Pitchfork

Photo by Chrissy Piper

Musically, Aesop Rock's last four years have included shows, an EP, a book, and one of those Nike exercise mixes. What they haven't included is a full-length album. But the MC will fill the LP-shaped void in his recent past with the release of his fourth album, None Shall Pass, via Def Jux on August 28. He spoke to Pitchfork about the album earlier this week, and during the course of the conversation, he revealed insights about the writing and recording processes, his (and Def Jux's) history, and his friendship with Mountain Goats songwriter John Darnielle, who provided a seemingly unlikely guest appearance on None Shall Pass.

Pitchfork: What's the idea behind the album's title?

Aesop Rock: Well, I turned 30 this year, and I did a bunch of shit there that was more adult-y than things that I've ever done before, so it settled into my head that once you hit an age-- I guess I'll throw 30 out there, around then-- is sort of a time when you become ultimately responsible for your actions. And I guess None Shall Pass is saying nobody is going to get past this mid-point in their life without being looked at or judged in a certain way by their peers and their contemporaries.

Pitchfork: How did the John Darnielle collaboration on the record come about?

AR: I think it was like 1994. My older brother was in college, and I went to college and he was like, "Hey check this band, the Mountain Goats, out," and I heard a bunch of Mountain Goats stuff starting in '94. I was kind of an über-fan for many years, and sometime after Bazooka Tooth came out, I was randomly reading a Mountain Goats interview and he had put Bazooka Tooth on an end-of-year list. And I was just floored, because I was a super-fan, and I was like, "Holy shit! He's a fan!" And I had seen him do shows for years and years and years, and then finally I was at a Mountain Goats show in New York, and I was like, "Should I be that fucking asshole who's just like, 'Hey, I'm fuckin' Aesop'?" But I did, and I was like, "Hey man, I think you know my stuff," and then he was like "Shit yeah," or whatever, so we got to know each other. That was at some show in New York three or four years ago, I guess 2003 that was, and we've been pretty good friends since.

That guy is one of the better lyricists of our generation. One time we were in Brooklyn when he performed, and after the show we were going to do something, so he actually recorded some other stuff at my house that's not getting used. [Because] I don't know how to figure out how to collab with someone who's not rapping [laughs], he just recorded a straight-up acoustic song at the house. And I was like, "Well, it's a good song, maybe I'll fuck with it and tweak it and turn it into a beat and rhyme on it," but it never ended up panning out. So eventually I was recording songs for the album, and I just sent him an mp3 of a demo, and I was like, "Hey can you sing anything on this? Would this be up your alley?" And he did a pretty damn good job.

Pitchfork: So the song that ended up on the album is essentially a rap song, and he gave it the equivalent of an r&b singer treatment?

AR: Well, he doesn't do the hook [laughs]. He's got a verse. It's not like a rap verse or anything, but he sings a verse on the song.

Pitchfork: Was it weird to be a fan of his for so long and then to meet him and become friends?

AR: Yeah, it's completely weird. This is a guy who, out of everybody in the world, was on my real top list of people that just flat-out impressed me, and so, yeah, when I found out that he liked my stuff I was going crazy. It was definitely a bit of a dream come true. And then when he actually did the singing and recorded and I got to hear it, it was better than I had hoped. I think it came out sick, I can't even lie. I kept rewinding his verse for a long time.

Pitchfork: When you guys first met, was he in awe of you at all, or did he play it cool?

AR: Oh we probably had a bit of a mutual fan-out, but he's been putting out music since way before I was putting out music, and I feel like I'm probably a bigger fan of him than he is of me [laughs]. But that being said, he definitely knows my stuff, and he likes it. At this point, it's turned into a friendship, but one of those friendships where he'll sing on a song, and I'll be reminded, "Oh yeah, you're this guy, and you're really talented on top of everything." There are probably more collaborations to come, too. We've just got to figure out a way not to make it too Judgment Night-y. That was our biggest worry.

Pitchfork: Was it weird getting back into the frame of mind of recording an album?

AR: Not really, because I've been steadily recording since Bazooka Tooth. I just didn't get a chance to do an LP. It's funny, when I did Fast Cars and it ended up being eight songs long I thought, "Man I'm a fucking asshole, I should have just put two more songs on it and called it an album. Wham!'s first album was eight songs, why can't this be an album?" I'm a real big fan of the idea of the EP. I think the EP is an overlooked goldmine that people don't take advantage of, because it's got such a different feel than an album and there are different things you can do with it. I'll probably continue to do the whole "album, then EP, then album, then EP" [thing].

Pitchfork: Was there a specific song you recorded for None Shall Pass that first made you realize the shape it would take?

