Aesop Rock - The Living Dictionary

Ian Matthias Bavitz, better known as Aesop Rock, is one of the pivotal figures in hip-hop's renewal in the new millennium. A champion of the American underground movement, he's one of the genre's avant-garde standard-bearers. His complex, abstract flow is injected with captivating visions, which make his tracks cryptic and three-dimensional, steeped in symbols, phonetic wordplay, quotations, callbacks and virtuosic rhymes. Aesop Rock combines the swagger of the kid from the ghetto with the spirit of the urban poet. Like a seasoned, eclectic actor, he can switch characters and merge the "loftiest" reflections with the "lowest" trivialities with masterful adaptability. So you might hear him boasting about his dominant-male role one moment, only to find him lost in hallucinated visions worthy of the most oneiric David Lynch the next.

Complex, intricate lyrics, abstract and poetic, are one of the two sides of Aesop Rock's uniqueness. The other side is the music, a dense concentrate of elegant stylistic excursions, a fitting synthesis of a musical genre, hip-hop, that has by now reached a complexity that rivals even the most encyclopedic rock bands. Aesop Rock thrives on this labyrinthine, lush style, carefully avoiding repeating himself or retreading ground already covered by him or by fellow artists. He often takes on the producer's role himself, yet at least one other name is essential to the success of the musical side of his work: James Anthony Simon, better known as Blockhead.

The underground beginnings: earthworms and apple seeds.

Ian became interested in hip-hop from a young age, thanks to frequent trips to New York City. At Boston University he met Blockhead, who, once he realized what he was made of, decided to become a producer and shelved his own idea of rapping. In a 2002 interview, Aesop Rock cites Public Enemy, Boogie Down Production, KMD and Run DMC as influences on his development, although in his discography these influences are hard to trace except in an indirect way.

The first step of his career is marked by the rawest underground ethos: a self-financed album recorded on a next-to-nothing budget. Ian burned the compact discs one by one and cut out the covers himself: he sold over 300 copies, an unexpected success. Music For Earthworms (1997) is, with hindsight, just a taste of what was to come. An unofficial debut album, already driven by a classy flow and charismatic musical touches. It contains his first single, "Abandon All Hope", with its curious classical samples, for which a video was even produced.

The retro vocals of "Wake Up Call" and the watery sci-fi synths of "89.9FM Night Train Promo" coexist with the mysterious fanfare of "Shere Kahn", a little Middle Eastern-tinged masterpiece. An overwhelming stylistic variety, further enriched by the comic horns of "Coordinates" and the military march of "Troubled Waters", with its melancholy strings. In the future the tracks would grow even more sophisticated and layered, arranged like little sonic puzzles with no regard for genre boundaries, but already this unofficial debut is enough to make this oblique take on hip-hop compelling.

The lyrics are already a phonetic and cultural trip with few rivals. In "Abandon All Hope" alone he references the "Transformers" character Megatron, the Wookies from "Star Wars", the North Star, Boo Radley from "To Kill a Mockingbird", Colonel Kurtz from "Heart of Darkness", "The Wizard of Oz", and the title itself even echoes our own Dante's Commedia. It's not just a matter of catchy, varied references, but above all of vocabulary: one of the broadest ever to appear on a hip-hop record, capable of putting a serious strain on the vocabulary of anyone who isn't a native speaker. This incredible lexical richness is even more impressive when compared with many of the most important and celebrated names in hip-hop, as the site Poly-Graph.co did. In the resulting chart, Aesop Rock is literally off the scale, managing to outdo even Roots, Wu Tang Clan and CunninLynguists in terms of the number of distinct words used in their lyrics. In practice, the lexical complexity of his lyrics creates a category all its own, where he seems to have no rival (although here in Italy we do have Uochi Toki).

Appleseed (1999) is a self-produced EP that marks, among other things, the beginning of his collaboration with Blockhead. Aesop Rock plays other cards too, such as the jazz of "Dryspell", lifted from Ornette Coleman, and the melancholy, introverted rock that spills out of the guitar on "Same Space (The Tugboat Complex Part 2)". The desolate trumpet of "Hold The Cup", later adorned with further horns and percussion, is probably the high point alongside "1000 Deaths", an Afro-hip-hop track with melancholy piano and horns.

On "Odessa" a wistful guitar sits alongside an ancestral flute. These are cathedrals of samples, of contaminations, of fusions with few rivals. The least significant element is the beat, since the tracks revolve around these layers of music and vocal snippets. Alongside this "flow" moves that of the lyrics, mutating and always on the verge of becoming disorienting.

