AESOP ROCK
Fast Cars, Danger, Fire and Knives
Definitive Jux
· New EP from indie rock’s favourite rapper could be called "Broadband, Downloading, RIAA and Arrrgh!"
While the Recording Industry Association of America sues a dead 83-year-old woman, who never owned a computer, for downloading several hundred songs with the user name "smittendkitten," while the FBI slaps warnings on every piece of digital media it can get its hands on and while some brave Internet providers refuse to give up identities of their users, record labels have gone to their own extremes to try to prevent pirating. Definitive Jux isn’t unique in its approach, though it isn’t nearly as common as anti-pirating software. See, what Def Jux does is have the artist (in this case Aesop Rock) say something like "Hey everyone, this is Aesop Rock and you’re listening to my new EP Fast Cars, Danger, Fire and Knives. Don’t pirate this, ’cause that sucks," or something to that effect. They then drop this line of spoken word into every song on the promo copies of the disc, often more than once, in the hopes that it will both encourage people not to upload the song, and discourage people from downloading what isn’t the true product.
Well, guess what? In the case of Aesop’s mumbled message (which is nearly incomprehensible anyway), it doesn’t just discourage downloading. It also provoked me to consider not reviewing this disc at all, with every song’s continuity, dynamics and flow completely destroyed by this incessant and useless tool. It made me want to fling the CD across the room. The irony? For several weeks now, the Aesop Rock album – expunged of this lame device – has been available online. I could have downloaded it and given this record a proper review. But what Aesop says goes, so I have based my review on the sections I can stomach and found the whole thing disjointed and annoying. Was this a rant? Yes. A review? Not really. Do I care? Not about this record, Aesop.
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