Aesop Rock

I had done a benefit for McSweeney’s that was a children’s creative writing fund and workshop here in San Francisco. I was a fan and I just walked in and said, “I want to do a benefit show for you.” So we did that and then I let it be known that I was down to get involved in whatever they wanted to do. At the time they were just starting that Wolphin series which is their new DVD magazine of short films.

Yeah, when I walked in that’s the first thing I saw. I walked in and this guy was like, “Look at this weird Dennis Hopper thing!” I was down with it. Basically one of the guys that runs McSweeney’s was like, “Well, my donation is this movie called ‘Walleyball’. We just got back from filming at the border.” He showed it to me and I go, “This is fucking nuts.” He explained to me that technically when you hit the volleyball over the [California/Mexico border] fence you’re importing and exporting goods illegally from Mexico. I thought it was so great. He was like, “Would you like to do some music? You would have to do it by tomorrow.” It was very quick and I said, “Yeah, I can whip up some volleyball playing music if you want.”

I just wanted to be a part of it. I tired to make something that sounds like goofy volleyball music.

A little beach-y.

Right! I felt like if I did goofy volleyball music it would weirdly compliment that.

I’ve aligned myself with independent labels and it’s allowed me to do whatever I want basically. Which is this gift and curse because on one hand it’s awesome; it’s kind of like what everyone wants. On the other hand, if you run out of ideas you don’t have anyone to blame beside yourself. Occasionally I’ll get these side gigs, like the Nike project or the stuff I’ve done with Jeremy Fish; they come to me with an idea and it’s basically more of an assignment. Like, “Can you pull this off with this little? We have a starting point; the starting point is this fisherman.” Usually I’m into it as long as they’re not steering my hand all the way through. I liked Nike’s idea of, “Hey, can you do music for athletes to train to?” I sit here and go, “Well that’s the weirdest thing anyone’s asked me to do.”

To a degree it’s refreshing for someone in my position to get a little bit of direction. Sometimes when I’m working on Aesop Rock material, if I have writer’s block I’m like, “Fuck.” You know, it’s all on my shoulders and if I don’t come up with something soon then everyone’s looking at me. Whereas [with Nike and McSweeney’s] if they have an idea it takes away some of the hard part and it turns it more into this puzzle that you have to figure out. Like, “Yeah, I can do this volleyball music.”

It’s a series they’re doing now but they had only done two --one with LCD Soundsystem -- up until they asked me. The basic idea was 45 minutes of continuous music. They wanted mostly instrumental stuff.

Yeah [laughs]. It would have been fun to do that.

No. But luckily my wife is. She was very much a lab rat during the whole process. Any project that comes to me that’s odd or that I don’t understand why I’m being asked to do it, I’ll usually do.

Exactly.

So far, so good. I’m swamped but it’s better to be busy than bored. I’ve got two videos that are both started but not finished. We finally finished booking the tour. I’ve got more going on now than ever before which is good but it all hinges on whether or not people like the record. It’s all up in the air. Right now I have more little groups of people that I’m working with at one time than I’ve ever had. It’s nerve racking because I’m a bit of a control freak and I like to oversee everything. I have this chip on my shoulder where I need to be in charge. I have to figure out a way to trust. I know I drive everyone I work with completely crazy. I run myself ragged a lot and then I’ll be like, “Well, you know, I’ve got to loosen up because I’m going to make enemies this way.” Especially this time around, just because there are so many little projects going at once, I think I have to take some Valium or something.

[Laughs]

Well, it’s hard to say because a lot of hip-hop does sound more like machismo and acrobatics and, to a degree, there’s nothing wrong with it. That kind of competitiveness gets people involved and increases skills at writing faster but that being said, there comes a point where you just say, “Okay, I can’t do this anymore.” There are only so many albums where I can talk about me and be braggadocios. There comes a time when you just need to talk about something else or you need to just take all these things you’ve learned and go in a new direction. A lot of people have a hard time digesting that. It’s weird because I get all these labels of being sort of “out there” or being left field.

