Word: aesopã
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This discourse between hip-hop and academia is starting to flow both ways. Courses like Literature and Arts A-86, “American Protest Literature from Tom Paine to Tupac” pack lecture halls at Harvard. After reading Aesop??s lyric “the villain of my Kabuki hologram cuz I hobble with hollow hands” (from the titular track of 1999’s “Float”), an enthusiastic Professor of English and American Literature and Language Gordon L. Teskey felt compelled to mention that “a good...
...John P. Marquand Professor of English Peter Sacks noted in an email that “there’s clearly an impressive and exuberant sensibility at work in the texture, verbal energy” in the lyrics to “Float.” He particularly admired Aesop??s impressive “range of allusion,” with its “blend of desperation and exhilaration, free play and constrained need—e.g., to float rather than drown...
...spout off references to Yeats or Ashbery, but instead constructs a veritable Who’s Who of classic rap lyricists, including Slick Rick, Ghostface Killah, and his mentor El-P. Instead of spending hours on end fine-tuning his rhyme scheme to match some stifled polyameter, Aesop??s main concern has always been to find “something I can work with, [...] then to assemble it over a beat...
...poetic abstraction is still somewhat of a rarity in the hip-hop world, perhaps because only a few of the rappers working at these boundaries of lyrical representation have been able to achieve some modicum of national visibility. Some stars of this subset include much of the roster of Aesop??s home label Definitive Jux (Cannibal Ox, El-P, Mr. Lif), shapeshifting scene veteran Daniel Dumile (MF Doom to most), and Anticon Records’ obscurantist crew (Sole, Dose One, Sage Francis...
...ain’t shit.’” Battle raps and posse tracks often serve to pad out “albums” lacking any unified theme, even in the “underground” scene in which he operates. An inextricable part of Aesop??s appeal is the relative lack of such pseudo-macho posturing in his work; in his own words, he doesn’t want to spend his “15 minutes of fame shitting on someone...