Name: Aesop Rock
Locality: Born in Long Island, NY, bred skills in Brooklyn, NY & San Francisco, CA
Crayon Color: Metal: Crushed cans, repo’d cars, the like
The Story: Aesop Rock is a silver clinching spitting, archaic sounding wordsmith who has been rapping longer than Willow Smith has been alive. He started out in 1997 with the release of his first studio album Music for Earthworms. Three albums and two EP's later came 2005 with the birth of the Fast Cars Danger Fire and Knives EP and some airplay of the not-so-kid-friendly tune “Fast Cars.” Not that his work has gone unnoticed by the tykes. His lyrics have been published in Hip Hop Speaks To Kids (quote this, a New York Times Bestseller), by Nikki Giovanni, and not to mention the Anthology of Rap by Yale University in 2010.
None Shall Pass was the next peak in the established rappers career, which was followed by a five year album break; however, not without a few drops: Aesop saw credits on Kimya Dawson’s album Thunder Thighs, released last November, and Dirty Ghosts' album Metal Moon, which came out this past February.
Die hard fans of the fables of Aesop can look forward to a new release from him come on July 10; it’s called Skelethon; on the Rhymsayers Ent. Imprint, and he produced it himself, with back-up vocals from Hanni El Khatib, Nicki Fleming-Yaran, Rob Sonic, and the Grimace Federation. This album sings of making lemons out of lemonade. It’s about relationship f***-ups, loss, memories, and how we make sense of it all. The interwoven lyricism of the man of the hour could be the downpour needed to make the little crops of the rap farm grow again.
Coloring Outside the Lines: He’s got a quasi dungeon, dinosaur tone to his voice, and a persona to match. Aesop knows how to tell a tale, to abstract the meat of life's monstrosities and package them into story form—all with an internal confidence that will mash your favorite rapper's jewelery.
Think: That sound machine vocoder thingy that makes one voice into three devilish voices, really long drawn out sentences with lots of prep phrases, dungeon dragons, abstract art, a plane flying low enough to be close to the ground-- but still over your head.
