He showed up to the biggest MC battle in the world in a grungy rock T-shirt, jeans and bad facial hair. No one ever capitalized off of being underestimated as much as he did.
As I began to become a part of the slam community, i was surprised to hear the same thing the hip hop kids always told me. Namely that Sage Francis as a person was an asshole. An unbelievable jerk you would never want to be around. Even jerks thought he was a jerk.
It made his albums even more interesting to me, for some reason I felt like I could hear his knowledge of this in his voice. Every song he made for that group of people who loved his work but hated him as person, he did vengefully.
I met Sage Francis once, I was buying his merchandise at a show and he was watching someone else perform. He grabbed me and started dancing with me in one of the truly odd, meeting an artist you respect moments, for some reason he doesn’t get the acclaim he used too. THe word in popular opinion is that he’s not what he used too. Funny thing is that his last album was the best work he’s ever done. You wouldn’t know if you didn’t buy it. Sage is a spoken word artist who transitioned to a rapper and has been paved a way for others in both realms. He has a new album coming out on May 11th and if I buy it and its terrible, I won’t care. He’s been so good for so long, poured so much of himself into performance after performance and made it possible for white poets to rap without being mocked for it. Their still stuck mocking Sage, saying Anticon as if it was a swear. Slam owes Sage a lot, and I’ll continue to pay him back May 11th.