Aesop Rock just dropped a new effort, Spirit World Field Guide, and it is the best album he has ever made. If you’re looking for an entry point to one of the most electric, eccentric voices in hip-hop and poetry, this is it.
So that you understand the gravity of my statement, some background. Aesop Rock is my favorite rapper. It’s true if you ask me subjectively: I’ve enjoyed listening to more of his music for more of my life than any others. It’s true if you look at the data from the all-seeing, Sauron’s Eye perspective of the Spotify algorithm, where he was my top all-time artist. I found his album Labor Days in high school - I was a weirdo who loved words; he made music for weirdos who loved words. It was a match made in heaven.
I love rap and hip-hop because I love poetry and lyrics. There’s just so much room for someone like me to pour over and geek out about. In this, Aesop Rock has no equal: he has rhymes like an M.C. Escher painting – he weaves images and wordplay and vocabulary in a tumbling, ever-evolving mental puzzle. It’s insanely rewarding to engage with his body of work and to try to tease out the mental gymnastics of a rap genius. Matt Daniels put together a statistical analysis of rappers’ vocabularies, and Aesop Rock topped the list at around 7,800 unique words in his first 35,000 words in his career. Every new Aesop Rock album brings me at least one new word.[1] Looking through his raps is like an intricate crossword puzzle. Aesop Rock is the spiritual reason we have RapGenius.[2]
His density matches the contents of his work. His work is cryptic and paranoid and lonely. In Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves, Johnny Truant finds a manuscript left by his apartment’s former occupant, a blind man named Zampano. The manuscript is an exhaustive exploration of a documentary called The Navidson Record, a non-existent film detailing struggles of a man whose house is bigger on the inside than the outside, to the point where a crew of rugged explorers goes missing for weeks traveling the impossible, cavernous, haunted house. Aesop Rock’s music feels like House of Leaves. It feels bizarre and alienating, like finding the scribbles of mad hermit or prophet, and trying to figure out what of it is profound and what is insane. It’s also exhilarating, explorative, tumbling freely through the open space of creativity.
And his delivery is as complex as his content; he can spit rapidly and switch cadences adroitly. Even short Aesop Rock tunes can spin entire yarns and span reams of lyrics. That he can remember all the words, let alone perform them, is insane. And somehow, he always seems calm, borderline bored with his byzantine babbling.
Okay, we’ve established that I like Aes Rock and why I find his work compelling. But what’s so special about his new record?
Spirit World Field Guide is what it sounds like – as my British friends say, “it does what it says on the tin.” Aesop seems to have gotten really into drugs and religion, and he’s brought us a rap album’s worth of revelations. Oddly enough, in trying to catch the profound, the spiritual, and the personal, Aesop Rock is more clearly understandable than ever, giving the whole work a compelling through-line. “Aesop Rock does heroic doses of psychedelics and reports back” is a compelling concept album if I’ve ever heard one; it’s basically Hunter S. Thompson raps. The album’s intro lets you know what you are in for:
“Hello from the Spirit World/
My days here have been as rewarding as they are troublesome/
And often dangerous/
I have been assembling my notes for some time now/
My intent is to create a guide for anyone whose path/
May lead them to this unwavering otherness/…
Spirit World travel is not recommended for the faint of heart or weak of stomach/
Swift and unprecedented consequences will follow your decision to breach this environment/
With that in mind, I believe the unabridged Spirit World Field Guide compiled here/
To be the ultimate companion for all modern supernatural tourism/
As well as those potentially seeking more permanent residency/
Kindest regards, Aesop Rock”
And with that warning, you’re cast headlong into an audible DMT trip.
It begins, as all trips do, atThe Gates. One of the album’s standouts, you can almost hear Aes’ eyes dilate as he gains steam.
One of my favorite things about this song is the simple, rebounding beat, which Aesop navigates with a collection of short phrases that match each bouncing musical phrase. They can be as short and simple as “Aes Rock, my day sucked” or as complicated and wide-ranging as:
“Troglodyte, I might split the blinds/
I'm like Vincent Van with that instant rice/
I write cryptograms at all waking hours/
I tattoo the mail and all paper towels/
I'm on the kitchen walls, I may paint the house/
It could breach the yard, it's omega-bound”[3]
It’s a collection of short, sharp, sometimes frantic thoughts that you get on the come up of a trip: a collage of paranoia, braggadocio, and introspection.