From the manifesto "Float" to the dreamlike electric-guitar psychedelia of "Commencement At The Obedience Academy", from the violin-laced jazz of "Big Bang" to the penetrating basslines of "Garbage", again with strings. And so on, without letting up, the Beck-style blues-hip-hop of "I'll Be Ok", the pensive, orchestrated interlude of "Basic Cable", the drunken trumpet of "Fascination", the orchestral ethno-jazz hallucination of the masterpiece "Oxygen", the reggae-rock of the remarkable "Skip Town", the robotic voices of "6B Panorama", the richly atmospheric suspense of "Spare A Match" and the majestic march of "Attention Span".

The imagination the record exudes is impressive, not to mention that every episode finds its own dimension and properly develops a precise sonic landscape. The splendid "How To Be A Carpenter", suspense-laden horns included at no extra charge, and the hallucination of "No Splash" lead to another moment worth framing, "Drawbridge": dark suspense, varied orchestration, razor-sharp rapping and an apocalyptic mood. Closing things out is "The Mayor And The Crook", an indian-ethno-rap track that's a fitting conclusion to an exceptional album.

Whether it's a new kind of jazz-rap, made of hallucinated, distant trumpets, perhaps seasoned with percussion, or visionary psychedelia or a majestic march, the instrumental side of this album is as much the protagonist as the lyrics. Exploiting the full potential of sampling, it lays down a tour de force of contaminations and blends, shunning the genre's prepackaged templates. Aesop Rock gives it his all behind the microphone, never missing a chance to throw the listener off track and bury them under outlandish imagery, so that on first impact they risk being left disoriented and dazed. Once you've broken through the tough shell of these tracks, though, you come to appreciate the richness of both the lyrics and the music. These are 20 songs capable of refounding alternative hip-hop, putting the lyrics back at the center while simultaneously using the instrumental side as a forge of suggestions, visions and digressions.

Simply because it follows Float, the subsequent Labor Days (2001) might seem like an all-too-linear album. In reality, placed in its proper context, it's another moment of great creativity and stylistic variety, just less unpredictable than what came immediately before. As striking as "Labor" is right away, with its telluric basslines, it's the poignant, moving "Daylight", a sweet orchestral folk-pop melody, that opens the list of standout tracks. The unsettling, Eastern-tinged synth melody of "Flashflood", with its ethnic shadings, is the second moment worth remembering as one of the peaks of his career and one of the moments furthest removed from the common templates of hip-hop music. Close behind comes "No Regrets", a catchy moment and a clear example of the originality of Aesop Rock's music: a bouncy refrain, distant, ethereal voices in the background, chamber-like orchestration, while behind the mic he unspools a surreal lyric complete with a plot twist.

The intricate horn arrangement of "Bent Life" and the overwhelming, bass-drugged music-box feel of "9-5 Anthem" round out the standout moments of an album that, while less frighteningly alien than Float, still sounds like nothing else being offered by the rest of the scene. This time it's easier to trace the tracks back to proper hip-hop songs, albeit atypical ones steeped in charisma.

In 2002 the EP Daylight contains an alternate version of the title track, which had already appeared on Labor Days. It's called "Night Light" and is a darker, more agitated reworking of the original. The rest sounds like a collection of top-shelf outtakes.

Time to change things up, so Blockhead has much less input on the following album, Bazooka Tooth (2003), another journey that sweeps the listener up and carries them through the most varied of sonic landscapes. There's still total musical freedom on the title track, then the Middle Eastern, jazzy, club-ready sound of "N.Y. Electric/Hunter Interlude" opens the door to the psychedelia of "Easy" before diving into the rhythmic whirlwind of "No Jumper Cables", showing in just four tracks a sonic variety that many full discographies struggle to match.

The album is marked by rhythms that lean more heavily on powerful basslines and a danceable feel, as captured well by "Limelighters", echoed by "Babies With Guns", the near-grime of "Mars Attack" and "Super Fluke", a gem that by this point is something other than hip-hop, closer to the abstraction that dubstep would later embody. A only loosely related case is "11:35", a danceable track with an opera singer in the background and a fluid flow that spreads harmoniously over the beat. Even when it returns to funk, it does so in a lopsided way, as on "Cook It Up", in a vocal ecstasy of voices and interweaving lines that borders on chaos by the end.

Aesop Rock is slowly pushing toward a more danceable style, without losing much charisma in the process. Then again, he could never have repeated the surprise effect of Float while sticking to territory that, however vast, risked being visited for a second time.

