Atmosphere is releasing their latest studio album, When Life Gives You Lemons, You Paint That Shit Gold, next week. I’m not going to rave about them, but this is the music I grew up with, and as Slug’s rhymes have matured, so have I. It’s interesting to have been listening to one group for 10 years, to reflect on the patterns of both the music’s development and the individual’s maturation. Anyway, here’s a preview from the album. It’s speaks for itself, so enjoy.
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April 17th, 2008 at 9:12 pm
Yo yo Jackie, jackmiester, jaclaruni Mister by my valentine. Check it out dude, your babble is a bright spot in the rabble of the web. Your words are a lesson just waiting to be read. A shout out to the darkness of the electronic bionic demonic wasteland of the World Wide Web. You make me do some thinking instead of all my drinking my sinking my stinking just trying to remain among the undead. The dead the dead and the dying the sad and the crying the dying and the dead on the World Wide Web. Do you think that we can save them? Shave them? Clean them up and bathe them? Make them safe for society free from all our piety ?? A life in the real world a world full of real life, goodness in balance with all the strife in life? Real is the deal its there for the steal if your spirit has the steel. We can all get mad and ragefull, hateful, spiteful, stuck in the rut of the self right-full. But can we navigate the real, use our birthright just to feel to heal and reveal what is real?
Now you gives me Atmosphere to hear and enjoy, but my boy, all I hear is despair and a helping of his pain. With nothing to left to gain, nothing left to feed my brain or to lift my own pain. No hope of salvation no foundation or relation to the healing transformation for the transillumination of the spiritual affirmation that you feel when your real when grasp the whole deal of a life that is real.
Slug’s final lyrics, and the message of his jam, don’t offer any hope just a life on the lam.
“The only guarantee in life is a life worth dying for……cause death is sitting on your front door.”
For me the best that life has to offer is a life worth living for. For the beauty of the Earth and our birthright just to feel and to heal and reveal what is really real.
April 18th, 2008 at 12:11 am
Holy crap, ladies and gentlemen, my father can rhyme! Props, pops! I especially liked this line: “Do you think that we can save them? Shave them? Clean them up and bathe them?”
Rhyming aside, you raise a valid question, and I will offer an earnest response.
I shall make no attempt to explain was Slug is trying to say with this song, but I can explain my relationship to it. I look at it two ways. First, it’s simply cathartic. I like this song for the same reason I enjoy tragic dramas–because on some level life is tragic. We can’t hold on to anything, no possessions, no loved ones, not even ourselves. Time separates us from everything we love. That is tragic. Most of the people in this country are struggling to survive, and it’s hard. The depth of this struggle was impossible for me to understand until I left university life, but now I have glimpsed it. So on that level, this song is a hymn for the hard life. It alludes to what I can only describe as ‘midwestern angst,’ where our hearts feel as empty as our corn fields, or as cold as our winter wind. I do not see it as depressing or negative, but, again, as cathartic. An ode to the struggle.
Secondly, you know I am Buddhist. I know this will sound elusive and unclear, but “a life worth dying for” and “a life worth living for” are really the same thing, and that is the most important realization of this song. In Buddhist terms, we have all this suffering to deal with, and we want to relieve it so that we can experience joy and spread that to others. So we have to ask, why do we suffer? The Buddhist answer is a false belief in permanence and a separate self. These two things make one another possible, so deconstructing one will invalidate both of them. Permanence is an illusion, and anyone who as experienced loss knows this, at least on some level. And this is not a curse, because without impermanence we would never grow up to experience all the wonderful things of life. At the same time, impermanence also means we have to die. But meditating on the self, we see that it is comprised of external elements. Our ancestors, our experiences, our food… all of the things which come together to make ‘us’ are rooted outside of ‘us.’ A “self” is an illusion of a permanent and independent being. But we are impermanent and inter-dependent. This realization is a blessing because it allows us to see that there is neither birth nor death. Or, we could say that birth is death. Or, we could say that death is birth. And that is what I mean when I say “a life worth dying for” is the same as “a life worth living for.”
Finally, I think the catharsis is shown in the video in a subtle way. Throughout the first two verses, the shadow is on the left side of Slug’s face (from our view). The music and his voice become more agitated up until the end of the second verse, when Slug’s face is suddenly cast in complete darkness. Slug begins to sing, and this is the point of catharsis. When his face becomes visible again, it is closer to the camera and the shadow has moved over to the right side of his face. He sings out the rest of his chorus and then his face blurs away. So in the beginning this realization of death is a painful thing, and the two verses are spent discussing the hardship of life. But then as he starts to sing, that to me signals acceptance and a level of detachment. As his face becomes blurred it is as if he is stepping away from the camera to return to his life and make it worthwhile.
