Happy 10th Anniversary to Homeboy Sandman’s third studio album The Good Sun, originally released June 1, 2010.
Homeboy Sandman is an outlier in rap music. He’s hip-hop through and through, with a love for the classics that has seen him make records in tribute to pioneers like Kool Herc, collaborate with artists and producers from various eras, and put on mesmerizing live shows with people like Edan. Yet there’s also something of the outsider and otherworldly about his music.
If people insist on putting artists into specific boxes, you would be hard pushed to find one strong enough or perfectly sized to place Homeboy Sandman. His awkward flow and, at times, Dr. Seuss-esque writing seems to make people either love his music, like it in small portions or not dig it at all. I personally adore it and genuinely consider him to be one of the most entertaining and lyrically sharp emcees of all time.
If you don’t believe me, I present exhibit A: his 2010 album The Good Sun. Homeboy Sandman’s third LP, released two years after the charmingly-named Actual Factual Pterodactyl (2008), The Good Sun was my proper introduction to “Boy Sand” and I was instantly mesmerized by the sublime wordplay. His lyrics are fun and playful, like nursery rhymes for adults. It is never just a gimmick, however, or stacking endless words into each bar to sound cute. There is enough clarity and inventiveness in his rhymes to cover all manner of social issues and elements of the human condition. If The Source magazine’s Hip-Hop Quotable column was still a thing, Homeboy Sandman could have featured multiple times.
The Good Sun lays out its creator’s intentions early with the self-explanatory “Not Pop,” where he sums up his music succinctly with the hook “I get it popping but it’s not pop / Listen to me.” More than your average screed about how awful commercial music is, Homeboy Sandman broaches the issue by questioning the shallowness of popular songwriting, and to assert how words used should always have meaning: “Close encounters with cowards and counterfeits that exist in the biz / You move in Rihanna and Ciara midst / Rare are moments where motives are clear as a Sierra Mist / And every line I wrote / From the top of the album to the bottom of liner notes / Every word of Ebonics word is bond as a solemn oath / And stronger than solid oak.”
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On the next track, “Yeah, but I can rhyme though,” Homeboy Sandman again takes a standard hip-hop trope—this time the old fashioned braggadocious tale of how good an emcee the artist is—but flips it around. Each verse has Homeboy Sandman cover the things people find weird and un-hip-hop about him—his dress sense, distaste for social media, lack of enthusiasm for the club, his abstract lyrics and general outsider status—and retorts to all of it with the ultimate response: “Yeah, but I can rhyme though.”
There’s lots more of this kind of material throughout the rest of The Good Sun, but Homeboy Sandman can also do concept songs, like album closer, “Angels With Dirty Faces.” Over a dramatic instrumental from J57, Homeboy Sandman tells the story of a homeless person begging for change, first from the perspective of someone who passes by ignoring the man’s plea for spare change, then through the eyes of the homeless man himself, finally turning verse three towards the listener to question why we often claim we are kind-hearted but usually don’t practice this with actual compassion for others. It’s a heavy way to end the album, but functions as a strong reminder of how for all the witty lines and humorous barbs, Homeboy Sandman likes to challenge as much as he does entertain.
Something else of note with Homeboy Sandman is how his music contains little profanity. Swearing is, of course, ubiquitous in rap music, and it’s never bothered me at all (I’m ashamed to say I swear like a fucking trooper). As standard as it is in hip-hop, its rarely warranted, and many of the greatest artists from the classic eras of the 1980s and 1990s hardly ever used profanity. Homeboy Sandman is another emcee who keeps things clean, only swearing when he knows it will add devastating impact (check his brilliant song “#Neverusetheinternetagain” from 2018’s Humble Pi to see what I mean). He lets his intellect do the tough-talking because you don’t need swearing to defeat a screw-faced hardass when you write lyrics like this rebuttal on The Good Sun’s “Mean Mug”: “It’s important I try to find out what’s the point of it / I’m not in support of it / Towards what ploy are you employing it? / You do know that it's poisonous, not poignant? / Have you deployed it at your place of employment? / If so, which position have you been appointed?”
Homeboy Sandman has only become better with every album and EP since The Good Sun. Highlights since this album include First of a Living Breed (2012), Kindness for Weakness (2016), the Lice EPs with Aesop Rock, and the aforementioned Humble Pi album recorded with Edan.
LISTEN: