Respect Authority

A selection from Aesop Rock’s “9-5ers Anthem”, a track on his third album, Labor Days. Something for that case of the Mondays.

We the American working population
Hate the fact that eight hours a day
Is wasted on chasing the dream of someone that isn’t us
And we may not hate our jobs,
But we hate jobs in general
That don’t have to do with fighting our own causes.
We the American working population
Hate the nine-to-five day-in/day-out
When we’d rather be supporting ourselves
By being paid to perfect the pastimes
That we have harbored based solely on the fact
That it makes us smile if it sounds dope.

Mr. Rock (no relation to The Rock) has matured and changed in a lot of ways since then, but nonetheless, it’s a volatile and perhaps even more innovative (although less accessible) collection of music than his newer material. This guy has been pushing the sheer art of rapping for years, regardless of what the mainstream hip hop community might be eating up at the time (these days… singing robots and Louis Vuitton apparently). Oh, and it certainly doesn’t hurt that his beats are hot fire.

Download “9-5ers Anthem” here if you want to see what mainstream hip hop could be if killing people over drugs wasn’t cool and T. Pain never discovered what the word “autotune” meant.