Aesop Rock Animates 12,000 Hand-Drawn Selfies For “All The Smartest People” Video

One of my all-time favorite songs by Aesop Rock is “Rings” from the rapper/producer’s 2016 double-LP, The Impossible Kid. Not only is it a highlight from an album that takes its name from the 1982 Filipino exploitation flick starring the late primordial dwarf stuntman/martial artist, Weng Weng, and the electrified, mutagen-soaked beat is amazing, but I’ve become attached to the track for personal reasons. When my son first heard it, he decided that he wanted to learn how to rap the entire thing; a remarkable feat for anyone, let alone an 8-year-old. With us working together, he was actually able to accomplish this goal, while I discovered a newfound appreciation for Aesop as an artist. We tackled it by breaking the whole thing down into sections and, in the process of dissecting it, the substance and meaning behind the track revealed themselves to be as equally impressive, layered, and nuanced as the cadence and language being utilized to convey them. Aesop‘s storytelling ability and production skill really shine on The Impossible Kid, but “Rings” was the perfect track for us for a few reasons; the first of which is that it differs from a lot of his material by not containing any profanity — my kid’s earliest exposure to rap was Kool Keith‘s Black Elvis album for the same reason. The other major appeal is that it focuses on the concept of being discouraged by others, abandoning your passions, and ultimately regretting it. The fact that I initially suggested to my son that learning a song this complicated could be a nearly “impossible” challenge, but the “kid” was so confident that I got behind him and took his lead, felt incredibly on the nose, at the time. For the man who wrote it, visual art — and, more specifically, drawing and painting — was the love he had abandoned. Fortunately, it’s a passion that he’s since returned to and one that is heavily showcased in his latest music video.

Around the time we were listening to “Rings” on rotation, I began seeing an increasing amount of illustrations appearing on Aesop‘s Instagram account. It was empowering to witness this revival manifesting itself in real-time, as the artist began pouring himself so fully back into something that he may have only recently recognized had left an unquenchable void in his life. Just as impressive as that message is the fact that he is really fucking good at it. Perhaps, being close longtime friends with Bay Area art icons/collaborators, Alex Pardee and Jeremy Fish may have felt overwhelming, but whatever sparked Aesop into becoming active again, he’s thrown himself into it fully. Along with drawing, the man born Ian Bavitz has reached back to exhume other elements of his past such as skateboarding — he was recently helping teach kids at a Portland skate camp and is currently selling decks and wheels featuring the Justin “Coro” Kaufman artwork from Spirit World Field Guide [2020] — while his most recent full-length, Garbology, sees him teaming with his old partner in crime, Blockhead, who produced the project in its entirety. Today, the duo release their latest video from that collab, which is painstakingly illustrated and animated by Aesop, himself.

Bavitz seems to have entered a new phase over the last few years, one where he is less apprehensive about relinquishing control in certain areas, while finding the confidence to step up and take charge in others. He and Blockhead worked together frequently during the two-thousand aughts, but aside from his 2019 collaboration with Tobacco, Malibu Ken, Aes has largely kept a tight grip on his own production, and done so masterfully, over the last 15 years. For those of us that love hearing the pair together, however, Garbology is a welcome return. It’s not that the odd collaboration hasn’t popped up from time to time, but nothing to this degree where he has handed the reins over to Blockhead for an entire studio release. As for visuals, Jeremy Fish has continued to provide his skills, but he also asked his old buddy to return the favor by contributing art of his own to Fish‘s latest book. Earlier this year, little animated clips of illustrations began appearing on Aesop‘s IG account. These primarily consisted of selfies with brief little passages from Garbology tracks playing over them. While these were definitely cool, I’m not sure that anyone expected they were signaling that an entire video comprised of over a thousand individual illustrations would be on its way.

The new video for the Garbology track, “All The Smartest People” was clearly a labor-intensive venture, but one that unfurls as smoothly as the vocal delivery of the rapper/producer (slash illustrator, slash animator) does on the track. Splitting the difference between the mutating sketch-like animation of Bill Plympton and the painterly rotoscoping effect employed for Richard Linklater‘s Waking Life, the visuals offer an effective counterpart to the lyrics which measure the balance of hermitage and solitude against the importance of simply going outside and seeing the world once in a while.

Aesop offers the following insights about the project, which seems to mirror that subject matter, to some extent:

“I heard a calling that said ‘you should draw 1,500 selfies,’ and I answered that call on some ‘hold my Bubly.’ I had been messing around with some short animations and decided to take a crack at something a little longer. The process made my eyes hurt, and now your eyes can hurt too. Some days it felt therapeutic, but a lot of days I was pretty over it. I would get about 6 seconds a day on average. Lots of repetition. Ultimately I’m glad I was patient enough to see it through – and thankful for those around me with the ‘keep going!’ attitude. This song is one of my favorites off the Garbology project. It’s fun when these weird ones work out.”

Check out the video for “All The Smartest People” below. Physical copies of Garbology are available in stores or online through AesopRock.com or the Rhymesayers shop.