The Gates is a good introduction to everything that I find so compelling about Aesop Rock: in just under four minutes, he raps over 800 words; he references St. Elmo’s fire and Futurama; he suggests we eat the rich while giving us a little “what what what from the guillotine.” It’s also a good test for if the rest of the record will be for you. You’ve hit the gates: do you want to proceed further?
The next few tracks find our hero firmly in the grip of the drugs. Button Masher sees him travel through space to sitars[4] while observing “I have never seen so many colors.[5]” On Dog At The Door, a short and delightful song, a dog’s bark sparks a paranoid spiral as Aesop rambles down the list of what it could be, before invariably settling on “it’s probably a trap.”
Pizza Alley is a centerpiece of the album; a masterpiece of gonzo travel journalism told through rhyme. This is Aesop narrating his Ayuahuasca trip in Peru; a place with “witch doctors pouring amphibians from out the blender” and where “shaman opt to zombify undocumented expats.” It’s a journey that takes him “from ‘dying on the vine’ to ‘it’s alive and indivisible!’”
The second and third verses find Aesop deep in the Amazon, in the throes of mighty jungle drugs, communing with the fauna and experiencing epiphanies:
“I told my darkest secrets to a pair of fuchsia dolphins/
The doozy out in Paris, the futures I had squandered/
They whispered something to me I will bear unto my coffin/
What's apparent via Occam is despondency as common”
A few lines later he appropriately observes: ”Motherfucker, I am on one.”
After this slower, more narrative rap, Aesop picks up the speed a bit with Crystal Sword. This is a fun and straightforward rhyme, where Aesop proves that he '“carries his water like nary a known other.” The song is probably one of the strongest on the album: full of little Aes Rock gems that I love: “Ruined last Christmas/probably ruin this Christmas,” “show him to the sick room/ sic him on the show room/ show us how you trick them into swimming through the au jus,” “Pigeons bring him donuts, I’m the motherfucking chosen one!” Poetry, I tell you.
The next standout for me is Jumping Coffin. In this song, Aesop Rock deals with forces from the Spirit World making contact; “Something from the other side clawing at the known world.” It’s a dark a propulsive beat that drives Aesop through a whirlwind of thoughts about death and the afterlife – an essential psychedelic trip rabbit hole. Ultimately, Aesop gives in and recommends we do the same in the chorus:
“Some try to combat any kind of odd force tryna make contact, nah/
Let it in, let it in/
Let it in, let it in/
Some try to stonewall any kind of woo-woo tryna make a phone call, nah/
Let it in, let it in/
Let it in, let it in”
In the end, Aesop visits with spirits: “Had a couple still to visit with a million pressing questions/ Like, where were you the night of?/ What are you traversing Earth in spite of?/ And how are you adjusting to the triumph?” Without getting too behind the curtain, I lost a loved one recently. I’d like to think that they are adjusting to the triumph marvelously.
The highlights continue with 1-10, a short and bittersweet song about back pain. Over a short minute of classical sounding piano arpeggios, Aesop humorously relates his struggles: “’Rate your pain on a scale of one to ten?’ / ‘Well, I’ll tell you Doc, it feels like I lost a friend.’”
Attaboy contains one of my favorite moments of the whole album. The song begins with Aes rapping over a grinding synth hook that feels stuck in reverse; the whole thing is very slinky and cool. The opening finds our protagonist “floating down the River Styx”, “particularly paranoid – enough to know that there’s no thing as an extraction point.” This dread continues to build for a minute before shifting entirely and dropping into something cosmically funky as Aesop Rock promises, “Look, I can help you tumble through the galaxy/Somersaulting backwards into vacuous finality.” It’s the best scene in Doctor Strange, made manifest in rap music.
All of Attaboy is a masterpiece – including a fantastic Douglas Adams reference[6]. You wouldn’t think he could top it, immediately. But he does, with album standout Kodokushi. This remarkable track has some of the coolest string instruments I’ve heard in a recent rap, both in the ascending hook and in a creeping, insidious baseline that slides smoothly under some of Aesop Rock’s best lines:
“Got a red phone right to the inside/
I could turn a ribcage into windchimes/
You don't wanna engage, kiddo, it's a burden to bear/
It's a whirlybird, nervous in the surface-to-air”
It’s one of the most engagingly dark tracks on the album; what would you expect from the song that translates to ‘lonely death’? Aesop sees “...a scarecrow every ten for infinity yards” and “a floating skull that won’t shut up, on his business trip from below the crust.” He engages directly with death: “I'm a seer, I could tell you how the curtain descend/ Or maybe hint at how it isn't with a circle of friends.” It’s just a remarkable song. While it’s hard to pick a favorite from the album, the combination of propulsive strings and imagery makes Kodokushi one of the record’s most repeated listens for me.
