Rakim once famously said he thinks of 16-bar verses as a grid and measures out exactly how many syllables can fit neatly within it. If this is true, then Aesop Rock’s grid must look like the cascading sea of glyphs from The *Matrix. *He has a wickedly extensive vocabulary, once deemed by a study to be the largest in rap, and he uses it to warp time and disrupt balance with phonetic pairings that sprout out unpredictably, an idea best articulated on the Busdriver collaboration "Ego Death": "I am ivy up the goddamn lattice/March to the math rock."
On "Rings," the single from his latest album *The Impossible Kid *and his second on indie rap mainstay Rhymesayers Entertainment, he eulogizes the visual art career he abandoned. "I left some years, a deer in the light/I left some will to spirit away/I let my fears materialize/I let my skills deteriorate," he raps, splitting all of the syllables on the back end. But he still is a visual artist in his way, coiling carefully articulated sentences into diagrams, each syllable a pixel in the frame of an image. He sketches in vibrant detail on Impossible Kid, balancing heavy verbiage with sharp clarity. This is what it sounds like when rap’s greatest wordsmith only uses the ones that count.
It's also the most specific Aesop Rock has ever been about what he’s thinking or feeling, and it borders at times on confessional. "Question: If I died in my apartment like a rat in a cage/Would the neighbors smell the corpse before the cat ate my face?/I used to floss the albatross like Daddy Kane with the chain/I’m trying to jettison the ballast with the hazardous waste," he asks on "Dorks." That doesn’t mean he’s making it easy; his yarns are still sometimes purposefully written like a puzzle with half the pieces missing. But the album loosely outlines the series of events and strained relationships that led him to abandon San Francisco for the seclusion of a cabin in the woods.
"Get Out of the Car" is a poignant reflection on loss and grief that points to the death of close friend and rapper Camu Tao as the starting point for much of his anguish. "Ah watch the impossible kid, everything that he touch turns promptly to shit/If I zoom on out I can finally admit, it’s all been a blur since ‘Mu got sick," he raps before diving down a rabbit hole of depression, explaining his withdrawal in expertly articulated tidbits and snapshots ("Into the woods go his alien tongue/It was that or a textbook faking of funk, and I can’t"). Then there’s "Blood Sandwich," which casts his brothers in starring roles in two memorable vignettes: In the first, his younger brother plays in a Little League game interrupted by a wayward gopher, a rodent that suffers a bloody end at the hands of the enraged coach. The second is a remembrance of his older brother's teen angst at being denied the opportunity to go to a Ministry show, resulting in a suicide threat. Later on, he studies the actions of his cat on "Kirby" before psychoanalyzing their relationship and society’s larger relationship with the felines as a whole, which have been everything from gods to memes. Each one of these songs constructs little worlds out of simple ideas using dexterous lyricism.
But The Impossible Kid is measured by more than its virtuosity. The soundbeds of dizzying synth abstractions, ominous piano crawls, and slow-strutting garage rock samples, all provided by Aesop Rock himself, are monuments to his growing skills as a producer. He is as detail-oriented with his beats as he is with his raps, providing the right mood at every occasion. Some of them are busy and swarming, while others are pleasantly simple, like "Lotta Years," giving Aesop the room to set up dialogue. Then there are beats that are simply hard-hitting, like "Rabies" and "Water Tower," with slapping drums that seem traditional until they stagger. These all supplement his writing, which is as crisp and as fluid as it has ever been, bending breakbeats to the whims of his strung-out cadences. Aesop Rock has yet to run out of words. After nearly 20-years in the rap game, he is still finding new means of self-expression.
