Article taken from citypages.com

He meets her in Keokuk, Iowa, site of a Civil War cemetery and not a lot else. The waters of the Mississippi mingle with the Des Moines River nearby, and the peninsula they carve was once set aside for the "half-breed" descendents of Indians and fur traders. By the 1950s the town's river boom and history of tolerance are a century-old memory: Every night the local starch factory empties into bars that are segregated by custom, white and black. 

As a black man and a jazz man, he knows the difference between location and place: where you are versus where you belong. He plays only the black clubs between Chicago and St. Louis, a divorced father living out an old dream: to create and provide.

Her people are Irish, and she runs the Irish pub before leaving its owner to raise a child alone. Against the rules that have already failed them, the jazz man and the Irish woman fall in love. But white women and black men know better than to be seen in public together.

So they play a game. When he and his trio play local nightclubs--maybe in some roadhouse off Highway 61, or at the edge of the county, where nobody knows her--she comes out and listens. He blows through the head arrangements, then slips in a signature riff during the solo, something she can't miss. If it's a certain string of notes, she knows to meet him in some prearranged place after the club closes. If it's another horn figure, she knows to meet him someplace else. It's their secret code, an intimate conversation played out in public--a conversation that neither Bill Daley nor Vivian Andrews would talk about with the kids they had together.

The woman who tells the story, a wispy-haired Scandinavian girl, married the couple's son nearly 30 years ago. She grew up on a tree farm in West Bloomington and met her mate as a teenager on a blind date in south Minneapolis. He was 19 years old and handsome, a freckle-faced musician two years her elder. Chasing his father's dreams in the Afro era, he played bass in the integrated Minneapolis funk band Salt, Pepper, and Spice. When Valerie and Craig Daley wedded in 1973, she was two weeks from due with their first son, Sean.

The grandparents were pleased: Their children, at least, had found their place. Old Bill Daley, the jazz trumpeter, hadn't been able to get work as a musician in the Twin Cities, landing a job at Honeywell instead. He'd pull out the horn only on rare occasions, usually to jam with a band mate from back home. Craig, his son, was just as practical about supporting his newborn: He hung up the bass and went to work for GM. Valerie and Craig had two more boys.

"But a farm girl and a city kid just could not get together," Valerie recalls. After ten years of marriage, he moved out, and he never played music again.

The intimacy of live performance comes easily for the grandson of Bill Daley. What follows is the hard part. Onstage at Manhattan's Downtime in September, Sean Daley, a.k.a. Slug, is so loose that his face could peel off, Mission: Impossible-style. His six-foot-plus frame looks smaller than life, bent and bobbing, his pale, pockmarked skin draped slackly over high cheekbones and around deep brown eyes. His attention is fixed on his more compact, teenage partner, Eyedea, who is kicking some freestyle for a predominantly black, and presumably skeptical, crowd of hip-hop aesthetes.

It's a pressure gig for Atmosphere, the phenotypically white Minnesotans setting foot in New York for the first time. The crew has been allotted 12 minutes at the industry-ruled CMJ Music Marathon, 12 minutes to win over hip hop's birthplace. But, after some technical glitches, the MCs step into the moment: Suddenly it's as if there were no major labels in the house, no Vibe critics, no Sudanese-born supermodels surveying the throng. There are only the mics, the DJ, Abilities, and the thick miasma of human funk.

By all rights, 17-year-old Eyedea should be terrified. But he notices the crowd chanting along to "Scapegoat," his mentor's amusingly long enemies list, which includes the police, the kitty-litter box, and, ultimately, "anything but me." And Eyedea notices the rousing shouts of approval as he reaches for the next line. It's a charge so profound that he later seems compelled by pride to shrug it off.

When Atmosphere's quarter-hour is up, Slug works the room like a shark playing his own Jaws theme on a Walkman. He hawks his homemade cassette, Se7en, released last summer on the seminal Minneapolis label Rhyme Sayers Entertainment. But those brown marbles beneath his brow look ready to roll right out of his skull and plop into someone's cocktail. Slug, and this year-old incarnation of his crew, may be better oiled than ever. But he's greasing a third rail, taking a leap forward into a public life he seems compelled to seek, yet one that is already taking a visible psychic toll.

Slug is a rapper, though he hates that word. "You can't be a 27-year-old 'rapper' just breaking in," he remarks from the club's upstairs balcony. "Chuck D can be, like, 34 because he was 23 when he broke in." (Except that the nearly 40-year-old Chuck D lied about his age from the start: He was 27, as Slug is now, when Public Enemy's first album came out.) But Slug is also a rapper in the sense of being a guy who just likes to talk. Not just to bitch or rant or bullshit--though he does all those things--but to vibe and joke and mess with people, teetering coolly on the edge of nothing to say.

