There's a peace you need to make with yourself as you get older. A lot of the bands you grew up listening to are going to break up; if they don't break up, they're going to stay together and start to suck. Same goes for solo artists, same goes for rappers and rap groups.
I'm 43, so at time of publishing I'm right in the midst of this process. Many of my favourite bands from when I was a kid are gone, whether because they split up, retired or, in a significant number of cases, had lead singers kill themselves after long and torturous battles with addiction.
There are precious few exceptions to this. And fair enough! I started properly listening to music in the late 80's, which was over 35 years ago. I wouldn't wish that kind of job longevity on anyone unless they absolutely wanted to rock and roll for as long as their legs could carry them.
Those few who remain are, almost universally, Very Bad. I don't know why Wu-Tang keep soldiering on, surely they've done everything they set out to do and made every dollar they needed to make. Josh Homme is the dictionary definition of tired. Even Clutch, a band I once thought immortal, are stuck in a creative--if also enjoyable, good for them!--rut.
Of everyone I started listening to while still at college or younger, I can only think of a single guy who is still doing it, album after album, year after year. And that guy is Aesop Rock. Now somehow 47 years old (everyone you watch get over 40 in real-time is "somehow" that age), Aesop just released his tenth solo LP--Integrated Tech Solutions--in a career that has now spanned four decades, countless collabs and one dude with a very similar name.
Every single one of those albums has crushed it. Some are better than others, sure, but every single one of them shines as an example of some of the most iconic rap (and production) of the era in which it was released.
The key to his longevity, I think, has been his honesty. There's a tendency in hip-hop for older artists to try a little too hard to hold back the hands of time. It's a genre born of youth, associated so often with youthful energy and endeavours, defined by fashion and language that serve at the vanguard of popular culture, so much so that most times I see a mid-life rapper clinging to relevance with their fingertips, all I can think of is:
Aesop Rock doesn't give a shit. He's ageing into his role as a hip-hop elder statesman with alarming ease. This is a guy whose trademark used to be a staccato flow that would assault you, overwhelming you not just with his oddly poetic prose, but the speed and creativity with which he'd hurl it at you.
That's how I remember his first decade of work: a man who somehow mastered both quality and quantity in his rhymes. And had that been the last of him, that would have been fine! It's 2023 and his production on 1998's “Odessa” still haunts me, while 2001's “No Regrets” tells a whole life story in a way TV and Hollywood writers must look at and be like "wow".
As the years moved on, though, so too did Aesop. Every album or two you'd notice a change in his cadence, a switch in style to slowly and subtly keep everything moving. Pitchfork's review of his latest album is actually a pretty good summary of the last ten years of Aesop Rock's career:
Aesop Rock still raps in lurching torrents of interlocking syllables and layered rhymes, but his delivery has grown more rhythmic and laid back, more conversational than combative. His production has come a long way, too; what was once functional scaffolding has become a pillar of his music
This is a guy I started listening to as a 19-year-old college student, and he was not much older than me at the time, both of us as full of rage at the world--and energy to meet it--as you could possibly have. By the time 2016's Impossible Kid landed, though, we were both older. Much older. I was 36, a father of two. I owned a house, I had a career, I had in most ways relaxed. Got a little tired. And here came Aesop with “Lotta Years”:
My mind's fucking blown
The future is amazing, I feel so fucking old
I bet you clone your pets and ride a hover-board to work
I used a folding map to find the juice place in the first
These kids are running wild, I'm still recovering from church
You should have seen me in the nineties, I could ollie up a curb
You should have seen me in the eighties
I was bumping New Edition, dragging acne into Hades
Lotta years
Naw mean?
Lotta years
Younger readers, do you know how funny it is to have rap tracks relate to your specific ageing process? It is very funny. And also weirdly reassuring. This process continued, as we both grew older still, when he dedicates a whole track on 2020's masterful Spirit World Field Guide to...having a bad back:
Bad back, bad back, bad back
One half zig while the other half zag
Stand too long and the whole sit hunch
Sit too long and I can't stand up
Gramps out for a Sunday drive
A man is betrayed by his lumbar spine
Who pull up to the spot like, "I'll meet y'all inside
I need like five"
Tracks like this could, for someone who cared more about a load of bullshit, be seen as a sign of vulnerability. For Aesop Rock they're just an honest confrontation with the most inevitable thing on Earth: we are all growing older, every second of every day, and as we do, there are things--like our bodies, sure, but also our perspectives--that are changing, sometimes breaking down, sometimes getting a little wiser.
There's nothing wrong with being honest about that! Indeed, as Aesop's last three albums--which are probably his best, and definitely his most consistent--show, they can bizarrely contribute to keeping you fresh and on top of your game. A 47 year-old man forcing out slang meant for people half his age is slightly embarrassing. A 47 year-old man at peace with his place in the world can be a very good story-teller.
And what a story-teller he is. Of all Aesop Rock's shifts and changes as he's developed his sound, it's the way he's now more "conversational than combative" that I think I like best. “On Failure” is basically an intimate little conversation about the fate of Vincent Van Gogh, and what it means to be an artistic success. On 100 Feet Tall he recounts--as though it was yesterday--meeting Mr. T at a sandwich place ("Mr. T is fucking real??!!") in the 80's. And on “Pigeonometry” he sums up a freelancer's regret so vividly it makes me slightly sick every time I listen to it:
I told my homie I had drew some pigeons
And was feeling like it could be the root of future submissions
It'd be cool to draw a thousand and layout a book of sketches
He said "how many you got?" I said "like 6 or 7"...
'What?!' He said "a thousand is a lot"
I said "that's why it's gotta be an actual thousand on the dot
I hit 'em with that thousand to make up for what they not
Once you mix that many bodies it becomes about the flock."
He told me "if you do it, its a cruise to manufacture"
I took it as a challenge, but regretted it soon after
See the point was always celebrate the individual vessel
That I pitched a package deal at all is pretty disrespectful
Plus a thousand is a lot
Sometimes I get excited before really sizing up the job
I think I drew like one more on a red-eye into Queens
I ain't even make a dozen, I been eyeing other things
I could have recommended you Integrated Tech Solutions for any number of reasons; it fucking rules, Aesop's production has matured to the point where on many tracks it's actually the main event, the whole ITS concept is something fans of games like Portal and Control could instantly relate to.
The thing that sticks out to me the most, though, is how much the album says about time. In literal ways--it includes a track called “Time Moves Differently Here”--but also how it continues Aesop Rock's journey of growing into his career instead of raging against it.
On the subject of time, let's close out with the album's standout track, “Mindful Solutionism,” which is again about time, only in this case about the relentless advance of human technology, for better and worse. I like to think of it as "We Didn't Start The Fire, Only Good":
