Five months after the release of his long-awaited hip-hop debut ‘Purple Handprints’, a pallid and morose Natural sits cross-legged in dim lighting, gazing at the wall with a fifty-yard stare as smoke plumes lazily from a Marlboro Light. 　　 　　“I wanted to do with rap what Don Van Vliet did with the blues. I wanted to create something rhythmically complex and linguistically innovative, something that built upon the roots of the genre but also broke some rules in the process. The hypnotic compositions of IDM alchemist Amon Tobin would provide the perfect backdrop for what I was trying to accomplish as the complicated rhythms would require a similarly skillful approach on the part of the vocalist—working within this aesthetic model would lend an element of accessibility to the project and allow me to more confidently experiment with the kind of material I wanted to write. 　　 　　[He takes a halfhearted drag, exhales slowly, continues.] 　　 　　“The content itself is what mattered most to me, and I really did my best to construct an intelligent dialogue about the human experience in an effort to redefine hip-hop’s literary landscape and provide a medium through which introverted over-thinkers like me could finally be heard. It was my sincere hope that this avant-garde approach to rapping would allow me to communicate more effectively with like-minded listeners by capturing not only the everyday struggled of postmodern middle-class American existence as we know it, but also the more existential concepts that define it as well. 　　 　　[A slight pause here.] 　　 　　“Needless to say, that sh*t did not catch on. 　　 　　“I wanted to push the boundaries of rap, to drop an H-bomb of hydraulic meta-fiction on an unsuspecting minimalist world. I wanted the textual content of the project to resonate with listeners in new and exciting ways and in retrospect I don’t quite think it does. But regardless of how I feel about the final product, Handprints represents seven years of my life—eleven if you count my whole career as the lead-in—and it’s nice to finally be done with it. I chased an idea that I wholeheartedly believed in and that feels good. Perhaps this will give one or two of you the inspiration to do the same.” 　　 　　The responses are well-spoken, yes, but they also seem rehearsed, as if he’s trying to convince himself of their sincerity, and I find that the words offer more solace when I’m not looking directly at him: his tired expression, this abject stare he refuses to break, betrays him completely.