Lice
Miami Lice: Season 4
Rhymesayers
9/10
Every so often, I find myself paralyzed by the overthinking of what I am writing, worried that I am not being clear enough or that I am being too cerebral and that I will come off as pretentious. Then I hear anything that Aesop Rock puts out and realized I am overthinking and under thesaurus-ing.
For their fourth drop, Miami Lice (Aesop and Homeboy Sandman) go bar for bar with dense meanings and funk bass-heavy, head-bopping beats. I am admittedly more familiar with Aesop, but Homeboy Sandman more than holds his own, making Season 4 significantly more than the sum of its parts.
Aesop Rock’s writing has always had a way of making me want to get weirder with language — to lean into the sideways metaphors, the inside-out phrasing, the kind of verse that feels like it was uttered by a dude who read so much he went insane. Listening to Miami Lice: Season 4, I caught myself wanting to review the EP like a Miami Lice stanza.
How to do that? You gotta go sideways. Think of what you want to say, now add to it, expand it, make it Shakespearean in its cerebral excessiveness. So, let’s take a single idea, I’m going with pizza, and explore as much as we can. Why be a minimalist when you can be a maximalist, amirite?
So, in that spirit:
Paranoid, I get annoyed by the oregano aura
I avoid the Noid and blast the grease-clicked flora
Piece a pizza Chichen Itza, explored like Dora
Hot-n-Ready constellations orbit cardboard moons,
Nobody out-pizzas the Hut in these fluorescent afternoons
Crusty, cheesy Olympic dumper dives with the racoons
Sbarro in the food court cathedral with the thin slice sermon,
Fast-fired comets are blazing with the mozzarella vermin.
West coast pizza kitchens daydreaming in sunburnt basil,
Rat mascots in Epcot passing tokens for children’s appraisal.
The mental firefights made-on-demand, bricolage of the brave,
Got my mojo potatoes in the jukebox static of the memories we save.
Red cups surround Round Table knights with a pepperoni shield
All salute and hail the melted kingdom, every crust a battlefield.