Crediting Aesop Rock & Homeboy Sandman's "Lice" releases

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Aesop Rock and Homeboy Sandman have released a series of EPs around the name Lice.

They have a Bandcamp page with a URL made up both of their names at aesoprockhomeboysandman.bandcamp.com, which uses “Lice (Aesop Rock & Homeboy Sandman)” as its artist name.

There’s a dedicated Spotify page for “Lice” (and a Deezer page too, although it’s a mess of albums from different people with the same name, like most Deezer pages).

The album art for the four EPs is unfortunately all over the place:

There are a couple of singles too:

I think there’s an easy case to be made for having a joint artist page for the duo, since they’ve released multiple albums together and created a dedicated Bandcamp page. I think that using the name “Lice” for it also makes sense, since that seems like it may be the artists’ preference (based on the Bandcamp page).

This leads to the usual problem of releases getting arbitrarily assigned to either the joint artist or the individual artists (and then duplicates getting added as a result), though.

I think my preference would be for all of the releases to be credited to the joint “Lice” artist, with “credited as” set to “Aesop Rock & Homeboy Sandman” in cases where the individual names appear on the album art but “Lice” doesn’t (like the first, third, and fourth EPs). It feels weird to have the majority of an artist’s releases not credited to the entity’s name, however.

If others agree that it makes sense to credit the releases to the joint artist, it might still be reasonable to do some join phrase hackery on the RGs so that they’re all credited to “Lice (Aesop Rock & Homeboy Sandman)”, to make it a bit less likely that people add duplicates due to not seeing the EPs in the individual artists’ discographies. I’d probably also add annotations to steer editors in the right direction, too.

I’d like to know what other editors think before I start trying to make this more consistent. Adding some people I see in the edit history: @JKBlohm @waxie @fedcor @J.Bloom @thomnottom @brinlystorm @envision5748 @Ooglogput @kinkornkarn

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+1 for one singular entity just called Lice.

This is one of the times I feel like artwork isn’t a great source of truth. The two have released enough projects together that we can safely say they are a group of two called Lice.

There is a little bit of prior art here. The original Run the Jewels release was often credited to “Killer Mike and El-P are Run the Jewels” (or words to that effect). IIRC, the opposite was true of the Czarface Meets Metal Face record.

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You can always have “Lice” credited as “Aesop Rock & Homeboy Sandman” if that seems like it makes sense for this specific case (not saying you should, that’s for people who know more about the case to decide, just saying it’s a possibility technically).

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+1 for Lice as an entity. To me it’s clear that the artists’ intent is that they are a group called Lice, and that they just have to use both of their names for discoverability.

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Thanks for the input! I’ve moved all the release groups and recordings to the Lice artist, so they at least show up there without needing to view various artist releases now. I’ve left the credited-as text as it was for now, but I wouldn’t object if anyone thinks that all of these should be credited as “Lice”.

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I support having a single artist entry for the collaboration, since it is an ongoing thing. I lean towards it being labelled “Lice (Aesop Rock & Homeboy Sandman)” because I don’t really see much official that only says Lice. Obviously some of that is for discoverability, but it also seems to be done in a lot of artwork and write-ups where it’s not as necessary.

That being said, I’d be fine with using the current Lice entry with Aesop Rock & Homeboy Sandman as the disambiguation. It’s hard to determine artist intent with this one and whatever the majority prefers I’d be cool with - as long as it’s a joint artist.

Also, thank for tagging me - I gave up trying to figure out what to do with this one awhile ago.

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Stick all the variations into the Aliases and they should then appear on the search.