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Artist: Aesop Rock and Blockhead

Album: Garbology

Released: November 12th, 2021

Label: Rhymesayers Entertainment

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Garbology: Who’s that Drunk Mall Santa Rooting Through my Trash?

Rock’em Block’em Robots

Garbology is a project of existential scope on both a personal and global level. When I accepted this writeup assignment, I experienced a bit of my own existential dread, fully aware that dissecting Aesop Rock’s raps is a daunting task at best. So I sit here, three days before my writeup is due, cramming like a masochistic Physics major.

Trying to pin down Aesop Rock’s verbal necromancy is like trying to trap an angry cat in a paper bag. At this point, most people are fairly sure he’s an alien, robot, or robot-alien. Never one to disappoint, Aesop stays elusive yet impactful as ever, poking and prodding through life’s detritus to find meaning before careening into the next expert rendering, his flows reliably composed of an unflinching, dream-like intensity.

This project’s concept conjures the scavenger junk-men of my youth who came around before every garbage day, their rusted, pockmarked pick-up trucks stacked with broken chairs, chain-link fences, and childrens’ playsets of mildewed plastic, all strapped down with frayed bungee cords. They would spend hours every Sunday driving street to street, hoping to salvage something valuable from another man’s trash. Aesop stacks his raps expertly as a ragpicker in a truck bed, extracting precious metals from everyday refuse and proving everything has a use, even when its function is thought to be long gone.

Born of a brotherhood forged between hip hop-obsessed Boston University students, Aesop Rock and Blockhead’s Garbology is a study of all things forgotten, repurposed, or recycled. It investigates not only what we forget, but the things we refuse to leave behind. In an ever collapsing world, this project finds comfort in the warmth of lost nostalgia and the fire of justified rebellion, all while projecting optimistic anxiety for the future.

Though they have a long history of fruitful collaboration, they never created a full joint project together, with this latest offering seeming a long overdue dream project for their respective fanbases. Embarking on a rap career with his first offering Music for Earthworms, Ian Bavitz is many things: a Long Island native, current Portland resident, diehard skate rat, and disillusioned art student. As Aesop Rock, he’s been weaving his nihilistic verbosity over beats equal parts dirty and melodic for decades.

As noted by Aesop super-fan Lupe Fiasco, Aes is a rare artist that continuously improves with age, in a way that’s mystifying and frustrating to creative contemporaries. Lupe went so far as to memorize and rap Aesop’s Supercell verse, posting with the caption “take time to memorize the unbridled excellence of others.” Aes’s sinuous flows are like fine ambrosia plundered from the catacombs of graffitied subway tunnels. Often, Aesop juxtaposes the natural with the digital and artificial. It’s like if the Cask of Amontillado was wrapped in scratched grip tape and brimming with rabbit blood.

Meanwhile, Blockhead long ago cemented himself as one of the more inventive and prolific producers working today. Aside from his memed-out social media feed of beautiful shit posts, he met early acclaim with instrumental projects like Music by Cavelight and Uncle Tony’s Coloring Book. His career spans a plethora of lauded projects up to his recent Space Werewolves Will Be The End of Us All and the 2019 underground super-compilation Free Sweatpants. Ever self-effacing, his Twitter bio asserts he “makes music for rappers and high people”.

On this album, skateboard references abound, which should surprise nobody who’s been following Aesop’s Instagram stories, his album promo often amounting to clips of his friends skating curb spots in downtown Portland. An 80s skate rat at heart, these reference points make even more sense of the context of this project’s genesis. Over the past few years, Aesop went through a rare creative drought following the sudden passing of close friend and Portland skate filmer Kurt Hayashi.

Garbology was born from that personal tragedy and resulting creative block. Sequestered indoors under a fresh pandemic, Blockhead supplied production via email for Aes to play on like a rusted jungle gym of grim synths, nimble basslines, and melancholy piano melodies. From there, things worked themselves out with minimal communication. Aesop claimed on an Instagram story “usually Block will send me a beat and I’m like bruuuuhhhh then I send him back the verse and he’s like, bruuuuh, sick”.