Yeah, yeah. It’s just so easy to be left field in rap because it’s such a small box. There’s not very many people doing something that’s hot. Everyone keeps doing a slight variation of the same thing and it’s been like that for 30 years. At some point, whether you’re going to get criticized or not, you’ve got to do something or it just gets boring. So at the risk of getting a bunch of hate, I just take things into my own hands and try something different. Whether or not it fails is up in the air but I just can’t talk about myself anymore. The way that hip-hop has grown, it’s done the opposite of what a lot of genres have done. As it ages, it gets more refined and what you’re “allowed to do” gets to be less and less. Whereas other genres kind of can…

Yeah. Rap music gets criticized a lot for doing anything that’s against the grain or out of the mold a little bit. Like I said, it doesn’t take much to go out of the mold because rap is so self-conscious and everyone’s so aware of what the definition of hip-hop is and whether or not what you’re doing is okay within the genre. It’s stupid and there are definitely a lot of people that are pretty close-minded and consciously sort of trying to hold back what should be a natural evolution. It turns into what we have now, which is a bunch of people doing second and third rate versions of stuff that already existed 10 or 15 years ago. It’s just laziness.

When I wrap a record, over the course of making these random songs something will click and you make a discovery and you’re like, “This is the first stepping stone into what I do next.” It’s hard to put into words but there’s definitely a different overall sound. I want to be talking at people less and I want to be talking with people more. I’d rather be engaging. I want people to be pulled into a record rather than be sort of preached at or talked at. Those were conscious things that I wanted to do. I don’t know if being on the West coast changed it as much as the fact that I was out of New York. I’m not out and about as much in this city. I’m in my comfort zone in New York. I’d been there so long so moving and pulling myself out of that was a pretty major thing for me.

Almost two years -- a little over a year and a half. Being out of my comfort zone was something I was scared of forever. Then once I did it I was like, “Ah, this is actually kind of more comfortable in a way.” I don’t know that many people here and I kind of like that. I don’t have as many distractions.

Exactly, I can just kind of get lost. I have to MapQuest going to the grocery store.

Yeah, it’s fun. It’s sort of this strange land. Everything I feared almost turned out to be refreshing. I still have a bit of an East Coat mind state and I still struggle. The whole idea was to come out here for a while and then move back to New York with my wife at some point. That’s still the plan but for now I’m just on this extended field trip. There’s a lot of art and culture in San Francisco specifically. I’m just sort of walking around in a foreign place every day. It’s cool but everything I’ve known and learned is from the perspective and attitude that comes from New York and Long Island. When you’re in New York you’ve got this “I’m never going to leave” attitude. It’s comfortable and you think, “This is it for me. I’m here and I’m going to put my flag here.” Then something happens and you either build up the courage to leave or because of whatever turn of events, you get out of New York. Now I almost understand New York more because I’m looking at it from the outside. When I do ultimately return there it’ll almost be more meaningful. Now I know what it’s like to be elsewhere. I’ve traveled so much -- I’ve been around the world but I’m never in any one place for more than one night. So this is sort of kind of interesting.

Yeah, you feel this sort of kinship with your home territory. But then there are also people who are constantly on the move. I think there’s something wrong with those kinds of people.

Yeah. People that can’t stay planted for more than a few months, they’re definitely running. It takes a special person to live like that; usually they end up being tour managers or something. They’re a special breed. Someone that can stay on the couch for a couple weeks and then pick up and go on tour and the day after that tour ends get a job on another tour. It’s the weirdest job to ever have probably.

No, it’s kind of something you fall into. I know a guy who’s been saying, “This will be my last tour,” for the last three years.

Yeah. When I moved out here I was a fan of him but I didn’t know he was a fan of me. We have a friend in common and basically he got in touch with me because he got the opportunity to pitch a cartoon to Disney and he said, “Hey, do you want to do some music for this if it ever were to go through?” I was like, “Fuck yeah, that sounds crazy.” I was like, “And by the way I’m moving to San Francisco next week. So why don’t we meet up?” So, long story short, the cartoon bounced around in TV land for a while. The pitch still exists but we’ve since moved on. In the meantime we became really good friends. He’s one of the only people I actually know and have become close to since I moved out here. It just became really natural for us to work together regardless. So the first thing we did was that book and record, which is similar to those old Disney books and records that used to come out where you sort of played the record and turned pages along with the record. I was interested in trying to think of different ways to bring visual arts and music together more often. It’s kind of a crime how little it happens these days.

