continued...

In a way, the plan makes not just emotional but practical sense: Nothing that the Rhyme Sayers do now--not touring, not producing--would need to change should that big chunk of money roll down the chimney. Yet, in a more basic sense, Slug seems hardly prepared for the implications of reading this portrait in print, much less someday appearing on the cover of Vibe.

"You didn't tell my mom about the song where my parents die, did you?" Slug asks nervously, taking another of a thousand coffee breaks from another of a thousand shifts at Fifth Element.

No, I didn't. "You should call her," I add. "She brought me farm-fresh eggs."

"I don't have long-distance access."

"That's what 1-800-CALL-ATT is for, kid."

Slug chuckles. No counterargument there. He tells me that "Nothing but Sunshine" is about not blaming "your upbringing for the fact that you're an asshole," an admirable sentiment from someone who keeps a friendly distance from his father and rarely sees his mother--especially considering that Slug's hang-ups are a source of continual self-fascination. Still, for someone who mines his interior life so freely for songs, he has erected walls between art and family that seem curiously high. Doesn't he think Mom will hear the song one day?

Perhaps, for Slug, diplomacy and compartmentalization are head and tail of the same dog. Hard to tell: Slug has welcomed me into his life as a reporter, but only to a point. He doesn't want me to see his home, which is then a south Minneapolis shared house that has lost its lease. By all accounts, Slug is a loving, if permissive, father to his five-year-old son, whom he sees one day a week. But he's nervous about exploiting the relationship. All of which belies the utter nakedness with which he routinely, almost obsessively, renders his private life in rap song.

"My real issue in life at the moment is where do you draw the line," he says. "Because I'm having problems drawing lines in a lot of different areas and wondering where I'm overstepping." He sips his cup. "I've yet to hurt anybody, so I know I'm not a bad person."

Clearly the lone writer compelled to spill himself on the page hasn't reconciled himself with the rapper spilling himself on the audience. Like the bilious MC he's inevitably compared to, Eminem, Slug traffics in white-trash iconography (for more on Eminem, see p. 55). The hidden final track on Atmosphere's debut full-length, 1997's Overcast!, pictured Slug living in Hinckley, Minnesota, barking orders at his trailer-park wife, "Fix the antenna, act your age, and spread your legs...I'll put a shadow over your sky/Now shut the fuck up and fix me turkey pot pie." He stopped performing the song live when he saw hundreds of teenage boys screaming along to every word.

Slug wonders who these children are: He feels some of the ambivalence the other Rhyme Sayers--most of them men of color, most of them parents--must feel about the giddy white teens pouring into the crew's Soundset parties at First Avenue. JonJon Scott remembers ragging his co-worker once about the Rhyme Sayers's new audience. "I was like, 'Slug, every 15-year-old has your fucking record. When are rap people gonna buy it?' All these little kids were coming in with their parents."

The MC's response: He hoped every eighth grader in the city picked up Overcast! "All the black MCs respect Slug," says Scott. "But he knows who his fans are. He doesn't like to admit it much."

Certainly Slug embodies the ethos of self-expression at hip hop's core. But to the culture's black and Puerto Rican originators, expression and the self were embattled terrain with clear, external enemies. This is why often silly questions of hip-hop authenticity still carry moral weight. And why the mutterings in the local community about Slug's pale audience--not to mention the Rhyme Sayers' Kenwood store--sting more than if Fifth Element sold metal or country music.

Self and expression aren't any more settled for Slug: His enemies are internal. Perhaps he has looked to hip hop as his own mixed Keokuk peninsula, his own peaceable plain. Which may be why the surest clue to Slug's ambivalence about race is that the MC--so intent on spewing forth every other sliver of spleen--rarely raps about the topic explicitly, and never "reclaims" the n-word.

"I always stood strong on the fact my dad's not white, just my mom. My dad got himself a white girl. Eventually I figured out what all that crap was about. Dealing with my father and mother's issues, the fact that they weren't together. I'm sure on the way there were questions at first when I entered other people's neighborhoods. Now I hear a lot more questions about it than I ever did then.

