Aesop RockNone Shall Pass | Definitive Jux August 28,
2007 5:55:53 PM
|
“It’s rain of the razor laser/Day of the cloudy howdy/Flight of the shelter melter/You can bow without me.” Sometimes I don’t have one goddamn clue what misanthropic underground hip-hop king Aesop Rock is talking about. But most of the time I want to rewind and figure it out: “There is a hole in front of the shovel/A shovel in front of the brawn/Six million guerrillas for whom the graves yawn.” It’s a sardonic, cynical brand of conscience rap, where all that’s left is to realize that capitalism is everywhere and you’re screwed. Aesop’s preference for boring “live” beats tends to hit somewhere between the Roots (“Getaway Car”) and Linkin Park (“None Shall Pass”), but that hardly matters: it’s his delivery that commands the attention here. The man bends his intonation like an ax slayer in a blues band, and he sounds as if he were eating his rhymes even as he spits them out. Bloggers have been signaling approval for Mountain Goats’ John Darnielle’s phoned-in cameo on “Coffee.” Makes perfect sense.
|
|
|
- John Hodgman holds forth on eels, mole men, and Macs
- R.E.M.’s ‘back-to-basics’ disguise
- Never mind its tough-girl alt-porn feminism: SuicideGirls has already moved on to a new generation
- Some Things at Trinity
- A do-gooder who recorded abusive Boston police officers was himself arrested under a controversial ‘wiretapping’ law
- A musical battle of the sexes
|
-
Black Habit | Paw Tracks
-
The bassline house invasion
-
Free at Last | Roc-a-Fella
-
Digital Shades, Vol. 1 | Mute
-
Widow City | Thrill Jockey
-
An antidote to intelligence and insight
-
An uncool conventional film
-
An art film about family
-
High on Fire, Middle East Downstairs, October 11, 2007
-
One of the year's best movies
|
- Shout! Factory
- Good Time | Arista
- Beyond Even (1992-2006) | Opal
- Til the Wheels Fall Off | No Idea
- Trilla | Def Jam
- Dive Deep | Ultra
- Cornerstone revives Neil Simon’s Biloxi Blues
- The proto-man comes home on Plague of the Planet
- Crossing Lines | Mu
- Bully
|
|