Your humble reviewer is not hugely invested in the state or the fate of hip-hop. A lot of folks are, though, sometimes to an unfortunate extent—hip-hop spends almost as much time drawing lines and fighting over its own image as the punk and hardcore zines do, albeit more entertainingly. One of the results of this is that a whole lot of hip-hop records are basically about hip-hop: The mainstream stuff (aka “real” hip-hop) offers up further meta-explorations of a few MC-persona archetypes, while the undie stuff (aka “real” hip-hop) dedicates itself to the Ancient Skillz of crate-digging, battle rhyming, and either picking on the mainstream or spitting abstract jumbles of wordplay. The former is how we get stuff like P. Diddy saying, “I don’t write rhymes, I write checks”; the latter is how we get stuff like the Anti-Pop Consortium, who sound godlike in ten second snippets but prove mind-numbingly tedious by 15.
Aesop Rock is one of those MCs who have stumbled upon a blindingly intelligent solution to this state of affairs: He’s ignored all of that baggage and made a record that’s mostly about something. That something is work. Labor—effort in its broadest sense—is a topic he treats sometimes pedantically but often more thought-provokingly than not only the bulk of hip-hop, but the bulk of any genre. It helps that Labor Days is as terrific a record as anyone could ask for, really, and you should buy it, and here’s why.
First: Aesop Rock is a terrific MC. His flow is rapid but clear; his interjections, double-time verses, and sing-song bits are arranged with near-symphonic skill. He’s also calm and confident, avoiding both the egomaniacal swagger of a lot of mainstream and the egomaniacal jerkiness of a lot of underground, while nicking their finer points as well. Better than that: Aesop Rock’s flow is brilliant, a combination of mind-bending wordplay (“Who am I?” he asks, then answers: “Jabberwocky Superfly!”), in-rhymed poetics (“You won’t be laughing when the buzzards drag your brother’s flags to rags”), and surgically sharp, eye-rolling dismissals of anyone he disapproves of: “If you had one more eye you’d be a cyclops,” runs one, “which may explain your missing the premise.” Aesop Rock says more astoundingly intelligent things per minute than the entire combined rosters of a lot of other labels.
Second: Blockhead, who produces much of this record, does an equally terrific job. Labor Days is bound for constant comparisons to Cannibal Ox’s The Cold Vein, the other Def Jux Edgy Intelligent NYC MCs with Stark Progressive Beats record to crop up on 2001’s year-end lists. And, while the comparisons are valid ones, lyrically and often sonically, Labor Days differs by trading in The Cold Vein’s minimalist grind for an equally minimal but remarkably lush, cinematic spread of subtly weaving beats and sinuous, somber, minor-key instrumental arrangements that sound as if someone has been doing his crate-digging in the klezmer, bouzouki, and koto piles of the “World Classical” section.
“Daylight,” the record’s initial standout, works from a long, plush melodic loop with a wood flute sighing over it. (There are a lot of woody flutes on this record—enough to make you wonder if Blockhead wouldn’t have done a better job than RZA on the Ghost Dog soundtrack.) Meanwhile, “Save Yourself,” the record’s real standout, consists of a slow-motion lope constructed from staccato bass blips, an east-Mediterranean guitar pluck, and wispy female cooing. “Battery” stretches the limits of hip-hop pastoralism with a bass-and-cello figure and more of those fluttering coos with Ace intoning, “Brother sun, sister moon, mother beautiful,” and, “I painted a sunny day on the insides of my eyelids.”
If most hip-hop chases a futuristic, brightly lit city vitality, Labor Days is laid out peacefully on a rainy plain somewhere. And, if The Cold Vein sounds like the grind of inscrutable machinery, Labor Days waits a couple hundred years for those machines to be covered with moss and vines. When it all comes together, on “9-5ers Anthem”—a track which pairs a sprightly bassline with handbells (handbells!) with Ace in top form, spitting out brilliant parallel metaphors for quotidian employment—it seems so all-consumingly right: hip-hop bouncing confidently along, actually saying something about something, and saying it well and smartly.
Aesop Rock does have a message here, which you’d expect to be a bad thing but isn’t, really, insofar as the message is a pretty reasonable one. Ace’s message is that life can be hard but that’s all the more reason to shut your mouth and work on something that makes you happy. Essentially. Labor Days gets cartoonish only once, on “No Regrets,” which is still a decent and sensitive track but which we won’t really get into here because on the other hand, it’s the inherent pragmatism of Ace’s theme that allows for his wonderfully apologetic complaints about 9-5 employment. Not to mention all those glorious eye-rolling disses: “Keep me posted,” he says, “as to when you grasp something mature to sit and soak about, Mister, and I’ll consider picking up your record.”
That last line’s from “Save Yourself,” which collects Ace’s comments on the How We Do Hip-Hop question—he’s undie, of course, here with his sonically progressive Def Jux release, so clearly he’s going to drop some invective on this Important Issue. His take, though? Forget it: “Maybe you ought to try saving something other than hip-hop,” insightful advice no matter what genre you insert at the end. “Pistons pump perfect,” he says, then, “what you’re holding ain’t really broken.” And for the duration of Labor Days, it’s pretty clear that in the hands of someone with something to use it for, it’s not, not at all.