AR: I wouldn't even say it's my favorite song on the album, but I like it. There's a song called "Catacomb Kids". It was a little bit reflective-ish. It had less of a vibe of "I'm talking at you" and a little more of a story, a little bit of scenery, and a little bit of "this is a specific time period that I'm describing right now." When I did that, I was like, "This is where I want to be. This fits into my idea of this sort of reflecting, without making it cliché 'back in the day' type shit." I really wanted to take portions of life and paint a scene or setting that makes you feel "Ah, this feels like junior high school, or being a kid, or some shit," but without being like, "Hey, I remember when I wore the K-Swiss and..." That's just not my thing.

Pitchfork: Do you notice that you're drawn to certain kinds of images and stories more than others? Do you have to avoid using any images over and over again?

AR: Sometimes. I mean, rap is so bad with that. It really falls into a trap of making these kind of "Ah, back in the day" songs, and they can be cool, but they're just tiring. There's a song [on None Shall Pass] called "39 Thieves", and it's kind of about-- I'm from Long Island, and it's the suburbs. And when you're from the suburbs, you hang out in parking lots a lot. And then I moved to the city, and people were just in awe that I grew up hanging out in parking lots, because it's kind of stupid. But there were all these parking lots that we hung out in every night [laughs], probably because I skateboarded a lot too. But it was like "Well, which parking lot are we going to go to tonight?" And you kind of just stand there and don't do shit or cause trouble and do what you do, and then you go home-- It's kind of trying to capture weird things like that. That's what I think about when I remember high school: I know I skateboarded a lot, and most of the time I was in some weird grocery store parking lot or something like that. It seems like a mundane thing, but at the same time it stood out as special. I hung out in parking lots. For like, years and years and years. So there's got to be a song in there somewhere.

Pitchfork: Are there any songs or records that provided good examples of that kind of storytelling for you?

AR: Yeah, there are, but these days, it's like, I've listened to rap so much that occasionally it gets difficult to get inspired by it. I was always a Tom Waits fan. He does that really, really well. He does pretty much everything really well. But he's a guy who can spit four sentences, and you're at that place, at that time, seeing what he's seeing. And all it takes is just one or two really descriptive lyrics that have a detail that you might not have thought about, but once he says it, it's just there. I guess it's a really visual style of writing, that's what I always refer to it as. I'd like it to be tangible examples of a time period, something that someone can grab onto and be like, "Oh yeah, that's fucking weird," that stirs up a feeling. John Darnielle does that really well, to be honest. A lot of the De La Soul stuff, especially the earlier stuff, is very visual. That's why you hear people my age talking about, "Oh rap ain't the same anymore." Rap used to be like that. It used to be [that] a vibe and a visual came along with the group. Like X-Clan or BDP, there's an entire visual element of those groups. There's a whole vibe and a picture and setting and a whole time period that goes along with them, and I think that happens less now, so I guess that's my crotchety old man answer.

Pitchfork: Since the picture book/7" collaboration you did with Jeremy Fish was about writer's block, I'd be interested in knowing your personal writer's block cures. Are you even more knowledgeable about the writing process now than when you first started writing and recording?

AR: I think I'm probably more picky now than I ever was. I'm very selective about words. The thing about the whole Jeremy-and-me thing, we kind of had this cure for writer's block that doesn't really end up working, [which] is the whole point. Because you can always be like, "Oh I figured it out! I just have to do this!" and that might work one time, but it's not going to work again, so it was this funny thing that I tried one time and it worked and then it never worked again. Just two days ago, I was actually kicking shit around my house because I was like "I'll never rap again! I can't figure anything out!" and then last night I had a super productive night.

I try and be really open, and I write down shit all day when I hear it. I do it in my phone when I'm out, and I do it on a pen and pad at home. I just have this list of phrases and words and things that I hear across the course of the day. If someone in the store says something to me, and I'm like, "That's a fucking weird sentence, man, nobody says that," I'll just write it down. So I end up with a bunch of cool shit, but then it comes to the point of piecing it all together and I sit in front of 10 or 15 pretty cool sentence fragments with nothing to glue them together, and it feels like you're never going to be able to do it again. And then sometimes you just get a line and it works, and the next thing you know you're eight lines later, and you're like, "Holy shit."

Pitchfork: Is producing different for you? What's that process like?

AR: It went from like, make a beat in a sitting, write a rhyme in a sitting, record the whole thing-- that was how I used to do stuff when I was young, and then over the course of 15 years, it turned into this process where I have all these sentence fragments, and then I have some drums that I like with one sound on them or something, and I'll be like, "This is a good writing beat." It may not be a beat that's going to end up on an album, but you can make something that has a good head-nod to it [that] helps you to write. So I'll work a little on a beat, work a little on some lyrics, try to piece things together, and once I see where I'm going with the lyrics, I'll add to the beat. And they both get built at the same time these days. Even if Blockhead is doing the beats, he'll give me a beat with a bunch of different elements to it, and we'll kind of lay it out. I'll write the rhymes and [tweak] the song over the course of a few days or a few weeks. I've done songs that I come back to a year later, so it's really just this "chip away, chip away" kind of thing.

