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Sage Francis entertains Madison with recent live show

At times, the events of Friday night were difficult to distinguish — and that's not alcohol-induced myopia talking. Fashion show-turned-hip-hop show-turned-political rally in the course of one sweaty evening at the Barrymore — that's the only way to surmise the Madison stop on the Knowmore.org Tour, which featured poet-cum-underground rap missionary Sage Francis along with openers Sole and Sol.illaquists of Sound.

Francis — who earned a black belt when he was 17 — demonstrated a kung-fu stance or two in his relentless stage routine and went shoeless just as if he had stepped onto the sparring mat ready to deliver a steady flow of knockout blows to the rapt audience.

Casting away the usual hip-hop bravado, Francis maintained a self-effacing tack tinged with cycnicism. His act was a postmodern interpretation of Shakespeare's Fool, taking myriad opportunities to cut up on popular media, as well as himself, and the sad state of hip-hop. Overall, though, the performer maintained his current focus on important issues.

Admittedly not a big fan of Kanye West, Francis nevertheless issued props for the platinum artist's use of the spotlight to call attention to acts of systemic social injustice during a recent appearance on NBC's Hurricane Katrina fundraiser. The nationally televised (although edited on the West Coast) rant reached a climax with West's proclamation that "George Bush doesn't care about black people."

To his own credit, Sage did his best to get the Recording Industry Association of America's panties bunched (not surprising from a man who has previously toured under the banner "F-ck Clearchannel"), dropping beats and rhymes over bootlegged backing tracks that ran the gamut from Nirvana to Elton John.

The performance highlight of the evening had to be "99 Rappers," a liberal retelling of Jay-Z's misogynist anthem, "99 Problems." Matching the Hova's clout seemed an easy task for Francis, who spit this to his verbal nemesis: "Six million ways to die / Choose one / I like 99 rappers / But Jay-Z ain't one."

Marge Fillyaw, one of the few dedicated fans to be name-checked by Francis during his set, had this reaction: "Best show I've been to all year, hands down, [aside from the] chodes standing next to me smoking shwag. … [Sage Francis] is one of the reasons I love underground hip-hop so much."

Francis' casual yet pointed showmanship had already-rabid fans hanging on to his every word. A plethora of emo jokes left many in the crowd wondering if he was talking about them (some even left early to go write about it in their LiveJournals). Fauxhawks and spacers — rather than backpacks and ball caps — were the accoutrements of choice for this crowd. The overwhelming white-boy contingent's refusal to embrace a typical hip-hop aesthetic didn't hinder the strength of the call and response in the room. Verse after verse, they kept up with the performance, regurgitating lyrics and throwing the occasional gang sign — "Midwest!"

An impromptu funky dance session saw Sage getting "stoopid," pulling out the early-'90s dance moves (Kid n' Play kickstep, anyone?) over a KRS-One beat that brought the wacky alert up to code red. "I think we just broke some kind of hip-hop rule."

Like some of the concertgoers, Sage has never been one to follow hip-hop convention. The rapper declared in 2001 that he would no longer tour with a DJ. Friday, his motley backing band of the night featured DiVinci thrashing an MPC drum pad and guitar licks courtesy of Tom Inhaler and a CD player that unfortunately ran with a few hiccups during the show. At one point, Francis told the crowd he was going to stop rapping for the rest of the night: "In fact, I'm not going to use my voice at all." Then he pulled out his de-facto secret weapon: the $5 Mexican squeezebox accordion. With that, things started to get a little raucous.

He then took a moment to yield the stage to Bernard Dolan, volunteer coordinator for Knowmore.org, who first met Sage when both were part of the same slam poetry crew in Rhode Island. Dolan and a small group of dedicated activists formed Knowmore.org as a means to disseminate information from corporate rap sheets that the mainstream media wouldn't touch. Users can search for a specific company or browse the list to find numerical ratings of a company's worker relations, environmental policy, political influence and overall business ethics along with corroborated reports of company activities.

According to Dolan, the site is a Wiki (similar to Wikipedia.org), which uses a decentralized model of communication. In this format, the users become the content writers and can edit and add to the information on the site, which now receives an impressive 20,000 hits per day. His provocative words onstage summed up the approach: "Don't hate the media. … Become the media!"

Since recording his first rhymes into a portable cassette deck as a 12-year-old in Providence, Francis was a clear proponent of this sort of DIY approach to making media. Skirting interest from the majors, he signed to seminal California punk label Epitaph in 2004 as the first hip-hop artist in their stable, soon to be followed in suit by Midwest rap heroes Atmosphere. He also continues to maintain his own imprint, Strange Famous Records (www.strangefamousrecords.com) as a jumping-off point for more personal projects such as the recently released "Life is Easy" DVD, a compilation of live concert footage, spoken word, interviews and the "awkward moments of a man who was too beautiful for this ugly world."

Sage Francis is more than a rapper; he takes his art to the level of action and impressively succeeds. On a campus as politically astute as this one, it is difficult for a day to pass without having one agenda or another thrown into the student body's radar — but how can we possibly process all of these intense issues seriously all of the time? Anyone who's ever watched “The Daily Show” can attest that self-aware satire can hit home harder than a straight ideological rant. Delivering terms of the absurd with a beat you can dance to proved to be the order of the day as the Madison hip-hop community graciously accepted this man's sagely offering.