Anyway, that is my interpretation. Sorry if that is long, but I wanted to give you an honest and complete response since you put energy into an entertaining and valuable comment.
(Also, we have to keep in mind that the album is called “When Life Gives You Lemons, You Paint That Shit Gold”)
April 21st, 2008 at 9:53 pm
Hi Dude. It has been a couple of days and this may be so far down by now you don’t see it but I will go anyway. Of course I understand catharsis. It is important at times in ones life. However, I don’t experience catharsis in this piece, or in the vast majority of popular rap that cross my awareness or comes through the young people I work with. Catharsis is, by one definition “A release of emotional tension, as after an overwhelming experience, that restores or refreshes the spirit.” The critical element is the restorative property of catharsis. One is better after a catharsis. Ones spirit is restored. But most rap does not offer this. It only offers a repeated re-experiencing of anger and pain. Not a transformation. Not a restoration. Since it does not restore, but only re-experiences, it fuels deeper anger, deeper pain, self-righteous blaming, and desperate measures to escape the pain such as drugs, risky taking behaviors, meaningless sex, suicide, etc.
I know this is an extremely broad brush. And I don’t mean to lay this all on Atmosphere. You have given me other examples of their work which was transformative. And I was also aware of the meaning of the title of this DVD. Perhaps the work as a whole will offer some transformation.
But in the genre of Rap. Popular Rap, the Rap the young people I work with listen to. All I hear is selfrighteous blaming and anger which feeds the negative things I mentioned. Wallowing rather than transforming, destructive of the human spirit rather than restorative.
We have talked about this before; I guess we just experience it differently.
Lastly, the difference between living a life worth dying for and a live worth living for. In my opinion of the world of Rap this is an extremely negative statement. Who is Rap written for and about? Life in the ghetto, inner city life glorifying the bloods and the crypts and various gang images. A life worth dying for is a life worth being murdered for cheating a drug dealer, a life worth doing a drive by on an opposing gang member, a life necessitating carrying a gun just in case. It is a life of risk and prison and self-righteous anger. This is what I think the mind set of most rappers and their target audience is. This is the anti-social posturing of popular Rap. They are not talking about a person who believes so strongly in the good things in life that they would die to defend them, or the soldier who falls on a handgrenade to save his buddies. They are not talking about the ultimate truth that we all will die so our lives need to be as true to the Buddha as we can live them. I just don’t hear that in Rap.
I must say I have the same criticism of other music. Not only Rap. Much of the blues is more wallowing than transformative. Much of it is misogynists too. But musically I do like it better. But much of the blues is inviting you to share in their pain. Rap is in your face self-righteous. Certainly some Country and Rock is just angry. Marylyn Manson is destructive to the human spirit. Etc.
I think we have analyzed this song to death. I’ll be interested for you to send me another song from Atmosphere which is more transformative or fits the CD title.
Thanks for your words. Take care, Love Daddy J.
April 21st, 2008 at 10:45 pm
Imagine a lamp that sheds a glorious light. Now imagine that a foolish person drops this lamp, and burns down his or her house. Do we blame the lamp, or the fool?
Your critique of rap engenders the same question, because hip-hop is not at fault, mainstream rappers are at fault. You will find no more vehement enemy of so-called “popular rap” than myself. I have an embargo on even talking about it because I get so pissed off. So I understand where you are coming from, but understand that your kids are probably listening to some of the worst crap out there. That is the fault of the industry. It is precisely BECAUSE hip-hop uplifts that those in charge bastardize it and turn it into something to oppress people.
I strongly suggest you check out Jeff Chang’s book Can’t Stop Won’t Stop to glean a fuller understanding of hip-hop.
All that said, Atmosphere is not “popular” in the way you use the term. Slug’s songs reflect his experiences, many of which are unpleasant. A song does need positive content to be transformative. Expression is intrinsically transformative, and it is the negative that we need to transform, so frequently that is what we express.
Anyway, in terms of positivity, I offer you two live videos.
The point of this first one is the chorus, “Sometimes it’s just too simple to live your life wrong / gotta do right for you when the time come.”
The point of this second one is its heartfelt exposition of two difficult lives (and the studio version adds a third).
Slug’s positivity isn’t blatant, but it is undeniable. He doesn’t sugar-coat truths and pretend that most people’s lives aren’t hard, but he does frame them in a powerful and ultimately uplifting way. Well, that’s my opinion.
May 1st, 2008 at 8:02 pm
It was nice to see him acting as himself. Little put on air of the cool and dangerous rapper so many “popular” rappers take on. Also these songs are much more sung as an emotional sharing rather than an angry lashing out. Even his facial expressions are more open and natural rather than angry and defyant. Thanks for the vids.
May 2nd, 2008 at 4:41 am
Thanks for watching and sharing your thoughts.