The 15 Best Aesop Rock Songs

Album: Bazooka Tooth
Year: 2003

In truth, "We're Famous" might be a bit of an odd song to include on a "Best of Aesop Rock" list, since it's largely a showcase for Def Jux mastermind El-P. In Aesop's catalog, however, it stands out as rather undeniable, a disdainful victory lap at the apex of Def Jux's creative and commercial powers, the leader and the loyal soldier summarily dismissing competition perceived and real. Aesop celebrates his then boss and colleague, drops a few clever lines ("the revolution will not be apologized for") and plays solid clean up to El-P's waste-laying opening four-minute verse. Brutal and effective.

Album: Fast Cars, Danger, Fire and Knives EP
Year: 2005

As Aesop piles on years of experience, his self-produced songs get more intricate and better developed, but on 2005's Fast Cars, Danger, Fire, and Knives EP, he had one of his most badass productions. With a rock edge, a robotic touch, and a fucking porn sample, "Food, Clothes, Medicine" was so engaging that Dog The Bounty Hunter even chose to use it on the show. And then Aesop called Dog a racist asshole. But that's a different story for a different time.

Album: Bazooka Tooth
Year: 2003

As Aesop got deeper into his Def Jux era, he often tapped his childhood as a source of inspiration. On "The Greatest Pac-Man Victory In History," he explores one terrifyingly magical, eye-opening summer spent experimenting with LSD for the first time. Aesop's syllable-packed abstraction presents the perfect prism for psychedelic awakenings and the confusion, exciting, and seeming enlightenment that accompany such a mind-bending new experience.

Album: Labor Days
Year: 2001

Aesop Rock lyrics leave a lot to the imagination. Most of the best lyrics do. It means that a lot of the time, you probably have no idea what Aesop Rock means, but as you listen more and more, you pick up little pieces, and even if you don't know what he means, the songs take on a meaning that becomes important to you. This song hypnotizes like a snake charmer, and after a few listens those words start to settle and take on meaning. This one struck a particularly powerful chord with me. That line, "There's smoke in my iris, but I painted a sunny day on the insides of my eyelids" struck a particular chord with me. Years later I started a website. Look at the subtitle.

Album: Float
Year: 2000

Aesop Rock's best chorus ever? Maybe. The imagery that Aesop brings to life is worlds away from what other rappers are capable of, what other rappers try to do, or what is relevant in the worlds that other rappers live in. Aesop Rock is in his own world, and he always has been, and he—hopefully—always will be.

No more pencils, no more books

I built the city out one brick

I had a mayor and a crook

I made the crook stab the mayor then slay himself in the guilt

I stole the brick back and migrated east, now, let's build

Album: None Shall Pass
Year: 2007

None Shall Pass marked one of the biggest shifts in Aesop Rock's career. It was four years after Bazooka Tooth, and things started to feel more urgent, even without that big industrial Def Jux vibe. Although he tapped longtime collaborator from his early days, Blockhead, for production on this one, it's unlike anything from his Float and Labor Days efforts. Instead, "None Shall Pass" drives forward with head down, like a paranoid version of the Aesop Rock that is now detached from that mutated, post boom-bap underground hero of his first few albums.

Album: Music For Earthworms
Year: 1998

In 1998, Aesop released his first album, Music for Earthworms, a CD-r only release later to be liberated by tools like KaZaa and Limewire. Raw and often far harder to access than some of Aesop's later work, Music coheres in moments like the gleefully bizarre "Shere Khan," where listeners can glimpse the crude materials of the rapper's fully formed style to come, tangling impossible words and syllables with a surprisingly languid flow. It's a sort of ground zero for the style that would prove divisive, galvanizing fierce loyalty and fiery disapproval alike.

Album: Appleseed EP

Year: 1999

You can't forget about Appleseed. Even for its re-release, only 1,000 copies were made, but there were some gems on there that would have fit in perfectly on his next two albums. Out of the eight tracks, this was the only one produced by the always reliable Blockhead, and it's no surprise that it's the standout. Over a piano-driven beat that uses percussion and strings you don't hear in hip-hop too often, Aesop weaves his frantic delivery through relaxed soundscapes, but what steals the show is the chorus, which has the rapper using just a touch of melody to separate hook from verse perfectly.

