Word: hipped
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...Hip-hop 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...
Vegetables” stirred up righteous anger only to be subsumed a few years later by the art-punk Dadaisms of Wire’s “Chairs Missing,” underground hip hop today is on the verge of a revolution in subject matter, form and overarching aesthetics...
Complete 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...
Also, reports of the Benz/backpack dichotomy between mainstream and underground rap that Kanye West claims to have transcended seem to have been greatly exaggerated. Hip-hop legends like Wu-Tang Clan, Rakim, Nas and Notorious B.I.G. have been weaving abstract rhymes into their oeuvres for years (albeit less pretentiously), along with left-field heroes like De La Soul, 3rd Bass and the Native Tongues Posse (Q-Tip’s nickname is even “the Abstract?...
...thing Teskey mentioned in his analysis of “Float,” before any mention of media theory or tumbling measure, was a simple and immutably subjective judgment: “I like it.” As the academy warms up to the rigorous analysis of hip-hop, it is finally beginning to appreciate Aesop’s dedication to “spittin’ the illest shit,” whether he likes...