The EP Fast Cars, Danger, Fire And Knives (2005) serves to break the hunger for new songs. Among these at times less distinctive experiments ("Zodiaccupunture"), there's at least one track worthy of his major output: "Holy Smokes", with a violin and moans accompanying a xylophone. "Rickety-Rackety" foreshadows the danceable style that will arrive with the next album of his maturity, while the most irreverent sample is the blatantly pornographic one on "Food Clothes Medicine", the track with the hardest, most menacing beat.

The EP was initially sold with an 88-page booklet, titled "The Living Human Curiosity Sideshow", collecting all the lyrics along with unreleased photographs and artwork: a must for fans.

Skelethon (2012) is a statement of class and another album worth remembering, even if by now those familiar with him might just be used to this kind of brilliance. "Leisureforce" is a lightning-fast opener, showing a sonic and stylistic synthesis built on a whirling rhythm full of drum fills and layering. "ZZZ Top" is laced with pop and rock, spinning through its rhythms like a virtuoso jam session and bewitched by that sensational flow that has always set him apart.

Eastern melodies on "Cycles To Gehenna" and the dark, dramatic mood of "Zero Dark Thirty", which never lets up for a moment, are further proof of his superiority over many of his peers: in his elaborate rhythms, his pop and rock contaminations, his syntheses and shifting structures, Aesop Rock is a step ahead of most others. Just listen to the bizarre sonic interplay on "Fryerstarter" if you're still not convinced. And if you still have any enthusiasm left for his stream-of-consciousness style, here it comes back in a cosmic mood on "Ruby '81", listened to with bated breath and the kind of attention you'd give the closing monologue of a film.

At the heart of the record, acting as its backbone, is the one-two punch of "Crows 1" and "Crows 2": a pounding rhythm, sweet female vocal melodies and smoky, nostalgic horns, followed by a second half of menacing rock reshaped by hip-hop. The rapper manages to carry forward the idea of a party-ready Aesop Rock on "Racing Stripes". The final tracks perhaps offer less to dwell on, but right up to the closing "Gopher Guts" there's no trace of real filler.

To ease the wait for the new album, in 2014 he released The Blob, made available online for free. In the artist's own words, it's "32 minutes of beats & sounds that have otherwise been orphaned by their hell-bound father. It is largely unmixed and occasionally offensive". Material for fans and completists, with no pretense of being anything more.

The seventh album, The Impossible Kid (2016), arrives to remind an alternative hip-hop scene now edging ever closer to the mainstream of who one of its founders actually was. In years when critics were falling over themselves for Run The Jewels, these new songs seem compelled to remind the world of Aesop Rock's centrality to recent hip-hop history.

It's a fairly accessible album, by now a long way from the complexity of Float, reining in his verbose, cryptic style and delivering his lyrics over music that's less adventurous than in the past. Still, this is no 50 Cent record: it's marked by his usual range of stylistic shifts and by abstract, intricate lyrics. "Dorks", "Blood Sandwich" and "Water Tower" add themselves to his already lengthy anthology of standout tracks. On the whole, though, there's nothing really new to report. But really, what more could you ask of this loquacious, erudite class valedictorian?

In 2019 he returns with the Malibu Ken project, reminding everyone that he may keep a lower profile these days, but he's still ready to tear a good chunk of the contemporary scene to shreds.

A major comeback: Aesop Rock returns as a solo artist with Spirit World Field Guide, four years on from The Impossible Kid (2016), though preceded along the way by a few minor exercises in the form of soundtracks. The chosen format is that of a guide to a world of his own creation, explored across the 20 tracks that follow the programmatic intro. Ian Bavitz not only raps as only he can, on a level that arguably has no real peers, but also produces almost everything himself, steering the project with a steady hand and piling up psychedelic and sci-fi references, atmospheric touches and gaming nods, jazz-rap and rock, even metal, with the ease of someone who could shape a hip-hop track out of any musical raw material whatsoever. For fans, it's simply confirmation of an inspiration that seemed to have entered a natural decline five years earlier, but which has now gloriously reversed course. In the fantasy world described here we find a reinvigorating break from reality, a sonic carousel that suggests rather than describes, where the lyrics - Aesop Rock's ever-visionary, dense lyrics - scatter just enough clues to help us find our bearings and keep enjoying the ride.

Garbology is the English-language word used to describe the study of waste, of how it's created and managed. Since November 2021 it's also been the name of a collaborative album between Ian "Aesop Rock" Bavitz and producer and friend Tony "Blockhead" Simon, with whom Bavitz co-wrote part of his first five albums and some of the most celebrated, best-remembered singles of that stretch of his career. The reason behind the chosen title is, of course, one of those typical linguistic detours favoured by the New York-born rapper: while working on the record he was grieving the loss of a dear friend, Kurt Hayashi, and piecing back together fragments of a life shattered by that loss. But since we're talking about Aesop Rock, the title inevitably lends itself to further readings too, for instance as a parallel with hip-hop's characteristic art of recycling old sonic materials to give them new life. More broadly, "Garbology" is split between looking back to the past and the need to use that act of recollection as a foundation for building the future.

