100 Songs: "Daylight" (and "Night Light") (Aesop Rock)

When I was first getting into underground hip hop, after for years maintaining a hip hop collection that consisted almost entirely of Death Row, Ice Cube, Public Enemy, the Beastie Boys and Cypress Hill.  A friend of mine embarked upon an ambitious program to initiate me into the ways of hip hop, loaning me three cds a week, ranging from the obvious to the obscure.  Ultimately, I wound up with a collection of a few hundred rap albums.  Really, it could happen to anyone with an open mind and an almost pathological need to give record stores money.  

Early on in the education, I heard two albums that completely changed my ideas of what was possible in hip hop.  One was Mr. Lif's ambitious concept album I Phantom (some might call it a "Hip Hopera", but these people are dangerous, and should be avoided).  The other was Aesop Rock's Labor Days, which was one of, if not the, first examples I had heard of hip hop that largely eschewed a coherent narrative or simple similes in favor of surrealism, opacity and a kaleidoscope of allusions to, well, practically everything.  This is all oversimplified, (and probably poorly explained) but you must remember that at the time I considered Dr. Dre's "Keep Their Heads Ringin'" to be a paradigm for all rap.  In that light, my sense of wonder at a song like "Daylight" is understandable.  Both are good songs, but there isn't a great deal of common ground between them.  It's like going from, say, "I Want to Hold Your Hand" to "Stuck Inside of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again".  

The lyrics stake out their unusual territory from the beginning, "Put one up for shackle-me-not clean logic procreation./I did not invent the wheel I was the crooked spoke adjacent" (and thank Zimmerman that Aesop  published his lyrics in The Living Human Curiosity Sideshow booklet that came bundled with his Fast Cars, Danger, Fire and Knives EP.  Less awesome was his decision to put out a second edition of the EP without the booklet but with the bonus track "Facemelter", leading me to buy the damn thing again, because of an inexplicable and unhealthy compulsion I had to own every Def Jux cd release possible.  I've gotten a little better about that.)  After six years, I'm still not entirely sure "shackle-me-not clean logic procreation" is, but I assume it has something to do with casual sex.  But actually, that's not the first words in the song.  The song actually begins with a repeated "yes yes y'all/ and you don't stop/ keep on /'till the break of dawn", which comes close to being the ur-hip hop statement, the gospel according to Coke La Rock.  Is this used ironically, considering how un-old school the rest of the song is? Is it meant to ground the song squarely in the hip-hop tradition, or serve as a sort of measuring stick for how far rap lyricism from 1976 or so to 2001?  Is this reading too much into things?  Is it even possible to read too much into Aesop Rock songs?  Have I strung together enough tangential questions to distract you from the first question?  Excellent, back to the song.  Listening to the song today, I noticed for the first time an interesting number of references to wings and those with wings throughout the song- the beautiful "origami dream" whose "wings will never leave the ground without a feather and a lottery ticket", the "Wingspan cast black upon vigils", the "backbones at camp Icarus", the angels who are roped in the basement by the triple sixers lassos, the buzzards who "drag your brother's flags to rags", the "duck hunt ticker tape vision" (Aes is here to pick apart the pixels, which echoes the chorus' "All I ever wanted was to pick apart the day, put the pieces back together my way" and possibly the line "Plug deteriorating Zen up in your pen dragon", which seems to reference King Arthur's father Uther Pendragon or a tabletop rpg called Pendragon".  The only wings here that seem to actually work for flight are the flying ducks in Duck Hunt (who, of course, are only there to be shot by the hunter with the smartass dog) and possibly the buzzards (although I'd guess they aren't circling in the air while they're picking the flags to rags.).  

Labor Days was released the week after 9/11 (For such a shitty period in general, the music was remarkable- Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot began officially streaming over the Internet after the record label refused to release it on 9/11, Dylan's Love and Theft came out on 9/11, Labor Days, The Coup's Party Music's release was pushed back from early September in order to change the cover art's exploding World Trade Center, Jay-Z's best album, The Blueprint was released on 9/11).  In February of the next year, Aesop released the Daylight EP, which featured "Night Light", an inversion of "Daylight".  Gone was the "Yes Yes Y'alls" and the music was stripped down to something more resembling the sound on Def Jux's other landmarks from 2001-02 like The Cold Vein and Fantastic Damage.  An example of the altered lyrics- in Daylight, Aesop chides "Life's not a bitch/Life is a beautiful woman/You only call her a bitch cuz she won't let you get that pussy" (Robert Christgau's favorite line from the song, singled out in his A- review).  In "Night Light", the line becomes "Life's not a bitch/life is a biatch/ who keeps the villagers circling the marketplace out searching for the g-spot."  In another spot, the interjection "Kraken" (which must be on the short list for the oddest interjections on a hip hop record) becomes "Godzilla.  It's possible that this shift comments on the changing nature of what monsters people expect to emerge from the sea, or a comment on the way that films and popular media have dethroned mythology's place in the public imagination.  

With Aesop Rock, it is easy to fall into a trap of trying to isolate and explicate every line and allusion, searching for the moral to each fable, and this can becloud the essential fact that his music is genuinely engrossing, proof that the best music is often the weirdest, a rejoinder to any claim that rap lyrics have grown stale and cliched.