About the album’s concept, Aesop said, “Garbology is defined as the study of the material discarded by society to learn what it reveals about social or cultural patterns. I find a lot of parallels between that and the idea of picking up the pieces after a loss or period of intense unrest, and seeing what’s really there. It’s information that speaks to who I am, who we are, and how we move forward. Furthermore – the idea of digging through old, often neglected music from another time with an ear tuned for taking in that data in a different way than your average listener would is exactly what Blockhead does. Go through the information and see what you find.”

Drawing Molotov Cocktails

Jazz Hands, the lead single from the album, concerns Aesop’s past few years and the adjoining anxiety of personal and societal flux. Much of the song is from the viewpoint of a fervent protestor. It feels like a roiling statement of seclusion amid a world in turmoil, juxtaposed with the speaker’s newfound sense of community as he rebels against an oppressive system.

The song begins with symbols and personal statements on isolation, paranoia, and a longing for familial connection. The first segment includes a reference to famed escape artist Henry Houdini, showing Aesop’s internal struggles to be closer to picking lock tumblers underwater than a simple pulling of scarves from a tophat.

Love note to the whole fuck show

Postmarked from a lighthouse in the blunt smoke

Dear motherfuckers, I’m teetering, if you must know

…

Niece on the phone saying, “Ian, you should visit more”

We could build forts while the pigs court civil war

….

I’m not here to pull scarves out

Here to pick tumblers underwater with his arms bound

Later lines build the theme of art as an essential, even violent catharsis, or weapon against an unjust world. Aes enacts a failed William Tell shot, imagining himself shooting an arrow, maybe figuratively in the form of art, maybe literally at the forehead of a corrupt cop or system, asserting he will not be aiming for the apple. He goes on to depict the results of civil unrest, mixing these images with his own artistic prowess, “New superpower that I picked up in a frenzy/I can draw a roof on fire from memory.”

The verse transitions into more direct references to the protests “Down to spray piss on a cop car, it’s rage in the form of Renaissance art”. Aesop then raps more lines dealing with frustration at the impermanence of life, himself, and those he loves most,

Lately, I treat every interaction as a living wake

Thanking people close to me before the photo pixelate

The song ends with eponymous bars that reference Gil-Scott Heron’s The Revolution Will Not Be Televised as Aesop affirms real systemic change will not be pretty, peaceful, or able to be sugar-coated.

Get your whole roadmap Pac Man’d

Black mask, snack on whatever’s in the dashcam

It’s not an ad, hashtag, or a tap dance

Patsy, the revolution will not have jazz hands

The spacey, deceptively simple production is a nod to the drumless loop trend first popularized by Roc Marciano, becoming so popular even Drake adopted the style for Champagne Poetry. By the end of the verse, Blockhead’s drums thump into earshot symbolizing release or resolution, or even the morning after a protest, the sun rising above the Portland skyline amidst the scent of smoke and tear-gas.

The Portland George Floyd protests were significant for their duration, where demonstrators engaged in a near persistent stretch of year-long protests, at times erupting into clashes between left-wing protestors demanding police accountability and right-wing counter-protesters waving Trump flags. Portland was also one of the cities where members of the National Guard were deployed, meeting later criticism after it was shown that officers did not clearly identify themselves and seized protestors who were not on or near government property.

The Portland Police Bureau even met criticism from the US Department of Justice via scathing letter condemning their use of undue force and violence towards protestors. This is the physical setting for Jazz Hands, with its current of resolute revolt. This undercurrent hums below Block’s loops, where the soundscape feels like wandering through cosmic decay, its deceptive calm contrasting Aesop’s fiery subject matter.

Ledgerdemain is defined as an adroit skillfulness defying normal human expectations or abilities. Mixing in more spooky magical bars, Aesop again employs his spoken sleight of hand with a sharpness befitting Houdini, narrating a story within the hook while describing his own characteristics and nighttime activities in the verses, mostly centering around skateboarding while depicting skating as the gateway drug for rebellion. Tying into the theme of garbage, Aes also shows how skateboarders, like graffiti writers who make markers from empty shoe polish bottles, reclaim the mundane structures of a city into skate spots, as sources of inspiration and joy.

To me, it sounds like the hook might be about finding a hidden skate spot in the woods or finding a hidden subculture in the unknown, then the verses intersperse skate talk with protest talk. He begins the song visualizing his outfit and demeanor, characterizing himself as a haggard vagabond, draped in thrifted clothes and supernatural implements, like some kind of Samurai Jack of Long Island’s back alleys.