Nearing the end of the album, there are two more highlight tracks. Aesop Rock has always closed his album’s strong (see Coffee, The Mayor and The Crook, Shovel). This is no exception. Marble Cake is the final course, and The Four Winds is the dessert.
Marble Cake has all the serious intonation of an Aesop Rock closer. It sees him coming to grips with his death. Ego death is one of the key psychedelic experiences, and how Aesop wrestles with it here is instructive. The shifting chorus of this song finds Rock listing spiritual rituals and life experiences he needs:
“I should paint a eye on the front door/I should tell time by the sun more…. I should hang a skull on the side door/I should drink water from the sky more…I should nail boards to the back door/ I should feed squirrels from my hand more.”
He pairs these reflections on life with musings on his inevitable death:
“I want a flaming arrow shot into a creeping raft/ I'm kidding I just want the cheapest shit you people have…. I want a thousand lanterns drifting on a summers wind/ I'm only joking, y'all can feed me to the fucking pigs…. I want to meet the maker in a proper suit and shoes/ I'm lying, let 'em find the body with the loot removed.”
All of these couplets speak to Aesop Rock’s revelation: That death is no end. Everything is alive and indivisible. Let them feed you to the pigs. Let them find your rotting corpse stripped of its belongings. Let them bury you in a shallow grave.
Every one of the repeated choruses quoted here ends with the same refrain: “It’s no thing.”
It’s a remarkable conclusion to Aesop Rock’s Spirit World excursion. It’s the primary value of psychedelics: they can put the fear of God in you and show you how wild, weird, and wonderful life is. And at the same time, they utterly melt your ego, preparing you for the moment when you will merge with the infinite. It is a hard experience to put into words, the type of thing that makes you glad they sent a poet into the spirit world.
Marble Cake is quite heavy, in terms of subject matter[7] and the stomping, enveloping, downright funky beat. So it is nice that we have a more fun note to go out on. The Four Winds may be the most upbeat song of the album; it definitely has the most interesting music. The track’s background is comprised of an aggressive, truncated acoustic guitar and, later, so far as I can tell, the Ocarina of Time.
Aes’ flows are also at his most impressive on this song: he “rows a big oar, he spins a grim yarn,” cycling through at least a few rhythms, including some fun raps in triplicate. And as always, the imagery is compelling: “I look like I feel like a fish in a beak.”
I want to quote at length from the third and final verse, which exemplifies Aesop’s knacks for storytelling and worldbuilding. Returning from the chorus, he embarks on a description of his residence:
“The one with the red cross sprayed on the door and a mountain of mail on the porch/
The one with the pit trap cloaked in the grass and a thick black smoke from the cracks/
The one with the werewolf chained to a tree and a circle of flames at your feet/
The one with the ominous regional lore/
Why? Which one's yours?”
The Four Winds is a tour de force, light, bright, and engaging. It’s a great come down from an intense trip, and one of my favorite songs in Aesop’s entire catalogue.
After an hour of rapping about life, the universe, and everything; after moving through purgatory and paradiso, wrestling with gods and demons, Aesop Rock ‘stands the hell up and sees himself out’, leaving us in stunned, sudden silence.
I’ve always felt kinship with what Killer Mike said: “I've never really had a religious experience, in a religious place. Closest I've ever come to seeing or feeling God is listening to rap music. Rap music is my religion.”
In the world of spiritual rap experiences, I’ve never had a journey like the one Aesop led me on here. Spirit World Field Guide is audio ayahuasca, a mystical experience, and Aesop Rock’s magnum opus.
[2] Where he is quite helpfully an active participant.
[3] More evidence for the Aesop Rock as Zapano-figure theory
[4] Sitars – the universal instrument of getting zooted.
[5] Like I said, Aesop Rock at his least obtuse.
[6] Oh no, not again.
[7] “People you confide in will be spotted eating rodents whole” is one of those images that will stick with you.