continued...

As a son, Slug is hardly dutiful when it comes to cards or phone calls. But his mother, along with his father and his stepfather, Kevin Skogen, speak of him with unguarded pride. This is tempered only by concern: Mom worries about his sleeping and eating habits. When I meet her, she offers me a dozen freshly hatched eggs from her hobby farm, shortly before she and Kevin head for their second-shift jobs at Honeywell--Bill Daley's old employer.

Valerie says Sean was always shy around strangers, and quiet as a toddler--more likely to take toys apart than jostle around and make war. But he grew remarkably articulate for his age, easily making friends in the area around 42nd Street and Oakland Avenue. By the late Seventies and early Eighties, this working-class neighborhood of south Minneapolis had absorbed a mix of families: African Americans, Among, Vietnamese, South Asian Indians, and Norwegians.

As a kid, Slug thought of himself as black--if the issue came up at all. He was into drawing and music, and hip hop seemed a natural expressive outlet, a passion he passed on to his much younger brothers. The form also arrived just as his parents' life together was coming apart. "That hit Sean the hardest," Valerie remembers. "He was the oldest. His way with the divorce was to try to talk us into getting back together."

By the time Sean was 11, he had been under the spell of New York street culture for nearly half his life. After months of practicing on cardboard in the back yard, tying bandannas around his jeans and tightly lacing his Adidas, Sean was persuaded by his father to enter a break-dancing competition. "Here's a kid who didn't want to be in the public eye at all," remembers Craig. "He didn't do that well, but he liked it. From then on, some of his introvertedness dissipated."

Sean saw his first rap shows in one rousing 1987 weekend, when UTFO played the Saints Roller Rink, and then First Avenue. He remembers the local openers, Style Posse, featuring future Urban Lights store owner Tim Wilson on the mic and tables, and Almond Joy, a kid Slug remembers as "the dude to be" on the south side. Minneapolis's I.R.M. Crew had already released their own 12-inch singles, nationally distributed by K-Tel. Soon friends were moving on from breaking and graffiti-writing to rapping and DJing themselves.

Sean paid close attention. He listened and adopted the slang, even learned a New York accent. He began painting his tag, "Jest," on anything "government-owned" (though it's been years since his last piece was erased). For a little while he grew his straight black hair into Jheri curls. It was like some crazy uncle had moved in, he remembers, and young Sean was hanging out with him more than with his mom or dad.

As a teen, Slug began to notice that his skin color and accent were "white" enough to earn him treatment different from that of his black friends. For white girls, at least, he was black, but somehow "safe." "I went through this huge Afrocentric phase, a lot of it induced by hip hop," Slug remembers. "I was trying to find myself, finding all these thing about black feelings. My father was black, and Native American too. And I went through this whole 'hate white people' thing. That was probably really annoying for some wide-eyed kid, to come up to me and say, 'Hey, you seem cool, what's your name?' and for me to be like, 'devil!' But at the time, all of my friends were going through the same phase."

In a way, hip hop became a way for Sean to assert his blackness, dovetailing with the more immediate urge to rebel against his mother's authority. In his senior year, he left to live with his dad, though he returned within months, missing home.

"He was very hard to argue with, because he would win," Valerie admits, shaking her head. "I thought he should be a lawyer."

But how, I ask her, could a kid win against his own mom?

"He could outtalk me."

Slug might have been cocky, but his artful, circular lines of B.S. never fooled Siddiq Ali, a fellow rap fanatic with two years, and an eternity of cool, on Slug. Today Siddiq (born Brent Sayers) is best known as the crocodile-voiced namesake of Rhyme Sayers Entertainment, the label he and Slug run with a close circle of performers. Sean met him at Washburn High School through Derek Turner, a mutual friend from around the block. Together the three formed the core of what would become the Rhyme Sayers Collective, copping similarly monosyllabic nicknames: Stress (for Siddiq), Spawn (for Derek) and Slug (adapted from "Little Sluggo"). Sean's alias might have seemed the perfect, malleable fit for a still-developing identity, equal parts self-deprecation (as in terrestrial gastropod mollusk) and cool (as in bullet).

