It’s been five years since Aesop Rocks’s last tour de force, 2007’s None Shall Pass. What has Rock been doing in the last five years? At the very least, he’s crafted two songs that make your favorite rapper look like an illiterate member of the ‘huntable surplus.’ At best, he has thirteen more gems like these (there are fifteen tracks on Skelethon, which drops July 10th) for us to pour over, to question and look up heated internet debates that discuss his diction, as we try to decipher what the hell he is actually talking about.

Zero Dark Thirty

(This is the most complex and artfully constructed piece of braggadocio ever written and put to a beat. I think.)

ZZZ Top

(I’m still trying to figure this one out. Aesop is barely in the video, and when he makes an appearance he’s bludgeoned over the head. Perhaps it’s a metaphor for the figurative death of the artist with each new project. Or maybe it’s just ‘synthesized cultures on a stage.’)