Somehow I imagined the video for this would involve Rob Sonic and Aesop Rock decapitating parking meters like Cool Hand Luke, but instead they opt for the black and white and green screen. That’s obviously cost-efficient and follows protocol, but it would have been nice to have seen one parking meter explode with quarters. Regardless, […]

Fun isn’t an adjective commonly associated with Aesop Rock. Dense, cerebral, obtuse are more common. Over the course of his decade and a half career, he’s released only a few songs digestible enough for alternate-world airplay:  “None Shall Pass,” “Big Bang,” and the closest thing he’s ever had to a hit, “Daylight.” Even on “Basic […]

Aesop, the most quietly influential rapper of the great late 90s indieground boom, remaining as relevant today as the first time he saw Daylight. In fact, I imagine he’d be even more popular had emerged in the new era, rather than the cloistered and benighted backpack era. Unless you saw his live shows where he […]

Part of an ongoing series intended to edify one-time underground darlings about how to age gracefully in rap. Fuck your insincere Lil Bow Wow collaborations or euro-trash Ed Hardy dance-rap (we all see you Kweli), Aesop Rock and Blockhead continue to sustain relevance a decade after Float fractured the minds of a nation of bong-toting […]

The inevitable Aesop Rock and Hanni El Khatib collaboration may not have elicited Distant Relatives-type anticipation among the masses, but in cloistered quarters of Los Feliz where the weed flows like wine, it ranked among up there with the time the Jetsons met the Flintstones. The explanation is easy. Khatib bashes at his guitar with […]

Aesop Rock does things the right way. He keeps it low pro and periodically pops up a few times a year to murder guest spots, while laboring intensively on his full lengths, which have been uniformly excellent (I will ride hard for Bazooka Tooth if pressed.) None Shall Pass dropped nearly three and a half […]

The tag team of Blueprint and Illogic is the fulfillment of message board fantasies circa ’02. Eight years later, the second part of their Electric Purgatory collaboration has elicited mostly crickets around the Internet, save for the Bloggerhouse Crew. Then again, we now live in a UserShare universe, based on page views and one-sentence summaries. […]