Word: rapped
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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...
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?...
Lyrical gems like Nas’ 1994 assertion that “sleep is the cousin of death” provide ample evidence for Teskey’s claim that “if you read some of Finnegans Wake...you’ll see some remarkable similarities to rap lyrics...
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...
During this process, he becomes equal parts writer and musician, all shades of categorization afterward inevitably falling prey to crude underlying cultural assumptions and models, both about poetry and rap. Aesop acknowledges that “some people like my shit, some don’t,” but refuses to get sucked into marketing himself as an “intellectual rapper...