Aesop Rock, King Poetic?

Hip-hop savant Aesop Rock claims to have “never wrote or read poetry that much” while growing up. You’d never know it from “The Living Human Curiousity Sideshow,” an 87-page booklet distributed with his recent EP “Fast Cars, Danger, Fire and Knives,” compiling all of the acclaimed underground rapper’s (neé Ian Bavitz) lyrics since his 1999 album, “Float.”

Aesop’s gravel-voiced verses abound with extended metaphors, complex rhyme schemes, and passages that just plain don’t make sense, leading critic after critic to bring “the poetry question” forward in discussion of his artistic output.

Aesop contends that calling rap a “poem on a beat ... is pretty valid,” and that the many parallels between the two forms are “not a coincidence.” But he also stresses that “overinterpretation happens a lot” when critics try to analyze his convoluted flow, probably because his work is “not as linear” as their preconceptions of rap allow. “You get used to it,” he sighs, with the seemingly unperturbed air of the superscrutinized artist.

While his ambivalence is probably genuine, it’s unclear if an art form has ever expressed as burning a desire to be taken seriously as contemporary underground hip-hop. “The Living Human Curiousity Sideshow” forms part of a larger trend of MCs including unpunctuated, vaguely cummings-esque lyrics in photocopy-chic booklets.

Spoken word posterboy Saul Williams has published three volumes of poetry, when not inviting “99 Problems” producer Rick Rubin to lay the beats down on his hip-hop records. DJ Spooky, a Bowdoin graduate with a double major in French and philosophy, who performed at Sanders Theatre in March, weaves webs of aural, visual, and textual references ranging from Derrida to De La Soul.

This discourse between hip-hop and academia is starting to flow both ways. Courses like Literature and Arts A-86, “American Protest Literature from Tom Paine to Tupac” pack lecture halls at Harvard. After reading Aesop’s lyric “the villain of my Kabuki hologram cuz I hobble with hollow hands” (from the titular track of 1999’s “Float”), an enthusiastic Professor of English and American Literature and Language Gordon L. Teskey felt compelled to mention that “a good deal of English verse of the sixteenth century, before the emergence of iambic pentameter in the theatre, sounded like that: longer lines, lots of alliteration, a basically oral style sometimes called “tumbling measure.”

Not to be interpretatively outdone, John P. Marquand Professor of English Peter Sacks noted in an email that “there’s clearly an impressive and exuberant sensibility at work in the texture, verbal energy” in the lyrics to “Float.” He particularly admired Aesop’s impressive “range of allusion,” with its “blend of desperation and exhilaration, free play and constrained need—e.g., to float rather than drown.”

Tumbling measure? Free play and constrained need? Has Aesop penetrated the formidable defenses of the ivory tower out of a conscious effort to write “poetically”?

When pressed for musical and lyrical influences, Aesop doesn’t spout off references to Yeats or Ashbery, but instead constructs a veritable Who’s Who of classic rap lyricists, including Slick Rick, Ghostface Killah, and his mentor El-P. Instead of spending hours on end fine-tuning his rhyme scheme to match some stifled polyameter, Aesop’s main concern has always been to find “something I can work with, [...] then to assemble it over a beat.”

FABLED LYRICISTS

Complete poetic abstraction is still somewhat of a rarity in the hip-hop world, perhaps because only a few of the rappers working at these boundaries of lyrical representation have been able to achieve some modicum of national visibility. Some stars of this subset include much of the roster of Aesop’s home label Definitive Jux (Cannibal Ox, El-P, Mr. Lif), shapeshifting scene veteran Daniel Dumile (MF Doom to most), and Anticon Records’ obscurantist crew (Sole, Dose One, Sage Francis).

Also, reports of the Benz/backpack dichotomy between mainstream and underground rap that Kanye West claims to have transcended seem to have been greatly exaggerated. Hip-hop legends like Wu-Tang Clan, Rakim, Nas and Notorious B.I.G. have been weaving abstract rhymes into their oeuvres for years (albeit less pretentiously), along with left-field heroes like De La Soul, 3rd Bass and the Native Tongues Posse (Q-Tip’s nickname is even “the Abstract”).