After high school the group grappled to find their new hip-hop roles. Spawn rapped for a while with Slug on the tables, gigging as Urban Atmosphere. A DJ himself, Stress took to the business side of things. As his circle squared to encompass producer ANT (Anthony Davis), MC Musab (then Beyond), rapper Mr. Gene Poole, and the Abstract Pack--all joining in the mid-Nineties crew Headshots--Stress became the patriarch, someone sought out for approval and guidance. "He's very precise and rational," Slug says. "I'm flaky."

Twelve years after they first met, Slug and Stress remain at the center of each other's personal and professional lives. One Wednesday night in March, Slug is slumped against the wall on a barstool in the Red Sea, once again sleepless, droopily "working" the door as various Rhyme Sayers nod their hellos. Abilities and fellow DMC champion IXL take turns at the tables. Tall, impossibly handsome Musab studies the geometry of the pool table as female admirers look on. Members of the Native Ones filter in. But as the breakbeats hiccup in the air, no one says much. The Rhyme Sayers keep the strange, warm silence that develops between people who've spent hundreds of hours together.

Stress walks in and greets Slug in that barely audible croak of authority that is so at odds with his slight build and soft eyes. Stress's nom de hip hop is particularly fitting this week: His girlfriend and their new daughter, Sumayah, just came home from the hospital, though doctors had induced labor a full five days earlier. As with all Rhyme Sayers releases, the delivery had been delayed.

"Bringing a life into the world is a humbling experience," Stress says simply.

It's been an unusually heady season for both fathers. On Friday night, Stress left the hospital to cohost the first installment of Break-a-Dawn, a four-hour hip-hop show now airing every Saturday from 2:00 to 6:00 a.m. on KFAI-FM (90.3/106.7). And for months Slug has been manning the Rhyme Sayers' new Uptown hip-hop shop, Fifth Element. Back in December, Stress and Slug huddled at First Avenue with T-Low, of R&B superstars Next, to weigh major-label possibilities. "We haven't said no to anything yet," Stress says. Now the New York-based Fat Beats will internationally distribute the new Atmosphere album, to be released initially as two 12-inches.

There's money in the air, if not on the table. Yet no one here seems too eager for a corporate fix. Slug might genuinely believe he can go Tupac: "I promise you that once somebody gives me that big chunk of money--I probably won't pay them back--but I will prove to the world that [he smiles] they. Can't. Fuck with me." But he doesn't grin at all when I mention the Sprite spot showing a boardroom full of Hollywood suits, who market a Godzilla-like movie called Death Slug using a rap crew called "Slug's Life."

The idea that hip hop might become a Godzilla remake of itself was both remote and anathema when Slug's DIY values were taking shape in the Eighties. "Nobody knew you could make money off it," he says. And like most b-boys, the Rhyme Sayers watched the boom spanning Biz Markie's Beethoven wig and Jay-Z's cruise ship full of hos with a mixture of hope and dread, their perspective inevitably shaped by the commercial isolation of our giant Paisley parking lot.

Now everything has changed, even many of the Rhyme Sayers faces. Abilities and Eyedea were among the kids that the crew pulled out of the younger, increasingly white hip-hop audience won by the collective's postering in local high schools. With a nod from Stress, the duo became official members of Atmosphere last year. Meanwhile, Spawn left to pursue his own beatmaking; he stuck around just long enough to be mentioned in Minneapolis's three paragraphs of The Vibe History of Hip Hop.

With hip hop's "underground" proving suddenly lucrative for major labels--witness Common, Jurassic Five, Mos Def, et al.--it's not far-fetched to imagine a major signing a Rhyme Sayer out from under the imprint, which operates on only handshake agreements. Stress brushes that possibility aside. "Our whole shit has always been more or less based on people, not anything else," he says. "If it wasn't this hip-hop thing, we probably would have just been hanging out, doing whatever."

Slug has cast his fate with his crew, and if the world becomes his, in gangsta-rap parlance, then he'll dutifully divvy it up, a guerrilla heroica who still runs the people's bank.