On the first day of the new millennium, rapper Slug, one half of Minneapolis-based duo Atmosphere, opened his guest verse on DJ Abilities’ song “Exclusive” by recalling “the earlier days when [he] would ego trip”, all the way up “to the phase when [he] hit all that emo shit”. As minor a quote as it may sound, that biographical snippet turns out to be an essential citation for anyone looking to engage with the historiography of emo rap, and for that matter, underground hip-hop in general.
To understand why, it may be useful to take a slight detour and consider what Chris McDonald once wrote of the brilliant singer-songwriter Tori Amos:
“Both in terms of music and lyrics, it takes great courage to perform in such an exposed and revealing way, and it is difficult to come away from Amos’ performances or recordings without feeling like one has had an up-close and personal encounter with the musician. This effect is the stock-in-trade of the confessional singer-songwriter and this is one key reason why mass audiences connect so strongly with artists like Amos.”
That mass audiences are drawn to confessional songwriting and seek intimate encounters with artists seems, more often than not, to be contradicted by any given sales chart. Doubtless some listeners look for that kind of artistic expression, and they will acquiesce to feeling a strong connection with musicians for whom it is indeed the stock-in-trade. Yet, when it comes to rap, relatability might not be the first thing most fans look for: technical dexterity, bravado, charisma, or credibility (in various definitions, but whose criteria are often based on notions of virility or material success) are often sought.
Post Malone’s claim that “If you’re looking for lyrics, if you’re looking to cry, if you’re looking to think about life, don’t listen to hip-hop” [my emphasis] wasn’t taken out of context as some would have you believe, and what David Drake once wrote about Jay-Z could indeed apply to a whole lot of rappers:
“He does not relate to what you’re going through. Rather, he allows you to, however briefly, feel what he’s feeling. Or perhaps “feeling” is the wrong word for it. He allows the listener to share in his sense of control, his precision, his expertise, his focus, doing whatever it takes to achieve success. (…) When it looks like he could appear weak, he calls up an investor.”
Conversely, if there’s one rapper who never shied away from appearing weak, it is Slug. Throughout a career spanning 30 years, he has been widely critically acclaimed, recognized by fans, the media, and his peers as a legend, and has become as commercially successful as an “underground” artist can hope to get, to the point where stating it can even be considered a boring cliché. In the words of RapReviews’ Steve Juon:
“Critically acclaimed, indie rap darlings, underground favorites, influential trendsetter. Slug and Ant, rapper and producer respectively, have been called these things so many times you wouldn’t be blamed for rolling your eyes if someone said it again.”
Both in terms of developing an alternative style that became essential to the general personality of indie rap, and in terms of successfully managing and expanding an independent hip-hop label, achieving commercial success without compromising creative freedom or artistic quality, Atmosphere (re)wrote the rulebook of underground hip-hop, and in doing so, “drew a fan base of like-minded interlopers on the fringes of popular culture, who related to [Slug’s] persona as much as they did the style and sound of his music.” Among this commendable list of achievements, you could also add that Atmosphere invented emo rap.
Linking Antagonistic Music Cultures
In a 1997 URB interview of his short-lived Deep Puddle Dynamics group, Slug jokingly described his music as “cynical, minimalistic emo rap”. It was the first time anyone used that term. He didn’t think he was inventing anything, let alone baptizing a whole new genre. He was simply acknowledging that his brand of rap focused mostly on introspection and personal storytelling. As the quippy jokester he is, he did so by provocatively linking two a priori antagonistic cultures (emo punk/indie rock and rap).
If the fanbase took this terminology more seriously than he intended, it may be because he inadvertently hit the nail on the head. “Emo rap” stuck with Slug and Atmosphere, so much so that in 2004, against the background of then-en-vogue emo pop, music journalist Jon Caramanica decided to investigate “the hottest thing going in below-the-radar hip-hop” in an article for Spin. In the wake of Atmosphere’s success with God Loves Ugly (2002) and Seven’s Travels (2003), the idea of rappers talking about their feelings gave every appearance of becoming a true movement: “For an increasingly vocal niche of the underground, rap bravado is a relic of the past — fear and loathing have replaced bitches and money. You could almost call it emo,” he wrote.
As the obvious poster boy of the emo avant-garde, Slug was one of the artists interviewed for the article. At the time, he was somewhat willing to own the term (more so than he would be in the future), and seemed to acknowledge that there was something innovative about his approach to rap, describing his quest as follows: “I want to be Billy Joel, and I want to be Prince. Except I want to do it with hip-hop. I want to make hip-hop that when you listen to that shit, it’s there for you.”
Slug would go on to claim that his emo style was simply in line with that of rappers like Scarface, 2Pac, Ghostface Killah, or Prodigy. However, using Billy Joel and Prince as references suggests that, at the time, he felt something in his aesthetic was alien to mainstream rap and more aligned with other styles of songwriting. My contention is that there was something innovative and unprecedented about that style of rapping – Slug’s, but also that of his peers – not only in its content, but in its form as well. To illustrate this claim, it may be useful to compare it with the music that would soon claim the term “emo” and establish it as a recognizable genre.
