The Man Behind the Metaphors: Aesop Rock’s “The Impossible Kid”
When Aesop Rock released the Impossible Kid in 2016, I had no idea who he was. I didn’t really know any contemporary rappers, for that matter. Instead, I sported 90s hip-hop T-shirts and watched YouTube videos about the four elements of hip-hop. I still have archives of CDs stowed away — Biggie, Nas, Common — the real heroes of a snobby revivalist. I particularly loved the bombastic Wu-Tang Clan, with their grimy brand of organized chaos. After listening to Liquid Swords, I thought I was the dopest kid in the eighth grade. GZA really was a genius. Just look at the size of his vocabulary on this list of the wordiest rappers! As any boom-bap punk with half-decent sense knew, vocab was synonymous with quality. Alas, GZA stood as the rapper with the SECOND largest arsenal of words. Aesop Rock claimed the top spot, dwarfing the GZA by 966 words. With that many words at his disposal, he must’ve been a legend. I couldn’t truly be a retro backpacker unless I added him to my nascent “conscious hip-hop” playlist.
So I skimmed through his top two songs on Spotify at the time—”None Shall Pass” and “Preservation”— and I didn’t understand a word. Not only was his vernacular too mammoth for a pin-headed dweeb like myself to digest, but the exaggerated delivery of his bars and the off-kilter beats didn’t resemble the slick slang and the simple samples I cherished. Aesop Rock truly matched his reputation as a linguistic deity, and his impenetrability only made lil 8th-grade me realize how little I knew.
My formal entry into Aesop Rock’s discography was his new project, Garbology. Recorded entirely during the pandemic, he connects with long-time collaborator Blockhead for a futuristic rap renaissance. He fuses sharp-one liners and hard-hitting beats driven by 90s-style drum patterns, offering a fairly formulaic entry into his catalog. Flashes of brilliance pepper the project (the line “drive till it feels like a Van Gogh” has haunted me for the past month). However, his vernacular was as dense as I remembered, often to the degree of overindulgence. At certain points, I felt as if Aesop Rock leaned on his vocabulary as a crutch, disguising simple meaning with metaphors to feign complexity rather than to write impactful lyrics. The most insufferable lines on Garbology appear on the song “All the Smartest People,” in which he rambles about metaphysics and enlightenment. It almost seems as if his obsession with his own myth prompts him to be even more abstruse. Surely there must be some traces of coherency in his oeuvre. Might Aesop Rock always exist on a pedestal, his words ever-impossible for me to appreciate? I combed through his albums, finally bringing me to the subject of this review, The Impossible Kid.
While Aesop Rock is typically known for a dizzying intellect and grand concepts, his talent truly shines through when he clarifies his material and tackles the mundane. Whereas much of his work induces a “what the fuck is he talking about” response from the listener, many of these songs boast comprehensible subjects. Ranging from conversations with his therapist to his cat, “Kirby,” Aesop Rock becomes a poet of the banal. Extracting allegories out of the humdrum, he preserves meaning while allowing his gargantuan vocabulary and his technical abilities as a rapper to shine.
Loquacious as ever, Aesop Rock over-enunciates every single word, making it easy to Google all of his obscure references. And still, even with his perfect pronunciation, he manages to string together dizzying whirlpools of rhymes like it’s nothing. On top of all that, he can sustain a narrative. In “Rings,” he memorializes his past ambitions as a visual artist. He recalls “movin' his arm in a fusion of man-made tools and a muse from beyond / Even if it went beautifully wrong / It was tangible truth for a youth who refused to belong.” Stacking internal rhymes over an incredibly precise flow, he illustrates the effect of artistic empowerment on him as a child. He expounds on the process of producing art and its relationship to his rebellious streak, demonstrating his knack for concise self-analysis! Another prime example is the song “Shrunk,” in which he describes sitting in a waiting room for therapy: “You pack up all your manias, you're sitting in the waiting room / You're dreaming of arcadia, you're feeling like a baby tooth / Awaiting panacea, channeling your inner Beowulf / In purgatory, just before you pay up to filet yourself.” The fusillade of triple-syllabic rhymes isn’t just there for show — it accents a feast of metaphors. Never one to neglect meaning, Aesop Rock’s heavy use of metaphors reveals even more about his psychology given the setting of the verse. Perhaps the metaphors shield his true feelings, acting as his armor of abstraction. Given that the images pull the listener out of the scene for the sake of comparison, he may be suggesting that he’s afraid to candidly express himself to his therapist.
