Hold your friends close and your enemies closer. Sage Francis and Jose Beats could have been enemies after Jose was clowning on Sage on Rhode Island radio station 90.3. Not being one to back down from a fight, Sage went down to the station, and according to their site posting, “…it was not a good scene.”
Thankfully for us, they’ve come together to fight as the heavy weight hip-hip army, Non-Prophets, with Sage as the rhyming scribe and Jose living up to his beating name. This is the epitome of music with a message, hitting on all the people and things that drive us crazy, mad, and to drink at times – homophobia, hypocrisy, ignorance, helplessness and all posers near and far.
From “Tolerance Level”, Sage hits it on the nail, hammering words with the soft touch of acoustic guitar, “My tolerance level has peaked, and it’s time to get heads flown / Just because I speak peace, doesn’t mean I can’t throw no jaws,” getting into how fed up he is with the hip-hop idiots calling themselves MCs, made for TV rappin’, and the emphasis on fashion versus what’s in their brain and what comes out of their mouths. Serious and sarcastic, eloquent and innovative, Sage and Jose make music that takes a microscopic view of the life and times of today’s society, reminding us that we can all do so much better. From our culture’s non-stopping popping out of kids, looking for a cure to the desperation of our youth that drives them to suicide, to a short satirical ditty on getting approached by labels with a cool million, we all need Hope in our music collection.
I don’t know that artists can get all the recognition they deserve without drowning in the mainstream. But if some consider Eminem to be the only master of lyrical wisdom and prophetic communication of ideals and human experiences, then they’re probably the type that Non-Prophets will only care enough about to diss in their own tribute to art form known as underground hip-hop. “I don’t want to be famous like the artists on your playlist / The more emotion I put into it the harder they diss.” Jealousy can be an ugly thing.
