Cool, Dope, Excellent

I adore Jewish rapper Aesop Rock‘s free-associative babble, and his new album Skelethon is excellent, so I was delighted to interview him for Rolling Stone:

Your lyrics are often abstract and verbally dense. Are there limits to how far you’re willing to take that?
To me, it seems more realistic to my thought process when things feel a little scattered in the lyrics. Being disjointed is not that abstract of a thing when I think about how my brain works – I feel like it’s almost more realistic. That’s how my brain works. I have a mission for the day, and I try and complete it, but my brain kind of pinballs around. I think it’s more abstract, in a way, to go out of your way to put all that into some order.

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Aesop Rock

Aesop Rock Long Island’s finest verbal nerd helps the fantastic McCarren Park Pool Parties wind down. Sadly, I only made it out there this once.

“This is one of the best days of my career right here,” Aesop says as the turntable belts start to cool. Musicians are generally full of shit, and usually they’re lying when they say things like that in Cleveland, but here I’m inclined to buy it: I can’t remember the last time I was at a show that transcended its circumstances like this.

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