Hail Mary Mallon

Hail Mary Mallon

Artist

Hail Mary Mallon is a hip-hop group comprised of Aesop Rock, Rob Sonic, and DJ Big Wiz.

The group met each other in the ‘90s and began working together on Definitive Jux–the record label EL-P owned at the time. Aesop and Rob collaborated for the first time on Aesop’s 2005 song “Winners Take All”—the two went on to become close friends. Aesop explained their bond in a 2014 Rhymesayers video series:

We started joking around. Which is kinda what-kinda a lot of what our bond is was just like being funny to each other.

The group had toured together for years before deciding to make a record. In a 2011 interview for the indie spiritualist they explained how they came together:

I guess it’s an idea we had been kicking around for a while, and finally it just seemed like the right time to make it happen. We were all pretty used to the dynamic just from doing so much traveling together, so forming the group seemed pretty natural. Once we recorded the first couple songs we kinda put everything else down for a bit and decided to see this through.

The group is named after Marry Mallon—a cook that unintentionally caused a typhoid outbreak in New York during the early 1900s. She has become an interesting footnote in the history of New York and the origin of the name “Typhoid Mary”. In a 2015 Bandwagon interview the group explained the reasoning behind the name. Rob Sonic noted:

It wasn’t so much the story of Mary Mallon as it was that we wanted something that represented New York City and how everyone from there has some sort of messed up story. It is interesting to me that she was someone who really wanted to help people but was just kind of screwing everything up. I can relate to that.

Aesop elaborated further:

She’s tied to such an interesting piece of New York history, and I think her story can be flipped in a lot of ways. She’s a killer, she’s a helper, she’s all of it. She just wants to feed you but the side effect is that you die. Tuff stuff.