(Photo credit: Raymond Flotat)

Back in May, Aesop Rock released his latest album The Impossible Kid. Since then he has shared a video for single “Dorks” that put on blast the music media and its influence that art creators deserve.

The hip hop artist is going in a much different direction for his follow-up single. We’re learning that Aesop is a cat person, after he shared a far more lightweight track dedicated to his fluffy pet, Kirby. This week, he released a new video for “Kirby.” The clip features a puppet version of Aesop loafing around an apartment with his new feline pal. According to Pitchfork, the cat is played by Dina, a rescue cat who has been adopted since the video filming. The rescue was included over Kirby herself as she “wanted way too much money to appear in her own video.”  Check out the complete video below.

The clip is a step above your typical cat video. Aesop accomplished this through not only his ability to make a mundane subject intriguing, but by later encouraging fans and viewers to support local shelters and check out The Animal Humane Society.

Aesop’s Ian Bavitz was a major player in the alternative hip hop and underground scene in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s. Bavitz’s lyrics have helped him garner a band of followers, yet have also left music fans polarized; while some have found his writing deep and complex, others have criticized his style as loquacious. The hip hop artist tends to use homonyms and spends much of his downtime learning new words to incorporate into his music. In a Polygraph survey of 86 major hip hop artists, Aesop was ranked as the star with the biggest vocabulary, using 7,392 unique words per 35,000.