Aesop Rock – The Impossible Kid

 
Aesop Rock – The Impossible Kid Cover.jpeg
 

How do people deal with being alone with their thoughts all the time? The ordinary ones and the intrusive ones? The ones that border on mania and the ones that border on despondency, plus the average everyday observations about mynas and cats and the world order and such?

How do people deal with aloneness? This is a city filled with the lonely people sitting indoors, looking out at streets lined with pubs made for smiling instacouples. Every city is a city unwilling to acknowledge that its primary inhabitants are the lonely. It’s like Aesop Rock asks in Dorks, the lead single off of the Impossible Kid, ‘if I died in my apartment like a rat in a cage, will the neighbours smell the corpse before the cat eats my face?’ Morbid. Maybe unnecessarily so? But is it really a far-off concern for the average inhabitant of the average post-industrial city? The average major city in the developed – and soon, the upper reaches of the developing – world is a collection of the overworked and the lonely slouching over empty tables in tubelit rooms – away from the city’s promenades, velodromes, and highly-rated-on-TripAdvisor nightlife.

Few albums encapsulate the crystallising of an all-encompassing existential crisis as well as the Impossible Kid does. It’s helped, of course, by Aesop Rock’s incredibly layered and wordy storytelling. This is often the one facet of Aesop Rock’s music for which he receives outsized praise. Take for example, another standout track, Lotta Years.

The girl that work down at the local juice place
Got a head full of dreadlocks down to her waist
I watched her add the spinach to the ginger to the grapes
My hair was underwhelming, my juice was fucking great

Some lady orders Maca, compliments the locks
She asked how many years it took the girl to grow the crop
It took a lot of years and then eventually I cut 'em, kept 'em
Reattach 'em anytime I want 'em

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

But a lot of credit must also go to the album’s alt-rock-infused studio instrumentation and the production by Aesop Rock and Slug. On each of the album’s fifteen tracks, this combination of intelligent storytelling, unique instrumentation, and tight production details the rapper’s interactions with loneliness, anxiety, loss, and aging – the same old big existential questions. But with his craft honed and perfected over two-and-a-half decades, Aesop Rock delivers a masterclass in how to talk about these things without things getting too out of hand.

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