Years ago, Slug says, he took a vow of extroversion: If he was going to get anywhere in hip hop, he was going to have to be "all smiles and handshakes" with everyone he met. Which might sound like a natural and inevitable tack for anyone working retail, not to mention a room at CMJ. But for Slug, being public requires an exercise of will. Just watch him when he's switched off, and he's barely there at all: a quiet-natured south Minneapolis kid, hanging back so far into a wall that he becomes part of the building's structure.

This is the indie champ who was once adamant about selling Se7en only out of his backpack, a practice, he has said, that allowed him to see the faces of every person in his audience. To most locals who recognize his soul patch and Mark Wahlberg voice, he is the grown-up hip-hop kid at the Electric Fetus, his employer of four years until last November. He started there when he was still pulling overnights at Target to support his newborn son, Jacob--finding that old family balance between creating and providing. Though running low on sleep, he'd tune you in, feel you out, pin down your tastes.

"He makes people feel real comfortable," says JonJon Scott, a local hip-hop promoter who works at the Electric Fetus and lobbied store management to hire him. "He doesn't come off with attitudes that he's better than somebody. Everybody to him is real cool. To him, everybody is a potential customer or a fan." As a result, Slug cuts a broad social swath unique in local music: There he is at the Tulip Sweet show, or in the pit at American Head Charge, or onstage with Happy Apple, or shirtless and dazed behind the Lifter Puller merchandise table.

Outside the Twin Cities, Slug has made Atmosphere a brand name by freestyling and handshaking his way through any town with more than 7,000 people, rocking such not-spots as Columbia, Missouri; Tulsa, Oklahoma; and Lake Tahoe, Nevada. With laxly enforced drinking laws, these rooms quickly fill with drunk kids, many of them fans Slug has attracted through yet another connection: the Net-savvy Anticon label, which just released Deep Puddle Dynamics, featuring Sole, members of Atmosphere, and other MCs.

Though Slug's national profile may be highest on the Net, he hasn't even bothered signing up for e-mail. Nonetheless he's a natural hero for the rapstream's largely white, exurban fan base. On last year's Anticon compilation, Slug's "Nothing but Sunshine" cast the rapper as a grown-up farm boy/b-boy returning home to imagined boyhood stomping grounds in northern Minnesota. Seems his fictional father drowned himself in a grain elevator there while grieving his mother's death. Over a bluesy piano roll, our hero winds up "getting even with life by murdering cattle."

The track is no more autobiographical than any other nocturnal discharge of violent (and humorous) hip-hop revenge fantasy--though Slug did spend lots of idyllic weekends as a kid trotting horses around a farm owned by his uncle. Still, there's a deeper emotional verisimilitude here: Like his jazz-cat grandfather gigging around the rural Midwest, or his farm-girl mother in south Minneapolis, Slug doubts his place. Surrounded by friends, supported by collaborators, he writes most powerfully from a position of isolation.

In the past year, Slug has begun leading more and more with his strengths, which is to say, his weaknesses. Like "The Abusing of the Rib" from Se7en, the best song on Atmosphere's forthcoming as-yet-untitled album, "Woman with the Tattooed Hands," begins by gazing at a woman's arms, noticing how each of her hands is inked with smaller images of herself. One night she lets the narrator watch as the tattoo creatures come to life, peel themselves off, and make love to their owner. "I didn't get turned on, I just got turned," Slug raps. "I wasn't as aroused as I was concerned/For each one of 'em I've hurt every time I've been burned/I've got a lot to teach but even more to learn."

Try to imagine any other MC drawing moral lessons from his wet dreams; this is no sensitive-boy ploy. In his own sly way, Slug is preaching to men. He has withdrawn from rap's version of the dozens--the mic battle--in favor of a less jovial African-American tradition, the cathartic jazz solo. And improvisation is his method of opening up his running conversation to the room, to the world. Slug wants to talk, not crawl into his diary and throw away the key. And though he may be uncomfortable with the contortions success demands, he demands success nonetheless.

"I am in this for the big record deal," Slug declares one day, swilling a bottomless mug of coffee at Pandora's Cup on Hennepin Avenue. "Everybody is, in a sense. I've never been crying about trying to get one, but deep down, we all want to be Tupac. Not just to get rich. I want kids to hear me. I have to admire the way he was able to touch people so hard. That's not Ricky Martin 'Livin' la Vida Loca' shit. [Tupac's] touching the ghetto, the people that are hurting the most."

For Slug, reaching hip hop's urban constituency would complete a circle he began tracing some 20 years ago, when a six-year-old Sean Daley became entranced by the funny yet gruff voices and robot beats coming out of his radio. "It just seemed like it was always there," remembers Valerie. "It was like this irritating noise in the background, constantly."