Today’s thought is being brought to you by: Pizza, Canadian Dollars, Wolves, and Readers Like You.
I mentioned in a previous post that I enjoy being ahead of the curve. I like being able to honestly tell people, “I told you so.” That may make me a bit of an ass, but I don’t care. Watching others jump on the bandwagon behind me is annoying, but there isn’t anything I can do about it, other than laugh internally, and every now and then point out to the bandwagoners how silly they are.
I saw an article floating around my facebook feed recently about the vocabulary of hip-hop artists versus that of Shakespeare. I thought it was an interesting topic, so I read the piece. The findings are mostly irrelevant and don’t prove much, but there was something in there that made me smile.
The idea of the article was to chart the amount of different words used over a given period of the artist’s career. Turns out, the Wu Tang Clan have some pretty extensive vocabularies, which is not surprising. Neither is the fact that Lil Wayne and Kanye aren’t exactly English majors.
So what’s the cool part?
Aesop Rock is literally off the chart. Matt Daniels, the man behind the study, had to adjust the scale just to keep him in the picture. As it happens, I’ve been listening to Aesop Rock since None Shall Pass was released, which admittedly was later than most, but I have retroactively listened to the whole canon. So I don’t get my “I told you so” moment, because there are plenty of people who would look at me as a bandwagon fan. But a quick trip to youtube reveals a large spike in views of his music videos over the last week. Safe to say I’ve known about him for slightly more than a week.
A lot of people I know dismiss hip-hop as a universally bad genre, or that it doesn’t take as much talent as “real music”. This is false. I’ll admit, there’s a lot of crap out there, but then again, that is true in just about every genre. If you want to see an example of an intelligent and musically gifted hip-hop artist, I suggest you go pick up a copy of Labor Days. Give it a listen or two. Now, Aesop Rock is certainly the elite of the elite when it comes to rappers, but I’m hard pressed to think of a musician in any genre who is as good at wordplay. Seriously, even if you don’t like his beats, or his voice, or whatever, just read the lyrics. I guarantee you’ll be impressed.
-Harry
P.S. Turn the bass up.
