He’s rooted in hip-hop, but he digs it deeper

Paul Francis didn’t see Eminem’s movie “8 Mile,” but he saw enough clips and ads to realize that he’s lived the story -- in a parallel universe sort of way.

Like Eminem’s semiautobiographical film character, Francis was a white kid growing up outside a Northern city who got turned on to hip-hop at an early age, venturing into the city to make his name beating primarily African American combatants at freestyle rap competitions and poetry slams.

But rather than the outskirts of Detroit, where Marshall Mathers III started his journey, Francis developed in a very unlikely hip-hop incubator on a dirt road north of Providence, R.I.

Unlike the mainstream, multi-platinum stardom Eminem has enjoyed, Francis, under the name Sage Francis, has become the star of an intense, burgeoning but still-small underground that rejects the glitzy values of mainstream rap and pop as practiced by Eminem, 50 Cent and other current stars.

“Right now people think rap is rap,” says Francis, 25, in his dressing room at the Troubadour before a recent concert. “But there is enough of a distinction to say these are two whole different musics. I could imagine people researching music in 100 years and not understanding that 50 Cent and I were putting out records in the same era.”

Anyone seeing the Troubadour concert would understand the difference. For much of his set he performed with his new band, the Gimme Fund, featuring two acoustic guitarists and sample programmer Joe Beats. Although the music was clearly hip-hop in roots, it added distinctive song character. Francis also brought in a thematic sense well beyond the standard, with informed lyrics discussing sexual politics, consumerism and a search for self-awareness. And there’s not even one bling to his regular-guy appearance, let alone two.

Even when paying homage to rap roots icons such as Run-D.M.C. in his duo the Non-Prophets with Joe Beats, the slightly doughy Francis looked more “King of Queens” than “King of Rock.”

Saddled with the tag “emo-hop,” Francis’ genre is positioned as the rap cousin of emo-rock, a format marked by earnestness and, at its best, intellectual curiosity and ambition.

The term (first used tongue-in-cheek in a Francis news release) has been applied to a wide span of indie hip-hop from Aesop Rock and others on the dark Brooklyn-based Def Jux label to Minneapolis’ Atmosphere. There’s also a vibrant L.A. underground whose budding stars include Busdriver and 2Mex. The artists come from diverse backgrounds, though the audiences seem to skew whiter than mainstream hip-hop.

All three opening acts -- a young Australian woman who performs under the name Macromantics, Kansas City parodist Mac Lethal and the Pittsburgh-based social satire duo Grand Buffet -- on stage hailed Francis with praise worthy of a true pioneer.

Among the most passionate in the audience was Andy Kaulkin, president of Epitaph Records, who has signed Francis as the label’s first rap artist in a stable known for such punk acts as Bad Religion and Rancid. Kaulkin is an evangelical fan not just of Francis but of the whole scene.

“I go to these shows and it’s way less corporate than a punk show today. And what’s fascinating is there’s a certain unself-consciousness about it. No matter how great the Beastie Boys or Eminem are, there’s a self-consciousness. The Beastie Boys were punk kids who embraced hip-hop. Eminem was a white kid who came out of black culture, expressing for a black audience. People like Sage and Slug [from Atmosphere] are kids who grew up listening to hip-hop, absorbing it. That’s their music.”

Francis became infatuated with rap as an 8-year-old when he heard a song on a TV commercial. He immediately started using his allowance to buy tapes by early rap stars -- EPMD, LL Cool J and KRS-One among them. Then he came under the spell of Public Enemy, for the combination of sonic invention, pointed messages and forceful personalities of the group.

But it was the punk world that gave him his start, simply because there were no hip-hop settings at hand. He had friends in bands, and his first performances were rapping along with the punks and picking up their do-it-yourself attitude.

“I didn’t listen to punk, but they gave me an outlet,” he says. “Same with spoken-word and poetry -- I wasn’t into that. I just wanted to hear my voice. But from hard-core shows I adopted a DIY ethic. Do as much as you can and don’t let others get their hands in my pot.”

Francis started making his own recordings in 1996, at first just rapping over other artists’ tracks onto cassettes that he would duplicate and give out. Eventually he got more sophisticated, crafting inventive tracks and unconventional, sophisticated rhymes in a variety of contexts. His inward-looking “Personal Journals” album was released in 2002 by the independent Anticon label, followed last year by the political commentary of the single “Makeshift Patriot” and his and Beats’ Non-Prophets album “Hope” on the British Lex label. His Epitaph debut is due later this year.

The albums and the concert also reflect tastes that have expanded since he turned 20, particularly obsessions with Bob Dylan, Neil Young and Hank Williams. And, he promises, there’s a lot more growth to come.

“I know where I want to go and haven’t seen anyone go there, and I don’t want it steered in a direction it’s gone before,” he says. “I don’t want to go somewhere comfortable.”