Uh-uh.

Right, right. I’ll check it out. That was interesting, what you just mentioned. With Jeremy’s stuff and my stuff, we both work in this little world of trying to mix cute and evil together. I’m trying to describe this evil situation using fluffy terminology or I’m trying to describe a fluffy situation getting kind of evil or pornographic. And Jeremy’s signature is this skulls-and-bunnies thing where it’s fluffy meets evil. I tend to be attracted to that stuff. It’s finding good in every amount of evil and finding a little evil in all the good, and describing any situation like that.

It’s a similar process. I only like to collaborate with people that I’m comfortable with and share a similar vision [artistically] or have a friendship. Someone like Jeremy I just knew would work because I felt his stuff looked like a visual representation of what some of my music felt like. He agreed with that so it worked out. Musically I’ve somehow aligned myself with people I was a fan of before I knew them. When it comes to a lot of my friends, I’m just fans of their music anyway so it’s easier to trust these people. I have a hard time trusting. The people I trust most are the artists that I collaborate with where I can say, “I need you to do this with me. I need it to be kind of like this but I want you to put your spin on it and I need it by this day.” I trust that they’ll pull it off. I guess the whole idea with collaboration is that you give the other person some leeway.

Yeah, that was a bad era for me.

Yeah, I don’t know. Everyone is different. Some people can go through every day with a robotic shield up and some are more affected. It’s hard to say, but that [documentary] was a testament to a way more turbulent time with what stuff was going on for me. I was very uncomfortable with the fact that my music was making noise. I had achieved this slight degree of success and I didn’t know what to do with it.

Yeah. I just didn’t know what to do. I’m not good at receiving that kind of attention. What I do is always kind of based in the art side of things. You know, I went to school for painting…

Yeah. The fact that I was making music in this indie way was very much based on the fact that I didn’t want to talk to anybody. I like to create shit -- I like to stay up at night and create things and make something out of nothing so that when I wake up I have something to show for yesterday. That was how I always did everything. But then, before you know it, someone takes notice and it’s cool, but then more people notice. It’s a little weird because before you know it, it’s really strange and you don’t know how to react. Because you’re like, “This is just what I do.” I still have those ups and downs all the time. I guess I’m just predisposed to being that kind of person.

But I’m more grounded right now than I’ve ever been. Probably my marriage has something to do with it. That combined with cutting certain things out of my life that were negatively affecting me -- trying to grow up a little and realize that I’ve got to be accountable for my actions and in doing that, I have to focus on certain things and make some decisions. You don’t want to grow up but once you do it you realize that your life gets a lot easier. I became a little more focused on what I needed to do. I’m still uncomfortable with the publicity aspect of all this but I like to make music so I can try to find some sort of balance.

Yeah, totally. I don’t think that’s going to happen, but yes, I would, in a second, step back. I’ve already almost stepped back a few times. Some days it’s almost not worth it to go through the industry side when all I want to do is make some jams. I always tell this to my girl too, I’m just like, “Look, there’s going to be a day where I’m just going to snap and be like fuck all this shit and I’m going to get a job at Starbucks up the street.”

Thank you. There are times where I’m like, “You know what; the stress that I’m experiencing right now is quite simply not worth it.” But somehow I get talked through it all the time; I have people around me that are like, “Hey, don’t worry man. It’s going to be fine. You’re making a good record.” I’ve got this little cheerleader squad that helps me out. I’m not going to lose friends or relationships over this shit. I’m not going to fucking deal with people critiquing my lifestyle.

If it ever delves too deep into that territory, it kind of loses its fun and I’m more than happy to just step out of it. Either that or I’ll just release all my music for free.

There you go…I think you’re onto something [laughs].

For more information and tour dates, go to www.myspace.com/aesoprockwins or www.definitivejux.net.