Lyrical gems like Nas’ 1994 assertion that “sleep is the cousin of death” provide ample evidence for Teskey’s claim that “if you read some of Finnegans Wake...you’ll see some remarkable similarities to rap lyrics.”

Aesop grants that the vast majority of rap these days, regardless of its visceral appeal, is still lyrically a “glorified way of saying ‘bitches ain’t shit.’” Battle raps and posse tracks often serve to pad out “albums” lacking any unified theme, even in the “underground” scene in which he operates. An inextricable part of Aesop’s appeal is the relative lack of such pseudo-macho posturing in his work; in his own words, he doesn’t want to spend his “15 minutes of fame shitting on someone.”

But just as turn-of-the-century realist social literature had its Joyces and Faulkners to smash the illusion of representation with their shapeshifting prose, and the fiery politicized strains of the Dead Kennedys’ “Fresh Fruit for Rotting

Vegetables” stirred up righteous anger only to be subsumed a few years later by the art-punk Dadaisms of Wire’s “Chairs Missing,” underground hip hop today is on the verge of a revolution in subject matter, form and overarching aesthetics.

While figurative lyrical flourishes were once treated as mere embellishments on relatively representational rhymes with concrete subjects, today’s avant-garde rappers approach abstraction for its own sake. When Mr. Lif and Insight, two Boston rappers still on the fringe of broad recognition, collaborated on the track “Iron Helix” on Lif’s “I, Phantom” concept album, they didn’t trade spars about each other’s virility or compare bling quotients.

Instead, the pair engages in a dialectical debate about the perils of modernity, focused through an eerily post-colonial conversation in which Lif subtly enslaves Insight with the allure of modern techno-commerce. Does pegging them “conscious rappers” do justice to the scope of their creative project, as much an experiment in form as a social critique?

SAVE YOURSELF

Aesop’s seemingly facile dodging of the “But is it poetry?” question strikes at the arbitrary nature of this balkanization of artistic expression, an othering which manifests itself across many cultural boundaries. In an example of Aesop’s, a punk kid in D.C. and a weekend free-styler in the Bronx both lack “money, [and] don’t have a singing voice.”

But what their music lacked in classically-trained polish, it “made up with twice the heart,” and the young Aesop eagerly devoured diverse mix-tapes given to him by his older brother, regardless of the ostensible categorization of the artists included.

To call KRS-One less “punk” than Jello Biafra is to treat musical genres as purely formal in nature, characterized by instrumentation, song structure and other easily sortable attributes. But such structuralist definitions ignore the unique aesthetic of the artist’s act of creation; their motivation does not intuit such boundaries.

Aesop stresses the importance of the creative method in his own work, as an assembly of “little phrases or sentences,” lyrical fragments typed into cell phones or scrawled onto scrap paper, “metaphors without links.”

During this process, he becomes equal parts writer and musician, all shades of categorization afterward inevitably falling prey to crude underlying cultural assumptions and models, both about poetry and rap. Aesop acknowledges that “some people like my shit, some don’t,” but refuses to get sucked into marketing himself as an “intellectual rapper.”

At this point, it seems as though conscious appeals to the academic merit of his work aren’t even needed. Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory Jorie Graham was so inspired by Aesop’s lyrics that she assigned one of her poetry classes to bring in samples of rap lyrics for analysis.

The first thing Teskey mentioned in his analysis of “Float,” before any mention of media theory or tumbling measure, was a simple and immutably subjective judgment: “I like it.” As the academy warms up to the rigorous analysis of hip-hop, it is finally beginning to appreciate Aesop’s dedication to “spittin’ the illest shit,” whether he likes it or not.

—Staff writer Will B. Payne can be reached at payne@fas.harvard.edu