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Life & Arts

Francis falls off beat to produce 'Distrust'

By Zach Lee
The Daily Cougar

Unlike 50 Cent, Sage Francis is more concerned with the message than tricks on the dance floor, and he's not afraid to lose the beat and sully the rhythm of his song to prove it. Along with that, he's got a penchant for taking hip-hop's clichés and turning them right around on his latest release, A Healthy Distrust.

There are a couple cases in which Francis takes off his gloves and hits mainstream hip-hop with a couple sucker punches. Jimmy Iovine can't stop Francis from targeting 50 Cent either, which is something he does quite cleverly on "Gunz Yo": "It might remind you of a mic by the way I hold it / Straight to the grill of every homophobic rapper / Unaware of the graphic nature of phallic symbols / Tragically ironic, sucking off each other's gats and pistols." 

It doesn't call out 50 by name, but he'd probably respond if he understood the insult.

Francis also takes a stab at the listeners of cookie-cutter hip-hop in "Dance Monkey," with his sendup of one of those listeners: "She loves repetitive songs that keep playing," but his politics in "Slow Down Gandhi" are both funny and disturbing. He calls out the superficiality of programs like Rock the Vote, saying, "Politics was on everybody's hot-this-summer list. The cool kids were all rocking votes ... It felt like Kent State the way they targeted the students." 

Francis seems intent on making sure he doesn't get confused with anything else under the hip-hop's umbrella, and "Jah Didn't Kill Johnny" is a nice way to end the album without any intimacies of hip-hop. It's just a solemn ode to Johnny Cash.

For those familiar with Houston's own Babel Fishh, it's hard to listen to A Healthy Distrust without thinking of the local emcee's Exit Lever. There are several times when Francis gets away from his beat and sings with a voice that knows more about what it's feeling than making that feeling sound good. That tendency and several of the more bizarre beats on A Healthy Distrust are where the similarities end, however. For the most part, Francis stays on beat, and his lyrics are far less surreal than Babel Fishh's dreamlike ramblings. It's still an uncanny resemblance.

There is also something about the liner notes that is terribly similar to something the Dead Kennedys would have done if they were still making music today. Francis is in good company.

Sage Francis

A Healthy Distrust

Epitaph Records

Verdict: It's too bad no one in the mainstream will hear it.

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