The 14 tracks are dense with surreal rhymes and razor-sharp wordplay, often set against bleak backdrops, so much so that the album's overall tone is reflective and bitter. The two principals are so thoroughly in command of their craft that they can forgo big dramatic turns, and so the 51 minutes glide by without major jolts, arranged into a tracklist that cruises steadily at high altitude. Of course, the closer "Abandoned Malls", dedicated to his late friend, is enough on its own to outclass (almost) all the competition: a flawless mechanism of tension and release, nostalgia and despair, joining the long list of gifts the pair have already given to the genre's history.

Through this return to the past, Aesop Rock seeks his own way out of despair and crisis, a science that helps him gather the fragments of a life and reassemble them into forms that are new yet also familiar. Much like the rest of humanity in 2021, really.

Aesop Rock's third life: tentacular capitalism, cosmic supermarkets and a new bitterness.

That way out is also sought, and partly pursued, on the following Integrated Tech Solutions (2023), a loose, perhaps overly loose, concept album telling the story of a sprawling, tentacular corporation that promises to improve the lives of its customers and the whole world through a string of innovations as bombastic as they are hollow and dangerous.

The slang of the most insidious, consumerist end of business, with all its values and principles, seeps in here and there across a series of tales poised between satire and reflection, shaping the most distinctly narrative album of his career, one in which the rapper's linguistic flair is put to the service of tracks that come across as accessible while still retaining a good dose of creativity. The concept loses some focus along the way on Integrated Tech Solutions, but the album, helped along by production that balances vintage and futuristic textures, still shapes up as an in-depth exploration of both self and the present day, as well as another chapter in a mature phase of his career that, having moved past the theatrics of his first four albums, feels increasingly at ease with broad, multifaceted storytelling. Once again, far removed from any trend.

Inspiration is still thriving on Black Hole Superette (2025) too, a collection that explores the boundaries between dream and reality, the lived and the imagined. Listen closely and the use of '80s- and '90s-flavoured sounds in the production also pushes the listener to probe the line between present and past, in a spiral of references that, musically, nods to arcade video games as well as to other albums in his catalogue. There's no clear dividing line between memory, dream and perception, because Aesop Rock leads us once again through his trademark syntactic maze, where everything becomes a story - or rather, 18 different stories across 68 minutes in total.

The many collaborators (Lupe Fiasco, Armand Hammer, Hanni El Khatib, Open Mike Eagle and Homeboy Sandman) are nonetheless supporting players on Black Hole Superette, since Aesop Rock has stamped it throughout with his own style, both in the production and in the rhymes. As already noted on the preceding Integrated Tech Solutions, it's this remarkable balance between complexity and fun, between brain and body, that makes this stretch of his career so particularly versatile.

This time a supermarket, or rather a superette, is the setting for stories as creative as ever, telling of a humanity in crisis, victim of a system in irreversible decline. It's another top-tier album, one that won't surprise anyone already familiar with his work, but which earns its place among the finest episodes of a career now past the quarter-century mark. It proves, or rather confirms, that hip-hop can go well beyond cliché, and can even tell the story of Elizabeth, the little hamster who marked the rapper's childhood, the star of the closing "Unbelievable Shenanigans".

Soon after, also in 2025, he releases I Heard It's A Mess There Too, which marks a decisive shift from his recent output: production entirely self-handled and far more minimal, shorter lyrics, and an intimate mood, more restless and melancholy, that leaves to one side some of the more ironic, colourful sides of his ever-shifting language.

The phrase that gives the album its title is the perfect distillation of this new sensibility, set within an imagined dialogue: it conveys empathy and a shared sense of others' struggles, something that resonates with us and binds us together. Flickers of unease run through the beats, hinting at a tension that at times verges on the stuff of a thriller.

The twelve tracks on the tracklist offer the usual carousel of more or less evocative images, but the syntactic and lexical gymnastics never quite take center stage the way they have in the past.

Just months after his tenth album, I Heard It’s A Mess There Too shows Aesop Rock's creativity from a new angle, pairing his ever-incredible verbal skill with a more melancholic, resigned, pessimistic worldview. It's a top-tier encore at a point in his career when most of his peers are burnt out. He, on the other hand, doesn't overhaul his sound but keeps adapting it to different needs as they arise. There's always a desperate need for albums and rappers like this.