MR. COMPLEX



He crafts dense, clever rhymes but hates his rep as the thinking man's rapper. For this most recent effort, the dark, frazzled Bazooka Tooth, he cast himself as a superhero without any superpowers. And when he should've been riding the wave of underground hip-hop stardom, this Brooklyn-based MC/producer was trapped on his sofa, entering his own personal hell. What's up with Aesop Rock?



Brooklyn, 3 p.m., the end of summer. Aesop Rock's  Ian Bavitz by birth  apartment is a shit-hole. It's not the apartment or the neighborhood. Rather, his brownstone in this mostly hip enclave of Brooklyn is structurally gorgeous, with high ceilings and airy rooms. It's just that personal maintenance doesn't seem to high on the guy's list.



His living room is a couch, a little table and a TV, all buried by what appears to be the after-effects of a hip-hop cluster bomb. Old newspapers and rap magazines are strewn around the perimeter, and the table, piled high with matchbooks and scraps of paper and pack after pack after pack of cigarettes, some empty and crumpled, some with a few smokes left, forms an apex amid piles of clutter and trash. Pro-Keds with fat laces sit askew, packs of EZ-Wides and empty Snapple bottles litter the floor. Crumbs are scattered about, along with plastic cups (some converted to makeshift ashtrays) and clothing labels that say "2XL" and stick to your feet as you walk. In one corner is his recording gear  an Ensoniq keyboard, a Roland 303, a G4 with ProTools, a busted turntable. The walls are barren but for one corner with posters of old tours and albums  mostly from his label, Def Jux  and a couple of shelves of Zoids and Bionical figurines, and a talking Master P doll.



If Bavitz's apartment seems a bit jumbled and dense, well, that wouldn't be so different from his new album, Bazooka Tooth, and it wouldn't be so different from his life since the end of 2001. To the casual observer, it might seem that Aesop Rock should have been on top of the world. Labor Days, his first album for indie hip-hop's premier label, Def Jux, was out and doing well. "Daylight," the strongest single from the album, with its happy-sad, '70s AM rock backing track and memorable, upbeat hook ("All I ever wanted was to pick apart the day/Put the pieces back together my way"), had become a bona fide underground hit; the album would go on to sell some 40,000 copies. Magazines fawned over the rapper's unique, elastic delivery and his seemingly encyclopedic knowledge of culture, delivered one clever couplet at a time. Yet, while this transpired, Ian Bavitz was in his own personal hell.



The rapper doesn't like to discuss it. He stares off at the television and mumbles, taking endless drags from his cigarettes. Around the time the twin towers went down, around the time his girlfriend of several years split for the west coats, around the time Labor Days came out and expectations were high, "I had some kind of anxiety attack," he says. "It was some real shit. Luckily, there were some people around me who gave a shit, who literally took me into their hands, started making phone calls, getting me help."



As much as Bavitz may not like to discuss personal details, Aesop Rock can't help but wax poetic over the fodder of life; the one thing the rapper can always find in his apartment is his mini digital recorder, and he's constantly recording rhymes and ideas. Bavitz rapped most directly about his difficulties on "One of Four," a hidden track at the end of the Daylight EP, the last thing he released before Bazooka Tooth. The song explicitly details the four people who Bavitz says he owes his life to, the four friends who were there when he needed them. Included in the four was El-P, rapper and owner of the Def Jux label. "I could live to be 1,000 years old and never repay them," Aesop raps at the track's beginning. "In August of 2001 my seemingly splinter-proof brain bone scaffolding exploded…I'd be lying if I said all of this made even the slightest fragment of sense to me/That's real/Simply put, I don't know what happened or what's still happening/I literally feel like I'm teetering on the blunt edge of my sanity."



Bavitz went weeks at a time without leaving his couch; a simple walk to the deli for smokes could reduce him to extreme desolation. Meanwhile, the Who Killed the Robots tour, slated to be Aesop's introduction to America alongside Mr. Lif and Atmosphere, intended to promote his new album, went on without him.



"Before I really understood what was going on, I was worried about the effects of him canceling the tour," says El-P, Bavitz's boss as well as friend. "Once we knew what was happening, we let him know that it was more important that he was OK than for him to be ambitious."



Bavitz never stopped making music, though. He invested almost anything he made from Labor Days into his studio gear and continued to experiment with production. And he channeled the dark days of his life into beats and rhymes that, likely, the world will never hear. "I leave those decisions to my artists," says El-P of that material. "If it was up to me, some of it might surface. There was some pretty monstrous stuff there."



Bavitz was born in Long Island in 1976. His most significant early musical influence was his older brother, who turned young Ian on to Run-DMC's Raising Hell and the Beastie Boys' Licensed to Ill, both of which were soon confiscated by their mother. "She walked into my brother's room and he was like, 'I did it like!/I did it like that!/I did it with a waffle-ball bat!' and that was pretty much it," he recalls.



Bavitz started rhyming for his friends and occasionally recorded his raps on his older brother's four-track. "There was hip-hop all around in high school," he says. "We were skateboard kiss taping [NY radio DJs] Stretch and Bobbito." After high school, he went to Boston University to study paining. "After I graduated, I was trying to make it with music and trying to paint and I ended up half-assing everything," says Bavitz, who had moved back to New York.



But he was making himself known in New York's underground. As a white guy, Bavitz recalls, "You had to do your thing if you didn't want to get made fun of." He says that when he was young, he never strove to be a rapper: "I was the white kid. I didn't think it was an option. You'd have these dreams of being the only white kid in a room and people being like, 'Oh shit, he's good.' Anybody who says they didn't have that thought is lying."



Bavitz isn't keen on the "white rapper" questions, though. "It's almost like someone asking for an excuse," he gripes. "'What's your excuse for being a white rapper?' What do you want me to do, apologize? I'm sorry, but I feel like I was born to be a rapper. I put my legwork in like anyone else."



Music for Earthworms was his first self-release. The album still circulates, thanks to CD burns and downloads, but he sold only 200 copies. "I got tired of cutting covers at Kinko's," he explains. With his follow-up, Appleseed, he made more of an effort. "Cats would call my house and be like, 'I got your number from this guy, who knows this dude, and I want 10 copies for my store.' I never expected to have one fan. When I started selling tapes and cats were interested, I was shocked. Selling 2,000 copies was like going platinum."