The fact that emo rap now has its own Wikipedia page confirms Caramanica’s guess that this “taboo strategy” (i.e., expressing one’s feelings) hinted “at what hip-hop may sound like — and look like — a generation from now.” Readers of that Wikipedia entry will have learned that emo rap (also known as “SoundCloud rap” – a term coined by Caramanica himself) is a movement that emerged in the 2010s, led by artists such as Lil Peep, XXXTentacion or Juice WRLD (all of whom died in their early 20s), and somewhat pioneered by Eminem, Drake or Kanye West (Kid Cudi can easily be added to that list). The page merely mentions that “Slug of Atmosphere claimed [my emphasis] (…) to have invented the name.”
A 2018 Chicago Reader article (which isn’t cited on the Wikipedia page) gave Slug a little more credit, stating that “the new class of emo rappers (…) actually make music that owes a debt to Atmosphere, whether they know it or not.” How so? Because their lyrics: “tend to focus on topics such as depression, loneliness, anxiety, drug abuse, nihilism, suicide, heartbreak, and self-medication” (Galil, 2018), which are topics readily present in Atmosphere’s lyrics.
The difference lies in the form. Consider this excerpt from XXXTentacion’s signature song, “SAD!”:
“I gave her everything / She took my heart and left me lonely / I think broken heart’s contagious / I won’t fix, I’d rather weep / I’m lost then I’m found / But it’s torture being in love / I love when you’re around / But I fuckin’ hate when you leave”.
Compare those lyrics with the following rendition of broken-heart rap from Slug, taken from Atmosphere’s “Fuck You Lucy”:
“I want to stand on top of this mountain and yell / I want to wake up and break up this lake of hell / I feel like a bitch for letting the sheet twist me up / The last star-fighter was wounded, time to give it up / On a pick it up mission, kept it bitter / Gettin’ in a million memories just to forget her / The difficulty in keepin’ emotions controlled / Cookies for the road took me by the soul.”
Now consider this couplet, taken from the chorus of the “SAD!”:
“Suicide if you ever try to let go, uh / I’m sad, I know, yeah, I’m sad, I know, yeah”.
Compare it with the following couplets of artists we may dub, by contrast, “old school” emo rappers – the ones who gravitated around Atmosphere and their Rhymesayers label at the turn of the century:
“Welcome to the dusty subconscious of an actor / Who murdered his childhood to stop the audience’s laughter”. (Eyedea – “Even Shadows Have Shadows”)
“There’s smoke in my iris / But I painted a sunny day on the inside of my eyelids”. (Aesop Rock – “Battery”)
“My secret pleasures have my inner demons gossiping / I’m a ghostwriter for the horrorcore lyrics my personal monsters sing”. (Sage Francis – “Pitchers of Silence”)
One could insist that the contrast is eloquent enough that it need not be commented on. If emotive, overly introspective, or distraught people have complex feelings, then we might argue that their artistic expression should match that complexity. Emo rap, as it was originally and spontaneously crafted by Slug and the likes of him, was not about namedropping buzzwords like sadness, anxiety, or depression. Aside from the musical difference – 2010s emo rap is sonically closer to R&B, drill, or punk pop, whereas “old school emo rap” remains, by and large, loyal to boom-bap albeit with notable eclecticism in the sampling choices – there is a clear contrast in lyrical elaborateness.
There’s a fine line between giving examples of emo rap and cherry-picking, but comparisons of “new school” emo rap’s catalogue with countless other songs by Eyedea and co. would highlight a similar asymmetry in imagination and the use of figures of speech.
In the above lyrics from XXXTentacion, emotions are not depicted, described, illustrated, compared to, or symbolized by anything. They are enunciated at point-blank. Sadness is expressed by “I’m sad”, lovelornness by “It’s torture being in love”, in displays of lyrical minimalism which could make one question the validity of Hemingway’s iceberg theory. Want to write a song about depression and obsession? Look no further: there’s your title, there’s basically your hook.
Conversely, it would be difficult to pinpoint precisely the feelings Eyedea, Aesop Rock, or Sage Francis express in the aforementioned lines. Their imaginative, abstract imagery makes the meaning more mysterious or unclear, but also paradoxically easier to relate to: one grasps the underlying feeling the artists try to express without necessarily knowing how to put it into words. Showing allows for greater variety than telling.
X tells you “[he’s] sadder than most of y’all”, and that’s all there can be to it. In the song excerpt above, Slug shows images: a man screaming atop a mountain, a wounded star-fighter, a troubled night’s sleep. What exactly is a “lake of hell”, how can something so benign as cookies get at someone’s soul? That’s up to you to decide.