Chicken noodle thermos, parka marching out the army surplus

Over thermals over thermals over thermals over thermals, look

Owl on my shoulder, initials on the katana

Whispering something wicked through a moisture-wicking balaclava

Again, the themes of rebellion and police criticism show, as Aesop highlights the uselessness of oppressive policing, and depicts police burning technology ritualistically, perhaps to destroy data and communication lines.

​​Caught ’em fudging the numbers and hiding birds in they coat

Burning phones and computers inside a circle of stones

When policing the people is, “Please return to your homes”

You get a people determined to take a turn in the strobe

He describes his fellow protestors further in the second verse, showing the similar scorn skaters and protesters have for tyrannical authority figures, occupying the “umbra” of shadows nobody goes. The plaza and thermometer lines could be referencing skating plazas in freezing temperatures, or protesting in plazas during COVID and taking temperatures to make sure nobody has a fever.

Plaza to plaza, thermometer going nuh-uh

My posse out of pocket on some occupy the umbra

If it’s under freezing, I don’t even wanna know a number

Just show me to the rolling thunder, wubba, wubba, wubba

Today a mall cop told me I should get a life

He then finishes the verse with some skateboard folklore, one of those “no way, he did that trick over that curb and wearing Timberland boots on a board that wasn’t even his!?” stories skateboarders pass between themselves like baseball cards, each detail adding to the mystique and difficulty of whatever trick it was.

I guess in ’97, so and so did such and such

In Timbs on someone else’s board

Tell the story, spread the lore

It’s epic to a people who would rather push than teleport

Aesop begins the last verse with more sartorial references, showing himself wearing a wolf’s carcass like an Arcteryx jacket, in search of late-night junk food, he and his friends able to turn a skatable curb into an evening of recreation, boardsliding so intensely they manage to “sweat a boiling ocean in early Feb’ ” To the very end, Aesop mixes the images in this song between protestors and skaters, moving or skating so fast through the night that they’re indistinguishable on surveillance footage.

My coaches told me don’t come home without the serpent’s head

I told ’em hold my turkey leg, point me at a pitchfork

Brought the trophy home and took the poultry back still warm

Out to flirt with hypothermia

It’s CCTV’s blurriest insurgents in your area

People are Disappointing

Difficult is a song built on Aesop’s insistence he isn’t that complicated. This is one of the more obviously braggadocious songs on the album, where Aes weaves dismissive assertions into a cascade of brilliant, quasi self-effacing boasts. Bavitz even brings in a compelling family reference, the war stories of grandparents we were all so horrified and impressed by as children around the rocking chair. The “I storm off, forged from my gramp’s war stories/short sword swinging like a dance floor in the 40s” is one of my favorite bars on the album, from the impeccably smooth assonance to the wordplay between the horrors of an era’s wars versus that era’s cultural recreation, and a subtle nod to the discontented traits inherited from earlier generations.

Pulled pork sliders

Headed for satori in jorts and horse blinders

I’m more for the sordid, got nan for the normies

Cornered, my storm got plans for the Dorothies

I storm off, forged from my gramp’s war stories

Short sword swinging like a dance floor in the forties

Further bars include an allusion to a bizarre scene featuring decapitation via bladed frisbee from the 1987 B-movie Hard Ticket to Hawaii a film about two drug enforcement agents overthrowing an island cartel. Aesop conveys his fascination with the stranger strains of “fringe science” aka left-of-center references he often incorporates in his writing. Ever the unreliable narrator, Aes confesses he’ll probably steal your lighter if you hand it to him, a fitting treasure trove for the absurdist character he often raps through.>My oars both row in an ocean of fringe science

The low road’s owner of the most pinched lighters

I maybe got a thousand

My crane kick plays like a train through a mountain

My neck chop plays like blades on a frisbee

Then, he goes on to describe himself as the black sheep of his family, a loose apple who couldn’t adhere to any family tree precedent. Aes claims to be a tide destroying childrens’ sandcastles then references a Dolly Parton song, describing himself as murdering his adversaries and rolling them in an area rug. Aesop Rock, for all his seemingly obscure, profound flourishes, is a child of bad 80s movies and nickel arcades. He’s the king of these light-hearted, deep-cut 80s references that border on incredibly well-worded cartoonish scenes. Plus, who else has ever rhymed “hair in the sun” with “area rug”? This is another example of Aesop’s exhaustive originality.

