Aesop Rock

I've been listening to Aesop Rock almost constantly for the last few weeks. I've had some of his tunes kicking around my computer for a while, but never really invested the time to get familiar with them until recently. I feel like an idiot for not listening to them earlier.



On the surface, it's underground hip hop, with quirky beats and incredibly articulate vocal delivery. Once you start listening to the lyrics themselves, though, it gains a whole other dimension. He takes a very stream-of-consciousness approach to writing, and the result is sort of like the hip hop equivalent of impressionism. You can get a pretty good feel for the ideas he's laying down by listening to the whole, but if you try to pick apart individual lines to squeeze literal meaning out of them, it all becomes kind of nonsensical. Every once in a while though, he drops great straightforward lines that stand out all the more as a result of the abstractness of the rest of the lyrics. It's a wicked awesome combination of literary delivery and unstoppable flow.

The best example of his lyrical style is the "Daylight/Night Light" song pair. The first song has a sort-of-melancholy feel to it, but seems kind of optimistic at times. Nightlight, on the other hand, is Daylight's evil twin. The lyrics are almost identical, but where Daylight is optimistic, Night Light is negative and furious. Listening to them consecutively makes for a pretty cool effect. Best lyric pair:

Daylight: "I'll lay my boots to rest when I'm impressed, so I triple knot 'em and forgot 'em".
Night Light: "I'll lay my kicks to rest when I'm impressed, so I'll staple gun 'em to my face."

Intense.