This is not to say that virtuosity is the only thing that Aesop Rock’s got going from him. With intelligible lyrics, his songs pack more of an emotional punch than ever before. In the track “Blood Sandwich,” he remembers two distinct anecdotes, each focusing on one of his brothers. The primary message is seen on the chorus: “Just in case of rough waters / I wanna put one up for my brothers.” This simple assertion of affection resonates more than the esoteric jargon of his earlier projects ever could. But good on him for never veering into the overly sentimental, even on “Get Out the Car,” an emotional tribute to his deceased friend, Camu Tao. Rapping over some guitar chords and a minimal bassline, Aesop Rock unpacks the spiral of depression he experienced after the death of Camu Tao. He highlights his stagnation, claiming “you can own what you are and still sit around stoned in your car / Not doing shit, halfway to nil” before encouraging himself to “get out the car, Aes.” This final line is nothing more than a pep talk, yet it’s quite heartbreaking. The absence of any obfuscating literary devices emphasizes his raw emotion.
And as a bonus, the dude is quite funny! Aesop Rock revels in self-deprecation, spinning his pain into jokes. “Lotta Years” finds him bemoaning his age. He recounts an experience in a juice shop in which he overheard a girl describing how she cut off her locks and could reattach them whenever. His immediate reaction: “My mind's fucking blown / The future is amazing, I feel so fucking old / I bet you clone your pets and ride a hoverboard to work.” His unusually forthright declaration of shock defies his reputation as an overly cryptic lyricist. The humor stems from Aesop Rock’s subversion of his own myth. Stripping away metaphors for direct honesty, he removes himself from the pedestal and makes himself relatable. This seems like the whole point, as evidenced by the song “Dorks,” a breakdown of the relationship between the music industry and the consumers. The line, “It's odd to see a pile of imperfections and flaws / Ascend a pedestal to patronize the rest of the cogs'' diagnoses the problem with the deification of artists. In the Impossible Kid, he avoids self-glorification by making himself relatable.
Of course, none of these lyrics would matter at all if the beats weren’t banging. Conceived by Aesop Rock himself, the instrumentals suit his abrasive delivery. The sonic palette seems to have been wrenched from the dredges of the dark web, with warbling synths and dusty drums booming through the project. The music never turns stale thanks to the dynamic developments of the instruments. Instead of traditionally redundant four bar loops, every song features some musical buildup of some sort. I also want to take a moment to acknowledge the brilliance of “Kirby.” Who else but Aesop Rock would think that squelching basslines would mesh in such beautiful symbiosis with bars about a cat?
The Impossible Kid proves that Aesop Rock is more impactful when he simplifies his lyrics, spelling out his subjects. Of course, this wouldn’t be an Aesop Rock album if it didn’t feature some cryptic cuts. Songs such as “TUFF” and “Molecules” are much less approachable than the tracks mentioned above. Symbols abound, and the copious amount of seemingly disconnected images makes it much more difficult to tease out meaning. However, the transparency of much of The Impossible Kid emboldened me to peer into the depths of the rest. From the beginning, Aesop Rock’s allure arose from my initial failures to understand his lyrics. After tasting his brilliance, I had to dive deeper.
Edited by Tatiana Jackson-Saitz, editor of Reviews
Cover art by Julia Fennell