Pitchfork: What was the process of making the Nike mix like?

AR: I thought the idea was cool, and I liked the idea of making this thing that is supposed to serve this purpose that I'm not even that familiar with. That was really interesting to me, but I'll be honest: those dudes called me and said, "Do you want to do this?" and I said, "Yeah, I'm into it. When do you need it?" And they were like, "Well, we need them to be mastered in 35 days from today." And I was like, "You want me to fucking-- I gotta make over a minute of music a day." During that time period, I was not fun to be around. It was stressful as hell. I was waking up and playing bass all day and just recording a bunch of shit. My girl would get home from work, and I'd tell her, "Play the guitar, dammit!" and make her record a bunch of shit. And I would chop it up all night and wake up and do the same thing. I didn't have the time to do this whole process where I chip away at things a lot, but it was kind of cool because it was almost like, "Well, I lay down what I lay down, and I'll give myself 24 hours to change it, and if I don't change it then I've got to move on because I've got so much to do." There are still parts of it that I cringe at a little, but then you wait 30 seconds and it's gone and the next part's good.

Pitchfork: So you played live on a lot of it?

AR: Yeah, it's almost sample-free. There are a few samples in there that are really tweaked to the point that they don't sound anything like they did, but for the most part it's either keyboards or bass and guitars.

Pitchfork: Have you thought about playing instruments live?

AR: I have, but I feel like, at this point, if I walked out on stage with a bass-- bass is what I can play better than anything else-- I'd get laughed at or something. I started playing bass in seventh grade and I can play decently enough, but I haven't played live in front of people in as long as I can remember, probably [at] some junior high party.

Pitchfork: Were you in bands then?

AR: Yeah, we had a rap band, and my brother had a band that already had a bass player, and I was just like, "I'm going to join it!" It was great to have two bass players, completely unnecessarily. We had a thousand and one shitty bands. To call them "bands" is like a sin against the word "band."

Pitchfork: Does your brother like the stuff you do now?

AR: [He] literally just, maybe an hour ago, listened to my new record for the first time, and he was like "This is the best shit you've done!" I'm super psyched right now, because I hold him in high regard. I'm pretty genuinely excited.

Pitchfork: It seems like Def Jux is having a renaissance lately, especially with El-P's album getting such good reviews. Do you feel like the label still represents a cohesive movement at all? How do you feel about the whole underground/mainstream divide now?

AR: You know, when Def Jux started up, it was 2000 I guess, and it was near the end of the Fondle 'Em Records era, and Rawkus, when that whole first wave of underground was really coming to an end. Between Stones Throw, Quannum-- a couple of labels were doing similar things [to us] around the same time in their respective parts of the country. I think Def Jux was always a pretty good piece of the pie that was this movement or new era of independent record labels, and since then, it's all running together. Even huge dudes, major label guys, are starting indie labels. It seems like the whole world is shifting that way to a degree, and everyone just makes enough money that they can start their own label and do it that way.

Def Jux has always been pretty-- it's hard to say because I've been there from the beginning, so I don't want to [just] toot the horn of Def Jux. But I think lately, once the initial couple of years of "we're here, we're independent, and we're doing our own shit. Fuck all of you"-- once that faded and we were already in the pool, everyone seemed to retreat to their own caves and emerge recently with new records. Everyone is still friends and all that, but it seemed like once the initial blast came, everyone was like, "All right, what's next?" and we all have been hiding to a degree, ready to come out. I guess El is the one who set that off with all the good response to his record, and I've heard some of the new Cage stuff and it's just crazy.

It seems like everyone's really settling into who they are and what they want to do, and it's really diversifying the sound a little more, whereas people used to refer to that quote unquote "Def Jux sound". I always thought it was a wider sound than people gave it credit for. That being said, these days it's wider than it ever was, and I think it just keeps going in different directions.

It's hard because Def Jux or me or a couple people that are in and around what I do were all critical darlings to some degree in 2000, 2001. Those were the years when this whole new era of indie rap was spawning. Everyone was psyched, and it was like nobody could do any wrong. And once that blows over, people start getting critical, obviously. You just buckle down and do what you've got to do and hope that people will see it for what it is. Hopefully, at the end of the day, I've got a bunch of records that sound a little different from each other, and hopefully they're all a little bit progressive and stand for something. Hopefully, history will be kind to the label and think that it was a cool thing.