AESOP ROCK - Black Hole Superette

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?

The latest album by Aesop Rock, “Black Hole Superette”, explores the boundaries between dream and reality, the lived and the imagined. Listen closely and the use of 80s and 90s-style sounds in the production also pushes the listener to question the line between present and past, in a spiral of references that, in the production, evoke arcade video games as well as other albums in his career. There's no clear dividing line between memory, dream and perception, because Aesop Rock leads us through his trademark syntactical labyrinth, where everything becomes a story – or rather 18 different stories across a total of 68 minutes.

The many collaborators (Lupe Fiasco, Armand Hammer, Hanni El Khatib, Open Mike Eagle and Homeboy Sandman) are nonetheless supporting players on “Black Hole Superette”, because Aesop Rock has infused the production and the rhymes with his own stamp. As already noted on the previous “Integrated Tech Solutions” (2023), it's an admirable balance between complexity and fun, between brain and body, that makes this stretch of his career so versatile. This time a supermarket, or rather a superette, is the setting for his usual creative storytelling, tales of a humanity in crisis, victim of an irreversibly declining system.

It's a journey that sinks into the sludge of terminal capitalism, but following a logic very different from Billy Woods' “Golliwog” or the cyber fantasy of Clipping. More colorful and more surreal, it's a triumph of creative storytelling.

From the sinking floor and bleeding walls of opener “Secret Knock”, through the sun that seems ready to wink at any moment at the paranoid protagonist of “Checkers”, we arrive at the mutt that is five dogs in one, described in “Movie Night”, a fun track that hides yet another display of his living-dictionary vocabulary. Elsewhere the rap turns into pure dreamlike narration, as on “So Be It”, or a kind of Kafkaesque vignette in the case of “Send Help”, if not a surreal story about an artist, a generic “John Something”, who turns out to be a vintage-boxing enthusiast.

Then again, Aesop Rock can rap about anything, always finding fresh narrative trajectories and language: he observes the magic of nature on “Bird School”, about the migration of Vaux's swift, and dreams up a hilarious weird little tale on “Snail Zero”, about the out-of-control multiplication of… a snail.

The carousel of cultural references, more or less pop, and musical ones, from boom bap to jazz-rap by way of vapor nostalgia and synthwave nods, as well as winks at sci-fi cinema, is a show within the show.

“Black Hole Superette” is yet another top-tier album from Aesop Rock, one that won't surprise anyone already familiar with him but that can be added to the best entries of a career that's now gone past the quarter-century mark. It proves, or rather confirms, that with hip-hop you can go well beyond cliché and even tell the story of Elizabeth, the little hamster who marked the rapper's childhood, the star of closer “Unbelievable Shenanigans”. There's always a desperate need for albums and rappers like this.

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19/06/2025