Sometime in the first half of this decade it became a minor sport in rap nerd circles to get pissed off at Atmosphere's Slug, a sport that Slug more or less acted like the commissioner of. The combination of self-loathing, female troubles, and stress-fueled antagonism in his lyrics could be off-putting to heads whether they liked Mos Def or UGK, and for a while Sean Daley seemed to revel in it, like he knew that the backlash against his growing modest-scale fame was pre-ordained. He responded with a sort of self-effacing rope-a-dope strategy, putting together a portfolio of tracks filled with a conceptual hook of Slug as Dickhead, as though it'd mollify the skeptical listeners who already harbored that suspicion. Of course, he also offset that with an increasing amount of humorous good will and been-there sympathy (something last year's When Life Give You Lemons, You Paint That Shit Gold thrived on). From the first-track get-go of "Trying to Find a Balance", from 2003's Seven's Travels, he really started to master the process of fine-tuning his lyrical persona until he made it, if not always likeable, at least easier to imagine having an empathetic beer with.
That makes the re-release of 2002's cusp-of-fame album God Loves Ugly stand out that much more as a grim, almost completely joyless anomaly in Atmosphere's discography. While the melancholy and broken-up bummer-rap Slug became (in)famous for was manifest on 2000's Lucy and Ford One & Two EPs, it didn't dominate nearly as much as it did on this follow-up album. God Loves Ugly is propelled almost completely by a mixture of distrust and anger, which makes it a difficult listen for reasons almost completely unrelated to Slug's talent. It's not that he isn't good at what he does here, or that he doesn't have good beats to accompany him; he is and he does. It's that he's so in tune with a specifically bleak, hostile, and borderline self-destructive character. Add some of the sparest, gloomiest beats Ant's ever put together-- glowering dub on "Blamegame"; half-gothic stagger-step boom-bap on "The Bass and the Movement" and "Flesh"; post-RZA soul melancholy throughout -- and you'd have to be in a rarified state of misery to actually get the most out of listening to it.
Most of what you need to know about the defensive-slash-aggressive tone of the album comes in most tracks' first lines: "We came here to slit your throat"; "I wear my scars like the rings on a pimp"; "She abandoned me, left me out in the cold/ No surprises, I guess that's how it goes". Hell, the first moments of the album consist of a couple girls chanting "you're so ugly, you're so ugly" (to Slug, or the listener?) and Slug snarling the name of his group a couple times before barking "Atmosphere, and maybe you don't like us." Atmosphere was still in the process of building their national following and solidifying their craft when God Loves Ugly was being recorded, and whether Slug's sour tone was the direct result of some real-life personal struggles or just their first really ambitious concept record-- or maybe a bit of both-- it set the tone for many of the preconceptions and misconceptions that would follow him throughout his career.
The two major targets of Slug's angst on this album are women and himself. If anything offsets whatever potential misogyny might be in that lyrical turf it's the fact that it's not entirely clear who's at fault. "Fuck you, Lucy, for defining my existence," he shouts in "F*@K You Lucy", and it's harder to tell if he's angrier at her for fucking up his love life or himself for obsessing over it. (Maybe he was predicting how many people would start seeing him as "that dude who always raps about that girl who left him.") He's a bit more glib and casual about his stressed-out love life elsewhere, like the admission on "Saves the Day" that "I sleep next to women that I don't deserve/ They like to hurt my pride while I work their nerves." And even when he tries to play slick, like he does on standout single "Modern Man's Hustle", he does so in a way that reveals he still can't quite let go and that he wants to make things right again. Shit, maybe it's just god and/or fate that's to blame for fucking everything up anyways: the only people who really seem to hit it off without a hitch on this record are the two partygoers in "Hair," and they die in a fatal car crash in the last line.
Aside from that, there's the haters and the doubters and the nameless targets of various dick-based trauma who earn Slug's wrath for being in his way on tracks like "The Bass and the Movement" and "Blamegame". Those moments feel kind of weird, since time's shown Slug to be more gifted as a smartass than a hardass, and they don't quite ring as true as the times where he focuses more abstracted variations of his frustration on post-9/11 paranoia ("Vampires") or ruminates on his potential post-death legacy ("Lovelife"). Since this reissue throws in the tour video diary Sad Clown Bad Dub 4-- labeled with the tongue-in-cheek disclaimer "the camera followed us around… so we smiled a little more than normal"-- it's easier to see where Atmosphere were headed once they got this catharsis out of their system: with that much success in front of you, all that anger doesn't seem so damn serious anymore.
