Word: aesop
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...savant Aesop Rock claims to have “never wrote or read poetry that much” while growing up. You’d never know it from “The Living Human Curiousity Sideshow,” an 87-page booklet distributed with his recent EP “Fast Cars, Danger, Fire and Knives,” compiling all of the acclaimed underground rapper’s (neé Ian Bavitz) lyrics since his 1999 album, “Float...
...Aesop contends that calling rap a “poem on a beat ... is pretty valid,” and that the many parallels between the two forms are “not a coincidence.” But he also stresses that “overinterpretation happens a lot” when critics try to analyze his convoluted flow, probably because his work is “not as linear” as their preconceptions of rap allow. “You get used to it,” he sighs, with the seemingly unperturbed air of the superscrutinized...
Tumbling measure? Free play and constrained need? Has Aesop penetrated the formidable defenses of the ivory tower out of a conscious effort to write “poetically?...
When pressed for musical and lyrical influences, Aesop doesn’t 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...
...Aesop grants that the vast majority of rap these days, regardless of its visceral appeal, is still lyrically a “glorified way of saying ‘bitches 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...