Aesop Rock

Yo, could you do me a favor? Could you go to the Black Hole Superette, please?
And can you grab me any, anything that has a warning label on it that says something bad's gonna happen to you from the product?
Can you bring me one of those?

Aesop Rock’s latest album, “Black Hole Superette”, explores the boundaries between dream and reality, lived experience and fantasy. On closer listen, the use of 80s and 90s-inspired sounds in the production invites the listener to also investigate the boundary between past and present, in a spiral of references that point to arcade video games as well as other albums from his career. There’s no clear line separating memory, dream, and perception, because Aesop Rock leads us into his typical syntactic labyrinth, where everything becomes a story—or rather, 18 different stories across a total of 68 minutes.

The numerous collaborators (Lupe Fiasco, Armand Hammer, Hanni El Khatib, Open Mike Eagle, and Homeboy Sandman) play secondary roles in “Black Hole Superette”, because Aesop Rock has infused the album with his own style, both in the beats and in the rhymes. As already noted in the previous “Integrated Tech Solutions” (2023), it’s a brilliant balance between complexity and fun, between brain and body, that makes this phase of his career especially versatile. This time, a supermarket—or more precisely, a superette—is the setting for his usual creative tales, telling of a humanity in crisis, trapped in a hopelessly collapsing system.
It’s a journey sinking into the muck of terminal capitalism, but with a logic very different from Billy Woods’ “Golliwog” or the cyber fantasies of Clipping. More colorful and more surreal, it’s a triumph of creative storytelling.
From the collapsing floor and bleeding walls of the opening “Secret Knock”, to the sun that seems ready to wink at the paranoid protagonist of “Checkers”, to the pet mutt that turns out to be five dogs in one in “Movie Night”—a funny track hiding another living dictionary moment—Aesop takes us through wild territory. Elsewhere, rap becomes pure dreamlike narration, as in “So Be It”, or a kind of Kafkaesque comic strip in “Send Help”, or even a surreal tale of an artist, a generic “John Something”, who turns out to be a vintage boxing enthusiast.
After all, Aesop Rock can rap about anything, always finding new narrative paths and language: he observes the magic of nature in “Bird School”, focused on the migration of the Vaux’s swift, and invents a hilarious weird tale in “Snail Zero” about the uncontrolled multiplication of... a snail.
The carousel of cultural references—some pop, some obscure—and musical ones, ranging from boom bap to jazz-rap, touching on vapor nostalgia and synthwave echoes and even nods to sci-fi cinema, is a show within the show.

“Black Hole Superette” is another high-level album from Aesop Rock, one that won’t surprise those already familiar with his work but can be counted among the best chapters of a career that has now spanned over 25 years. It proves—once again—that hip-hop can go far beyond clichés, even telling stories like that of Elizabeth, the little hamster that marked the rapper’s childhood, and is the star of the closing track “Unbelievable Shenanigans”. Albums and rappers like this are always desperately needed.

19/06/2025