Atmosphere (featuring Mr Dibbs) at the ICA, London: 26th April 2004

Added by a Guest Author on 27 April 2004

The 26th April saw Atmosphere’s Minneapolis-based rapper Slug take the ICA stage with producer and co-rapper Ant – but don’t fret, it gets better as soon as you hear them. Their roughly-biannual albums Overcast!, Sad Clown Bad Dub II, God Loves Ugly and Seven’s Travels might also not have the most promising titles, but they belie often intelligent and striking lyrics and some of the best anti-gangsta positivity one can find – Atmosphere represent the flip side of the east side of the LBC (on a mission trying to find some humanity).

With Mr Dibbs of the 1200 Hobos joining them behind the turntables, it’s easy to love these guys, as they celebrate the last night of their tour by throwing free CDs, DVDs and vinyl into the crowd. But in many ways the distinctive vibrancy of their records didn’t find itself into their live show. The sound erred too much on the side of bombastic, with much of the duo’s pithy couplets too often being rendered inaudible.

Atmosphere make a stand for redistribution and you can almost hear the crowd wonder: “where’s my free stuff?”

The usual hip-hop postures began to creep in – although it is difficult to see how Atmosphere could become “bigger than Jesus and bigger than breast implants“ without them – and the justification of the multiple “hands in the air” call-and-salute routines during the night sounded a little half-baked. Apparently, we all come together as a community like the fingers of a hand clenched to form a fist. You do the math(s).

Empty rhetoric was also disappointingly obvious on Slug’s T-shirt, emblazoned with “Misogyny is a bitch.” Right, so “racism is a nigger” and “homophobia is gay” then, are they? With the jubilant Party for the fight to write, I sensed a confusion of ideas, and as the perfect teenage rant Scapegoat came to a close, the almost inevitable anti-George W. Bush tirade began.

Now I have a lot of time for criticism of the American President, but Slug reduced it to “Yah-Boo!” demagoguery and then Mr Dibbs relied on a scratched-up version of Killing In the Name Of by Rage Against The Machine to up the energy. An attempt was made at channelling the entire dynamic and reactive, negative logic of that song through the crowd but it appeared to pass most of them by. Atmosphere make a stand for redistribution and you can almost hear the crowd wonder: “where’s my free stuff?”

Despite some miscommunication or opportune posing, Atmosphere still present a pretty fresh approach to hip-hop, and although their live performance wasn’t entirely faithful to expectations, they’re still well worth a sample or a few. D.Rose