Aesop Rock Performs “Dorks” on ‘The Late Show With Stephen Colbert’

Aesop Rock pays a visit to The Late Show With Stephen Colbert and performs "Dorks," a track from the New York MC's latest album, The Impossible Kid. View the four-minute performance, which aired on Monday night (June 13), above via YouTube.

Aesop Rock has been a staple in the underground game for two decades, and his appearance on The Late Show served as his first major TV gig. Just prior to the show, Colbert tells the crowd, "My next guest has been making music for over 20 years and is performing on network television for the first time."

Backed by indie rock band Yo La Tengo and a purple-and-green video screen, Aes uses his extensive rap vocabulary to speak on the reality of the music industry. He kicks off the first verse by spitting, "Question: If I died in my apartment like a rat in a cage/Would the neighbors smell the corpse before the cat ate my face?/I used to floss the albatross like Daddy Kane with the chain/I'm trying to jettison the ballast with the hazardous waste/The kid is comfortably numb, routine a tedious crutch/Steep in a self-imposed Stockholm and Lima in flux."

Aes recently took to Facebook to explain the song's message, stating, "This is about the music industry, tastemakers, artists, critics, and messages pumped out into the community through all related channels. It deals with the divide I see between the art, the artist, the image, and how music media gets to steer the conversation more than the actual creators do."

The Impossible Kid is one of Aesop Rock's most successful projects to date. The "Daylight" rapper took to Instagram on May 9 to thank his fans as the new album earned him the best first-week sales of his career. In case you missed it when it dropped on April 29, go ahead and cop The Impossible Kid via iTunes for $9.99.

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