Album: Labor Days
Year: 2001

Unlike most of his  busy, chaotic, and wandering output, "Labor" is strikingly concentrated. Attacking a concept over sparse production, this is Aesop at his most venomous. For Aesop, that still means dense and lyrically abstract, but the tone he takes on this one is possibly his most ignited.

Album: Daylight EP

Year: 2002

Dark and abstract as Aesop gets, "Alchemy" is the emcee at his best (or worst, depending on how you feel about his style). Spilling jagged syllable brambles across Blueprint's darkly cosmic keys, Aesop delivers a textbook performance, running through his typically unusual imagery, delving into personal history, and hurling otherworldly battle rhymes in ever direction. Threatening, bleak, and intense as any song in Aesop's catalog, "Alchemy" is the sort of barometer that separates the die-hards from the passing listeners.

Album: Labor Days
Year: 2001

While Aesop's entire Labor Days album deals at length with its namesake theme of labor, few handle the topic with the delicacy and poignancy of "9-5ers Anthem." Grabbing a twinkling, bouncy Blockhead beat, Aesop serves up the sort tangled insight only he could seemingly access, spouting pointed observation ("damn get these men some water/They're out there being slaughtered/In meaningless wars so you don't have to bother/And can sit and soak the idiotbox trying to fuck their daughters") and weary wisdom ("I tend to underestimate my average/Just another bastard savage"). Building to its tragi-comic ending--a rapped interpolation of Dolly Parton's "9 to 5"--"9-5ers Anthem" illustrates Aesop's ability to couch poignant thought under the surface of his dense wordplay.

Album: None Shall Pass
Year: 2007

For "Coffee," Aesop Rock enlisted The Mountain Goats' John Darnielle for a collaboration. The rapper and singer were mutual fans, but when John recorded some stuff for Aesop while in Brooklyn, the rapper realized that he didn't know what to do with it. Over a year later, they decided to try again. "At some point when I was working on my latest album, I sent him a track and told him to do whatever he wants with it," Aesop explained to Pitchfork. "I mean, we had nothing to lose and wanted to collaborate. So he added some stuff to my work and here we are." Instead of singer jumping in on the chorus like most simple-minded rapper/singer collabs, John tacks on an excellent, nasally verse that explodes at the end and turns what would be a really good song into an excellent song.

Album: Labor Days
Year: 2001

Perhaps the most lucid, straightforward song of Aesop's career, "No Regrets" is a narrative pure and plain. Aesop tells the story of Lucy, a girl single-mindedly dedicated to drawing, in three parts, the first verse dedicated to her youth discovering art, the second detailing her awakening as an adult artist, and the third her death: Alone, surrounded by her paintings, exiting the world having committed herself entirely to her craft. It is a surprisingly romantic vision from a frequent pessimist, a call to follow dreams and, in so doing, find fulfillment.

Album: Float
Year: 2000

I remember the first time I heard this song. It was the first Aesop Rock song I ever heard. It built like a series of what-the-fuck moments that I'll never forget. First, that bass. I'm in. Then the hi-hats come in like tsh, tsh, tsh, tsh-tsh-tsh, tsh-tsh-tsh, tsh-tsh-tsh. Yes. The voice comes in. I'm thinking, "????" What is this? Who is this? What's happening? It was like nothing I'd ever heard. Before I can even get over what this man is doing, that violin comes in. Still not getting it. Then the rapid-fire chorus. It's over. It took me 10 listens in a row to wrap my head around what was going on, and by the 10th listen it was my favorite new song.

Album: Labor Days
Year: 2001

There are certain moods that aren't easy to capture in a hip-hop song. It's easy to make a song to ride to, a song to smoke to, or a song to nod your head to while you throw your hands in the air like you just don't care. There are thousands of songs for those situations. There are very few songs that capture things like nostalgia, melancholy, or that bittersweet feeling when you're looking at a sunrise and feeling overwhelmed by something much, much bigger than you. Aesop Rock's "Daylight" captures a mood that is complicated and impossible to put your finger on, and it's ironic because despite his verses packed with complicated imagery, metaphors, and wordplay, it's that simple chorus that cuts deepest: "All I ever wanted was to pick apart the day/Put the pieces back together my way."