Even the more explicit beginning of the third line (“I feel like a bitch”) functions as a literary device in its juxtaposition with the abstract imagery: this fluctuation from the metaphorical and the grandiose to the raw and the trivial is a noticeable feature of Slug’s songwriting, and depicts a narrator who struggles with his emotions (see line 7) and how to express them. As such, “old school emo rap” was something more than the blunt and unimaginative expression of any kind of negative feelings. It had an aesthetic component, subtlety, and attention to language that the new-school variety all too often lacks.
Among the “like-minded artists” Caramanica identified as belonging to that first wave of emo rap, the Atmosphere fan encounters familiar names: Sage Francis, Buck 65, or Sole and Doseone (members of Deep Puddle Dynamics alongside Slug). As illustrated above, Eyedea or Aesop Rock (frequent collaborators of Slug, and fellow members of supergroup the Orphanage) can be added to that list. Placing them in the same category as the Lil Peeps and Lil Xans of the world is misleading – even if from a strictly descriptive point of view and without hierarchizing.
If emo rap is indeed the name we give to the subgenre of rap Atmosphere and these other concomitant artists shaped in the early years of the millennium, then it does not really cover the kind of music the late Juice WRLD used to make, sonically or lyrically. Emo rap as it was outlined in the Spin article, and as I have tried to illustrate here, might hence be retrospectively defined as “old school emo rap”. It could then be summarized as an underground rap subgenre which emerged in the late 1990s to early 2000s, more expressive and open to vulnerability in its themes, more literary in its form, and with a certain cross-over appeal to fans of other genres of music.
Of course, anytime a dichotomy between old and new schools arises, the smug purist sides with the Original Gangster. While any critic ought to stand by the everlasting words of Beaumarchais according to whom “without the freedom to criticize, there is no true praise”, from 1784’s The Marriage of Figaro, I have to stress that the point of this article is not to disparage “new school” emo rap, which is obviously not without its merits – lyrical ones as well (it bears repeating that the distinction between the two works from a strictly descriptive point of view).
Their words and music put mental health on the forefront of hip-hop in a way it never had been before, helped countless fans cope with their issues, and made them realize that, as is scribbled on the cover of XXXTentacion’s only album, they were not alone. Nor is it to claim this loosely-defined category of “old school emo rap” has a monopoly on poetic value. Even sticking to the underground, other subgenres such as “art rap”, illustrated by Project Blowed figures such as Open Mike Eagle, R.A.P. Ferreira (formerly known as Milo) and Busdriver, or “lit-hop”, mostly associated with MC Lars, are easily just as qualitative in that regard. Besides, how well song lyrics would do as standalone poetry should not be the litmus test for worthy music. However, when they do have that additional poetic value, it should be acknowledged.
In 2014, Slug took to the comment section of his Facebook page after some fans had taken issue with the line-up of that year’s Soundset festival – an event organized by Rhymesayers from 2008 to 2019. A section of the fanbase considered that some acts – 2 Chainz and Wiz Khalifa in particular – were unworthy of performing on the same stage as the “Nas” and “Atmospheres” of the world, and the absence of other, prestigious underground names – Aesop Rock, P.O.S. – was bemoaned. Slug clapped back at some of this holier-than-thou bitterness:
“[S]ome of y’all act like your definition of good music is the only one that matters. this culture exists to move everyone, not just you. this culture exists to represent everyone, not just you. this culture was born from dancing and partying, and now you wanna exclude artists who make people dance and party? the irony. you don’t need to like everything, but you should probably step back and admire the whole tree for [its] ability to grow so strong. quit tryna cut off certain branches just because you don’t like them.”
Well, that is the point of this article: not to cut off any branches, but to draw attention to one that is so often overlooked, neglected, and absent from the canonical history of hip-hop, in a way its contemporary successor isn’t. To keep something from being forgotten, the first step is to give it a name.
Works Cited
Caramanica, Jon. “Emo Rap: Up From The Underground.” Spin. 12 February 2004.
Drake, David. “Magna Carta Holy Grail (2013)” in “Jay-Z’s Albums, Ranked from Worst to Best.” Complex. 2018 (updated 9 April 2026).
Dugan, Stacey. “Atmosphere: More Than A Feeling.” XLR8R, 23 April 2008.
Galil, Leor. “How Atmosphere Accidentally Predicted Juice WRLD.” Chicago Reader. 11 September 2018.
Cruz, J. ; Slug. “Slug from Atmosphere talks Word? MF Doom, Emo Rap and therapy.” YouTube, uploaded by REAL 92.3 LA. 10 October 2021.
Juon, Steve. “Atmosphere: Whenever.” RapReviews. 14 January 2020.
McDonald, Chris. “Tori Amos as Shaman.” The Cambridge Companion to The
Singer Songwriter, edited by Justin A. Williams. Cambridge University Press. 2016.