Sage Francis is a victim of circumstance. Though he initially rode high on internet buzz as one of the harbingers of the new face of hip-hop, his emotional Anticon debut led to a severe backlash among the independent rap massive. Soon enough, Francis' breed of confessional emcee would become as defunct as the Hip Hop Infinity website that fostered his development, and the notion that to be white was no longer to be right in underground hip-hop would face him with a serious obstacle.
Fortunately, by that point, Francis had built up a strong following on the strength of the Sick Of CD series he'd been promoting as tour-only compilations of live, rare and spoken word tracks. The earliest volumes still contain some of his most accessible and highly regarded work, and have recently become more widely available through online outlets.
His first salvo, Sick of Waiting Tables, hit hardest. This collection contains most of Sage's work from 1997-2000 and also houses his best overall songs. "Rewrite" is both his best-known track, boasting deeply personal and emotional lyrics that never overstep into the domain of pretension, while "I Apologize", featuring Anticon cohort Sole, seems in retrospect to have been the anthem for the bearded white emcee explosion. The mixtape format tends to limit an artist's impact, but Sage's mix of impressive freestyles, tongue-in-cheek battles, and an interpretation of Devo's "Whip It" make for his best and most enjoyable work outside of Non Prophets' 2003 debut, Hope.
Still Sick... Urine Trouble draws its material entirely from 2000, and comes close to capturing the strength of the first disc. The songs boast a much more conceptual slant than Waiting Tables, with Sage personifying a newborn baby ("The Time of My Life"), stalking Natalie Portman ("Her Shlag"), traveling through time ("Majority Rule"), being patronized by armchair quarterbacks (the hilarious "Eye of the Tiger"), and attempting to fake his own death ("Andy Kaufman"). Yet, while most of these songs are incredible, the supporting freestyles and other oddities aren't nearly strong enough to compete with the previous collection, or to pad the nine actual songs the disc contains.
The downward trend continued ever so slightly with 2002's The Known Unsoldier: Sick of Waging War, despite its comparative lack of filler tracks. The standouts stick out more than ever, with "Narcissist" ticking and humming its way into the spot of best Non-Prophets song ever, "Makeshift Patriot" taking aim at the political mechanisms behind the 9/11 aftermath, and "I'm Gonna Getcha" dubbing and skanking the many ways that society's commercial structure can harm you ("B-b-bad to the bone, like the Coca-Cola you sip/ I'll get you, baby, giving you only soda to drink"). Still, some weak cuts ("Embarrassed", "Inner Conflict") and lame extras ("Mermaids Are Seasluts") bog the record's continuity and conviction.
However, Sickly Business, this year's pileup of odds and ends, marks the first real disappointment in the series. I understand that one motive behind these kinds of releases is to offer exposure to unknown artists, but Jared Paul's "Jesus in a Bowl of Germs" is painful, overlong, pretentious and, if meant to be funny (or not), a complete failure. On the positive side, the Danger Mouse-produced "Garden Gnomes" is a biting critique of the generic bedroom emcee and his fair-weather listener ("Fuck a fickle fanbase, stuck a middle finger in their damn face"); DJ Signify's "Cup of Regrets" is Sage at his esoteric best; and "Doomage", featuring Slug, Brother Ali and MF Doom on the beat, is an instant classic. But regrettably, the standouts are less plentiful here than on previous editions, and without the typically strong rarities to back them up, the record tanks.
Issuing these kinds of mixes ranks among the quickest ways to gain a dedicated core of fans. Sure, some of the guests appearances seem unfortunate additions, the revolving selection of producers gives way to varying degrees of success, and spotty sound quality tends to dominate the proceedings. But even while the decline in cohesiveness on these discs might suggest otherwise, Francis' progress over the past four years has been stunning, and newcomers looking for insight into his growth and development would be hard-pressed to locate a better indication. Still, Hope, his 2003 collaboration with Joe Beats under the Non Prophets guise, remains his finest and most accessible work to date, and stands as the best introduction to his catalog.
