Photo by Sagan Lockhart
On his latest album, I Don’t Like Shit, I Don’t Go Outside, Earl Sweatshirt raps like he’s been pulled, kicking and screaming, into the cold world of adulthood. His flow is fleshed with earned aggression, and when he raps about "accepting a fifth of whiskey and necking it ‘til I’m dizzy," he sounds like he means it. The album often illuminates the process of coming to terms with one’s past and broaching an approximation of maturity; on I Don’t Like Shit Earl of the past becomes fodder, another artistic tool. It’s unlikely Earl will ever outrun his early hype—the version of himself that became famous in absentia by making a song about rape, and the one that led him to deal with "a gaggle of 100-fucking-thousand kids"—and he knows it. But by the end of I Don’t Like Shit, he just might be okay with that.
As clear-sighted as I Don’t Like Shit is at times, its insights are hard-won, and cloaked in a haze of depression—in a recent interview with NPR’s Microphone Check podcast, Earl tells host Frannie Kelley that he became "aware of himself" over the course of making the album, gaining clarity about what he had been through since returning to America. And he didn’t like what he saw. "I looked fucked up," he says, describing looking into a kind of emotional mirror. "You get to the other side and it’s like the clearest your head has ever been." Passing through hell to emerge, intact.
Maturity and self-awareness were the sworn enemy of Odd Future when they initially blew up in 2011. The pure youth—the energy and IDGAF rawness of every expression—was so exciting it made that all that Golf Wang misadventure revivifying.
While Odd Future’s musical energy was new, the attitude it was selling wasn’t. As long as there are disaffected, angry young men, there will be music made by and catering to them, and that music will often rely on misanthropy (or misogyny/homophobia) to signal writ-large masculinity to its intended audience. That’s just part of (American) youth, one that often, of necessity, entails denying the humanity of others en route to reaching one’s own moral and emotional self. Yet the diverging paths of Earl Sweatshirt and Tyler, the Creator point at ways of understanding this process of growth, and the way it plays out as they get older.
Take Tyler’s apex, "Yonkers", where the Tyler character serves as a template for the rest of Odd Future, and a cartoonish crutch supporting a certain type of disaffected masculinity. Here, his production is at its most seductive--defining a headspace you either want to be in or can’t stand, but that proves impossible to negotiate on your own terms if you’re not already with Tyler in spirit.
He’s a misanthropic, unhinged loner dude who can threaten rape in one breath and ride around on Jimmy Fallon’s back in the next looking like the cousin about to introduce you to fireworks. He’s defined more by the things he hates than the things he likes. He’s sexually frustrated (you could easily imagine his infamous first line on "Assmilk" going, "I’m not a bastard/ I just don’t get to fuck a lot"), and, as a result, explicitly positions sex as an awkward attempt to assert his own power rather than anything even remotely sensual ("That was me who shoved a cock in your bitch").
Meanwhile, Earl, the not-so-secret weapon of the first Odd Future releases, immediately establishes himself as a master of smashing the boundaries between poetic wordplay and utter depravity. On tracks like "Drop", he’s practically daring you to formally respect his inventive command of the language even as it’s being deployed for horrifying ends:
Tell your bitch to stop complaining ‘bout her achy tits
Her body is a temple
I don’t give a fuck I’m atheist
It’s an effective way for Earl hold our attentions, forcing focus onto prodigious verbal dexterity rather than an angry posture. It mimics much of the appeal of the initial message (expressed in its silliest, purest form as "kill people burn shit fuck school"). The characters of Earl Sweatshirt and Tyler, the Creator serve as avatars of unchecked rage, capable of doing the things all of their younger listeners might secretly want to do but would never act out.
The Earl character, at this stage, takes the same general approach to young dude-ness as Tyler. Both characters are still engaging precisely because they emanate from a core of real pain—the moment at which you can observe and condemn so-called "bad behavior" while still finding it wholly understandable. Like a rap game Tony Soprano, Tyler spends a lot of time awkwardly talking to his therapist, working through another identity—"Wolf," who does a lot of terrible things that Tyler sometimes feels bad about, and sometimes has reasons for doing, mostly related to his absent father.
"Seven", the galloping lead track on his first album, Bastard, starts with Tyler sharing some choice words for him: "I’d tell him to eat a dick quicker than Mexicans spring over borders." Earl’s equivalent of "Seven"—his most overt, personal, and illuminating early revelation—is the breathtakingly ambivalent "Luper"—a murder ballad in which Earl lashes out at a girl because "Most wanna tap and score, I want a fam of four," a desire for familial stability that’s explored in far greater depth on Doris. But here, Earl finds himself exposed, then hesitant, embarrassed: "Not, like, a family of four, just like... fuck it. You’ll never listen to this shit anyway, fuck you bitch."