"It's not really an issue to the point that I'm going to hold it against people that do come to the show. But at the same time, how am I going to get the message across to the people I want to hear it? Nothing is better than having a black dude come up to me and say, 'That was dope.' I don't know why I hold that so much stronger, but I do. It's like, 'You're the dude that I want. I was you. You were me. Ten years ago, we were the same kid.' The kids that come to shows now, we weren't the same kid."

Like Slug's rhymes within rhymes, his search for legitimacy seems embedded in his hopes for fame. He can only hope the contradictions between those poles don't translate into hypertension. As Slug puts it, "I constantly have this voice in my head going, 'You fucking loser: Do something with yourself! You smoke too much pot.'" (Actually, sess might help.)

And so Slug sweats the details, obsessively listening to his own tapes, breaking them down, finding problems, mentally fixing them. Indefatigable in public, he takes his campaign into his own skull with as much zeal, endlessly crafting new pieces that will never make it onto a demo tape, much less an album. He knocks off 13 songs a week, with the notes to prove it. And he worries about where to draw the line with his drinking, which he indulges every night, late into the a.m. hours.

Slug is such a relentless self-critic that it takes an outside voice to prioritize the complaints. "This 17-year-old is telling me what's wrong with my life in song," Slug says, referring to Eyedea. And perhaps he couldn't find a more perfect temperamental foil.

"I can't see unless I'm asleep," Eyedea muses. "Sometimes, people don't even know it, but they hate themselves because there is something that happened or some type of thing holding on that they can't see. The reason why everybody is tired all the time is because they have something in their subconscious that wants to come out and it's telling them, 'Dream, because I want to come out.' Yogis bring that into awareness. They listen to every molecule in their body. It's like listening to your heart. And the benefits are amazing."

And has he converted Slug to this philosophy?

"No, you know him: He's a drama freak. He calls me weirdo, and I am, you know. I'm me and that's cool. He's having all this girl drama, and I don't care about the girls, or him for that matter. I can say, 'This is how it looks from this side.' But no. If Slug didn't have issues he wouldn't be Slug."

It's about an hour into the eve of Christmas Eve, and the other MCs have cleared the stage to finish their drinks and say their goodnights. But Slug keeps going, his eyes glazed, a mic raised to his lips like an upturned glass. He squints into the lights of the 7th Street Entry and glances back at Abilities, who is crouched against the wall wearing a wide, expectant grin. A DAT tape plays in place of the broken turntables, and something in Slug seems similarly impaired. He's reeling more than swaggering, and when his DJ dashes off, he's alone in front of an attentive crowd that has dwindled from hundreds to dozens, remnants of a First Avenue showcase held by the local label Groove Garden.

Slug begins to kick some freestyle, a hip-hop rite usually likened to improv in acting or solos in jazz. Except that rap jams rarely feel truly off-the-cuff: Rhyme dealers seem to reshuffle pre-marked couplets, and the smoother the freestyle, the less authentic the effect. By contrast, few rappers teeter on the edge of saying nothing quite like Slug. "When the beat rolls/I can feel it touch my soul," he rambles, jiggling the o's. "Maybe I can try to develop some kind of contro-o-ol/What the hell?/Where 'm I gonna go-o-o?/I don't know-ow-ow..."

That's not what he raps at all, actually: Like Slug, I'm reeling a bit myself, and not taking notes. I scribble down these lines a few weeks later when he appears live on KFAI, with Eyedea there to whip him into shape. Solo tonight, Slug's confidence game seems off. His wording is crisp, but the calculator that slots this rhyme here seems down, even given his usual mistakes-allowed approach. What's he trying to prove? I wonder. He trips over the space where a rhyme should be and flashes a mischievous smile. Without missing a programmed beat, he starts rapping about how he's too drunk to rap. The rhyme clicks and the audience laughs, a subtle tension lifted. The calculator is back up.

That anyone but a few indulgent friends would stick around for this little show of nerve says more about Slug than a thousand condom-tight gigs. For a few minutes, he has a room hanging on his every "deep"/"sleep," "laughter"/"rafter," "calluses"/"psychoanalysis."

Then, quickly as it came, the moment passes. Slug nods his bow. "Thank you for letting me deal with my personal shit in public," he says under the applause. "Those of you that know me know this is something I do all the time."