Testing? One, Two...

Today’s review cover’s Aesop Rock’s None Shall Pass. It’s a tricky one- Ace Rock requires the wit of Conan O’Brien, the vocabulary of Toni Morrison, and a peculiar fixation on death, drugs, and the nerd culture of the 80’s and early 90’s to truly appreciate, which makes it difficult to believe he’s got an audience at all. The only people that fit that description would be me and maybe some hipster kids at NYU.

This is my favorite CD of the Ace Rock collection, for a couple of reasons. Over half the songs have both an engine and a steering wheel- there’s energy and drive and push that doesn’t fall into the typical Ace Rock mental masturbation trap like he's taking your brain and rubbing it erogenously between two pads of firm tofu until you drip milky lymph in forced satisfaction. ‘Keep off the lawn’, ‘Catacomb Kids’, and ‘Citronella’ have a pounding and unforgiving baseline that push the song until its caustic conclusion. They end with a punch, too, unlike the current practice of alerting the audience the song is over by abruptly shutting your mouth and letting the instrumental hang out on the corner smoking a cigarette alone for a couple of bars before it too disappears from the scene and heads inside for a couple of beers.

However, despite it’s hooves, stirrups, and curiously heavy testicles made out of fuzzy dice, this horse-drawn stagecoach suffers from the same problem Aesop intentionally loads into all his mind-splooging work; sure it sounds good, but what the fuck does it mean? Take this excerpt from ‘Citronella’, for instance:

No harps, no delusions of losing with something prettier
Than ash around the metacarpal still clutching the teddy bears
But we can run with scissors through the city fair
Or situate the nuzzle with the subtle art of splitting hairs!

Hands down, it sounds badass. Badder than baddass. Like, ‘badass’ affixed with twelve extra S’s. But while I can find nouns, verbs, and objects, I’m still looking for the cohesive thought I was taught back in grammar school flits in between the words of every sentence not penned by Faulkner or Joyce.

What highlights his incredibly simultaneously confusing and yet almost maddeningly-near-enlightening work is that the few moments of lucidity are almost embarrassingly cogent. ‘The Harbor is Yours’ involves nautical jargon alongside a modern fable that marries the fantastical with gritty realism (This dude either got two glass eyes or he’s wearing his patch on the wrong side!). ‘Fumes’ made me stop in my tracks once I realized he was telling a story in a language that wasn’t lost when the tower of Babylon fell. His punch lines are taut, the suspense is delicately built and no conclusions are drawn on behalf of the listener. Ace condenses an O’Henry novel into 32 lines. For that, he deserves the five dollars it would have cost me to get my middle-school homeboy to burn it for me way back when.

I really, really want to hate on Ace because he talks so much, so well, with so many adjectives, and yet remains so incredibly difficult to understand. But judging from his vague digressions into a more plebian mode of storytelling (THIS happened, and then THIS happened, and then THIS happened), I’m guessing this aspect of his style is more feature than bug. Go figure.

What I do hate are his music videos. Both ‘None Shall Pass’ and 'Coffee’ entail badass, new-wave digital shooting techniques that have more in common with Tool’s cinematography than the rest of the hip-hop genre.

That’s not nearly as wonderful as it sounds.

Though novel and different, they don’t hold your attention, don’t elucidate the song’s arc, and often confuse the listener. Because I saw the videos before I listened to the songs by themselves, I skipped over both songs in rotation until I couldn't anymore. It was great afterwards. The video just ruined it for me.

My official ranking of this album is that of crunchy peanut-butter mixed with honey, oats, and sweet cream. Listen too much and you’ll go blind and lose a leg from diabeetus, thus preventing you from doing more than drag your flat, useless carcass towards the sound and smell of day old road kill for sustenance. And yet, it’s a delightfully homey snack nonetheless. Pick up the CD, and learn a couple phrases – use them to impress hot chicks with fiery hair and mean tattoos that only go home with a particular clan of hipsters. Convince her you’re from another tribe, whose music is far superior to anything she’s ever heard precisely because she’s never heard it.

Wait for it.

Wait for it.

BOOM! Make out.