Somehow, both of these songs are simultaneously repulsive and (to an extent) sympathetic. Tyler wants to be a man, but certainly not the same kind of man as his father and all he represents, while Earl reacts violently to admitting that he wants a normal family. (Try imagining the Earl of "epaR" fantasizing of a picket-fence future.) These remain the most powerful, enduring installments of the Odd Future catalogue—the origin story for the group’s collective performance, capturing the way in which the characters form as important pieces of young, male identity, and how that manifests itself in their art.
Many rappers/artists attempt to identify their personae with their selves as much as possible; Earl and Tyler exaggerate their character until it’s impossible to identify with the human being underneath. In contrasting Odd Future with their hero Eminem, Bethlehem Shoals writes: "The Odd Future bunch never mistake acting nuts for actually being nuts, and what makes their music so easy to excuse, and enjoy, is the sense of living, breathing kids underneath all the ugliness."
This gap—between acting and being nuts—is, in some sense, suspect (after all, we are what we do), but it allows for an understanding of the mindset the produces this music—most importantly, they are (or were) living, breathing kids. This youthful energy is often definitionally exclusionary and interested in proclaiming its individual identity, something that Odd Future harnesses for creative, if difficult, ends, but it’s more the work of kids keeping the nerds off the playground than real schoolyard bullies.
Forming an identity by "acting out"—something that is, by definition, reactive—is deeply related to actually being able to engage with and understand people in the long term. Possessing an actual, strong, and positive sense of self is crucial to understanding that other people have identities, too, even if they’re not the same as yours. They’re separate people. And it’s impossible to stave off that process forever. Growing up happens and our identities calcify, whether we want them to or not. So taking the process of youthful, masculine rage as far as it can performatively go raises the question: what’s next?
At first, Tyler and Earl playfully rapped about murdering people because it was fun. But it stops being fun and becomes an albatross, and eventually you have to either let your character die or live long enough to see it become a self-parody. Growing up is, in part, about losing that psychic scar tissue and being able to see the blood underneath. Actually being a bad person comes from seeing it and still choosing to ignore humanity, or simply not getting it. And that’s why it’s promising that Tyler appears to have largely discarded his persona.
By Wolf, Tyler’s production is slick, beautiful even—but his heart clearly isn’t in his tongue anymore. Most of the songs on Wolf are, ostensibly, love songs—twisted, creepy, stalker-y love songs that sound like they’re from a mashup of "The Following" and Adult Swim, but love songs nonetheless. In interviews from as far back as March 2014, Tyler expresses a lack of interest in doing anything besides skateboarding and watching Wes Anderson movies. It shows.
By contrast, I Don’t Like Shit is a warning against hanging on to the character for too long. Earl tells "Microphone Check" that, "the funniest part about the album is that it was funny and then it wasn’t funny. Like at all." And, indeed, I Don’t Like Shit isn’t hiding behind, or coyly deploying, Earl’s age, because the man is starting to catch up with the creations of his music—"I been living what I wrote," he raps on lead single "Grief". What he lived and wrote is the prior incarnation of the Earl Sweatshirt character: an avatar of the justifiably angry, gifted young man, naive and violent in equal measure—a sociopathic, brilliant Charlie Brown. ("Good grief," Earl spits.) He knows that it isn’t as cool to be angry when you have to live like that all the time.
In Earl’s dextrous command of his own persona, he’s become a different type of artist—more like a gifted comedian than a stock MC. One of the hallmarks of great comedy is the ability to slather on layer after layer of performance and skillfully yank them away. (Take any number of Louis C.K. bits, which play off the comic’s persona to undermine the audience’s expectations.) Earl frequently accomplishes this in his live show, where he manages to implicate the audience in the actions and impulses of his own character—in one instance, goading a crowd into chanting the "Molasses" refrain "I’ll fuck the freckles off your face bitch" before abruptly launching into the serious self-hatred of "Chum". (In the interim, Earl called out a bro in the audience who refused to join the crowd—making him feel uncomfortable no matter how he responded to the taunt.)
There is certainly a lot to get excited about in Earl’s career, but it’s hard not to think about what lies further down the path of I Don’t Like Shit. Earl’s Ghost of Christmas Future is basically current-day Eminem—a warning of what happens when you stay a psychotic Peter Pan. You get boring. The optimistic approach to I Don’t Like Shit is to call it a distillation of the moment where the persona overwhelms the person underneath, a self-aware version of The Marshall Mathers LP 2, and that in its wake is a reflective young man who knows exactly what buttons to push and when.