I’m an apple with no tree

I’m ground swell crashing every castle at Jones Beach

It’s beautiful as Jolene hair in the sun

Or any adversary wrapped up in an area rug, oh, Jesus

In the final verse, Bavitz opines his weariness of our endlessly artificial, social media-obsessed world, while admitting he’s as much a victim as anyone to the easy dopamine distractions of cellphones or “houses of mirrors”. Nobody is truly immune to an algorithm that reflects your own self-image via relevant content. We’re all hopeless narcissists in our special human way, even the inimitable Aesop Rock.

Every time an influencer offers advice,

I feel years coming off of my life I feel

blood shooting out of my ears

Still, I’m apparently a sucker for these houses of mirrors

Flamingo Pink, with chorus assistance from Hail Mary Mallon associate and frequent collaborator Rob Sonic, depicts the hazards of propping false idols on shoddy pedestals, exposing the menacing energies lurking below a pretty facade. Over thumping drums muddled as kerosene puddles, Aesop begins the song picturing himself as some kind of bandit, holding a stethoscope to the locks of a bank vault before absconding down castle walls with search dogs in hot pursuit. The chase is reflected in the production, with an everpresent synth pluck pulsating in the background.

Aesop is unflinching towards death, positing that no pharmaceutical panacea can contend with the crushing existential weight of the inevitable end. Instead of dread, he adopts a carelessness to the universal imminence of death, whistling the grim inevitability away with the wave of a hand.

The rope goes over the wall

For the controller born to hold a stethoscope to a vault

Wooly willy, peel off in a barrel over the falls

And down river by the time they radio for the dogs

I crossed heart, can’t tell a bad day from a death wish

Detour through the graveyard with a chef’s kiss

They don’t make a pill for that, it’s too advanced

All you can do is lick your wounds and whistle past the boogie mans

Standout bars on the album follow, rendering carnival decorations reminiscent of the Coney Island boardwalk. Aesop shows death can be hiding ominously behind the most innocuous objects, uncovering the looming doom beneath a bright image of conventional fun.

Wicked forces in the wings descending on the simple things

Like taffy at the boardwalk under ribbons of flamingo pink

Which mutates into ovеrcrowded Plinko on a laser grid

Bavitz continues to build his self-characterization as a misanthrope. This stretch includes more references to wolves, roiling internal rhymes, and social justice imagery. Aesop asserts that the system cannot tame ardent activists, portraying his own grim unreliability before shifting into another skateboard reference.

Don’t do it, social cues bouncing off his open wounds

Folk are on some, “Oh, hello,” I’m on some hocus pocus, poof

Holy moly, motion blur from bloke to Canis Lupus

…

You can not domesticate the modern vigilante

Who increasingly identifies as energy expanding

My pat on the back is a little Edward Scissorshands-y

Come and send it with the cleverest to never stick the landing

He then raps about Plinko machines, a manmade object that itself is outdated in our hyper-digitized world, seeming more a forgotten piece of human nature than civilization. Sonic’s refrain kicks in after each verse, his world-weary timbre mirroring Aesop’s own Marlboro-tinted baritone.

Good goddamn, good goddamn

Every idol I ever met is a con-man.

Gotta hopscotch hot pan to hot pan

Rob ties into the bleak realism of the overall album, showing that when it comes to promises and persona versus reality, humans tend to underdeliver. Never meet your heroes, they’re only people, flaws and all.

Secret Sponsor-Me Tapes

In the TV-themed That is Not a Wizard, Aesop demystifies himself through vulnerability then addresses the negative facets of humanity at large. Featuring the best hook and one of the best beats on the album, Aes proclaims his affection for anything that can knock an arrogant person down a peg, showing how he uses obscure information to catch the high falutin off-guard. In the same bars, he asserts his respect for work ethic and creative excellence over materialistic success. Blockhead supplies some elegant piano samples, with delicate keys floating over an unrelenting drum break as silky guitar hits play at intervals.

