Released on October 5, 2005,
on Rhymesayers Entertainment.
You Can’t Imagine How Much Fun We’re Having… If you know Atmosphere, and if you so much as glance at the cover, you know just how ironic that title is. Slug, after all, is hardly the partying type. And in 2005, this album – their fourth, if you set aside the Lucy Ford compilation and various side releases – does nothing to change that. Long before Drake brought this approach to a mass audience, the Minneapolis rapper was making rap the way others write a diary. He is the one who lays bare his emotional life. And, for that very reason, the one who became unusually popular with women.
One of those young women, a certain Marissa Mathy-Zvaifler, then sixteen years old, attended an Atmosphere concert in 2003. She never came home. An employee of the venue took her backstage – either to meet the group or to tend to an injury, depending on the account – where he raped and murdered her. The event devastated Slug, who devoted the song “That Night” to her on this album. After first wondering whether he even has the right to write such a song, he expresses his sympathy for Marissa and those close to her, before turning on her murderer with vengeful fury.
That song, of course, is far from the only one in which Slug opens himself up. Whereas Black rappers have often used their lyrics to celebrate a more or less fantasized life of success and material comfort, as though to ward off a history of slavery, poverty, and exclusion, their white counterparts, by contrast, tend to indulge in self-reproach. They present themselves in a less flattering light. More down-to-earth, they talk about dreary lives and mundane routines. We are no longer in the realm of fantasy, but in sad – very sad – reality. And even though Slug is partly Black, he is no exception.
The rapper’s ambitions are modest, if the life lessons of the gospel-backed “Get Fly” are anything to go by. On “Say Hey There” and “Smart Went Crazy,” he settles scores with women. He suffers heartbreak, and according to “Pour Me Another,” he drowns it in alcohol. Slug also has plenty of feelings for his family on one of the album’s most remarkable tracks, “Little Man,” where he writes intimate letters to Jacob, Craig, and Sean – his son, his father, and himself.
Elsewhere, Slug takes aim at society, particularly big business – the pharmaceutical industry, for example, on “Panic Attack.” As the man at the helm of one of the biggest independent rap labels, he also vents his resentment toward the entertainment industry on “Musical Chair.”
Music itself is another of Slug’s major themes. On the retro-flavored “Watch Out,” he pays tribute to the idols of his past, foremost among them LL Cool J, KRS-One, and Big Daddy Kane. On “Angelface,” he talks about touring and the encounters with women that come with it all across the United States. And on the opening track, “The Arrival,” he celebrates his profession and his passion for rap, not without a dose of self-deprecation:
Sorting through the bills, fan mail, and life threats
Wondering why the postman ain’t delivered my wife yet
Because there is humor here, after all. But it is sarcastic. Ironic. Even blackly comic, as on “Panic Attack.”
None of this was particularly new at the time. This is Slug’s usual territory; these are Atmosphere’s familiar themes. And yet something is different about this album. The rapper’s personality and talent are so conspicuous, Slug looms so large over an underground scene of which he is one of the kings, that it is sometimes easy to forget Atmosphere is a duo. Ant’s productions have often been described as functional, even crude. And at times, they are exactly that. There are stretches of plodding boom bap in that music that has, by no means, abandoned the bouncing rhythms and scratches of the old school. Elsewhere, however, Ant outdoes himself.
Because it is limited to thirteen tracks, because it is so well sequenced, and because its best productions arrive at exactly the right moments – from the triumphant entrance of “The Arrival” to the melancholy of the magnificent “Little Man,” via the simple yet gripping loop of the cryptic title track, the piano-bar atmosphere of “Pour Me Another,” and the brilliantly repurposed Doris Duke sample on “Smart Went Crazy” – You Can’t Imagine How Much Fun We’re Having is an exceptionally well-crafted album. Atmosphere have certainly released other noteworthy records, but this one may well be the duo’s most accomplished.
