glad to have taken a part in that, because it was able to move me while making it. How many rappers cried when they were writing one of their own songs? Get out of here.

Q: I saw that you were on a list last year at MTV titled "Eminem's Legacy: The Five Best White Rappers Who Followed" And one of the things they said was that "like Eminem, Slug's raps are brutally honest." But to me, it feels like your raps are honest and his raps are more in this character he's playing. What did you think when you saw that comparison?

A: I never saw that. That was news to me, what you just mentioned. I'm going to have to go Google that s- -t now. But I don't know that guy. I've never really met him so I don't know how much honesty is in his raps. But I feel like much like even me, he wrote some rhymes that were probably really honest and came from a really fragile place and forever people will always think of him as that rapper, even when he makes songs that aren't like that. So he probably gets categorized as being that honest rapper to a degree that maybe even he resents, similar to how I still get bothered by the fact that people think a lot of my rhymes are autobiographical. It's one of those things where, when people meet me for the first time, they expect me to me this brooding, upset, mad-at-everything guy. And I'm not. They get confused when I crack a stupid joke or something, because they expect me to be this guy that they know from, like, four songs in a catalog of 500 songs. So I've got to imagine that for Eminem, it probably can be a weight on his shoulders.


Read more: http://www.azcentral.com/thingstodo/mus ... z1WGNNCq49

[KillahBee]

Cheers for posting this, man, that was a quality interview

[Block]

I thought so, as well. A lot of people seemingly don't like to read though, lol.