Aesop explains that he resents how the most outspoken people, regardless of the substance of their words, seem to find it easiest to achieve acclaim. Another bar laments the societal tendencies to laud false idols before following them to certain emptiness. Aesop would rather be seen as “out to lunch” in the context of the entertainment industry if it means he can maintain artistic integrity.

True crime, fantasy, action-adventure, game show

It’s all sci-fi, I’m all Play-Doh

I like data that turn brains to egg yolk

It turn royals to regular John or Jane Does

I hate praising net worth over legwork

I hate ceding all power to the extroverts

I find the current social architecture hell on earth

We make shepherds and shadow ’em to the netherworld

I move reticent, never really an open book

I’m gone fishin’ at thе risk of being overlooked

The hook encapsulates the themes of the song. Aes ultimately paints himself in vulnerable terms, showing his artistry wasn’t discovered easily. He shows himself in a fugue state “learning how to walk from leaving the TV on”, a possible reference to his debilitating clinical depression, explored previously in One of Four. He then links this image of a TV flickering in a dark room with each set of beginning bars in the song’s verses, listing TV genres before expanding into introspection.

I was on the floor in a fugue state

Tripping over old flicks

Picking out a new name

I was on the couch feeling real gone

Learning how to walk from leaving the TV on

Abandoned Malls, a concept I’m surprised Aesop is only now exploring, finishes out the record. As gloomy synths tumble over the palpitations of Blockhead’s drum patterns, Aes investigates American deindustrialization. The production itself evokes Big Retail’s carcass flatlining in real-time, like a threnody for the Toy-R-Us’s of yesteryear. It features a pulsing throb that sounds like an EKG machine, an image reflected in Aesop’s hook. Still, despite the stark rendering of commercial desolation, there’s a strange nostalgia for the brighter days of Blockbuster and cassette tapes. It feels a fitting soundtrack to popping switch rocket airs over a decommissioned escalator (Tony Hawk Pro Skater 1 anyone?).

Aesop begins the verse with references to natural elements and their ability to reclaim manmade landscapes, a theme he builds throughout the song. Blockhead maintains a thrumming paranoia throughout the production, reflecting the melancholy of Bavitz’s skate-park Mark Twain bars. Aesop explores how isolation leads to self-discovery, while again referencing negative experiences with people that contribute to his introversion.

I was staring off into the water

Looking for some undiscovered colors

Like a blue that really wasn’t, but it wasn’t any others

The synesthetic cousin to the hum of his discomfort

I been a punching bag for some truly deluded garbage

Now his handshake is a unicorn, his hug a moving target

He begins the last verse painting the overgrown back alleys of adolescence that were America’s modern ruins. He shows them as a refuge from the mundane trappings of adult society, where kids could really be alone playing amidst the spiderwebbed cement of manmade places that nature reclaimed.

The same alleys we used to imagine Babylon

Feel like abandoned malls overgrown with Spanish moss

Commotion froze in time with no sign of your lamb of god

It’s a land of the lost, scrambling for canned applause

These places are depicted as mischievous portals to another world, where teenage imagination sanctifies forgotten parking lots through a strange kind of elemental freedom.

I freak an Archeology that reek of repercussion

If you need to pick some pieces up come dig a hole to jump in

Light sleeper, I’m a fighter, I’m a feeder

Earth, wind, fire, water, ether

Redeeming Empty Cans

Garbology, an album decades in the making, summons the memories and ghosts trapped in thrift store trinkets and discarded artifacts. Aes and Block mine their long history for fresh gems, re-contextualizing their partnership with the new tricks they’ve learned over the years. Turns out, you can teach an old dog how to return from the dead after all.

This is a project that picks through the detritus, harvesting art from the rubble of everyday tragedies. Whether that’s justified social unrest, a personal loss, or just digging through crates of records, it is yet another entry in the expansive catalogs of Aesop and Blockhead and cements them as the most inventive artists in their field. Despite the present’s catastrophes, it’s a project that refuses to numb itself to turbulence, and instead embraces the pain of loss as a vehicle for reinvention. Garbology depicts the process of uncovering as a means of coping, and the first step towards a second step forward.

Discussion Questions:

What do you think of the project’s concept? What does Garbology mean to you? How does this stack up in Aesop and Blockhead’s respective discographies? Favorite bar and favorite production moments? What’s the craziest thing you’ve ever found in the trash or a thrift store?