Why earl sweatshirt

Tyler once answered a question on this topic with a mixture of pride and resignation. Tyler is more than six feet tall, with a deep, resonant voice, but he moves with the sprightliness of a little kid, pausing for the occasional coughing fit brought on by asthma. He favors bright-colored Vans, slim-fitting shorts, and white tube socks, which he pulls up almost to his knees.

He hates being bored, and he has developed two strategies for keeping boredom at bay: either he entertains the people around him, thereby alleviating his misery, or he torments them, thereby sharing it. On a recent afternoon, he and the others were summoned to a local park to be photographed by the Los Angeles Times , and, once the shoot was over, Tyler found himself perilously underoccupied.

Maybe I am! An older white man shuffled past with his family, dragging a bag on wheels. The man stopped, turned, and stared. A friend arrived with a car and a video camera; the group was gathering material for a proposed show on Adult Swim, on the Cartoon Network. One idea was to have Tyler drive while Jasper, on his skateboard, held on to the passenger-side window and got pulled along.

Tyler started slowly, but then turned onto a side street and accelerated, and so did Jasper—who then swiftly decelerated in a pile of trash bags.

Tyler pulled over and got out of the car. He spied a man in basketball shorts and a sweatshirt. The man looked down, realized this was a prank, and looked up at Tyler, registering the face and the famous tube socks. For a brief, rare moment, Tyler was speechless. As a boy, Tyler was distractible but precocious. He got a copy of Reason, a music-production program, when he was twelve, and started teaching himself the piano when he was thirteen. Having established himself as a disruptive presence throughout the Los Angeles Unified School District, he eventually wound up at Media Arts Academy, in Hawthorne, which was also known as Hip-Hop High: it was a last-chance charter school that used music facilities to lure students from all over the city who might otherwise have dropped out, or already had.

One of his instructors was Jacques Slade, a hip-hop fan and a former rapper who quickly realized that Tyler was the most dedicated and creative young musician in the school. Tyler was also making a name for himself on a Web site called Hypebeast, which is devoted to the intersection of hip-hop and fashion; he used the message boards to post long screeds about his life and to solicit interest in his early musical projects.

Odd Future was coming together, too, around then: a loose confederation of like-minded young people from various high schools who hung out together on a stretch of Fairfax Street that was home to skateboard and street-fashion shops. Tyler had been working on an Odd Future magazine never published and an Odd Future T-shirt line since before the group existed, and he was unquestionably the leader; prospective members had to win him over.

And Mike G found out he was an official member only when he overheard Hodgy describing him that way to someone else. Dre, and 50 Cent; some observers viewed this as proof that Odd Future was about to join the mainstream record industry, or already had. Steve Rifkind, a veteran hip-hop executive, delivered his pitch in public, on Twitter:. Hey fucktyler and oddfuture have not been this excited since when I heard a group called wutangclan.

Tyler fired back a dyspeptic response, also on Twitter:. Tyler eventually met with Rifkind, but, instead of signing a big record contract, the members signed a series of small ones. Earl Sweatshirt remains a free agent—and a question mark. I could fuck up. This next single could be a failure. A recent London concert ended when fans stormed the stage, and New Musical Express , the impulsive British rock tabloid, put Tyler on the cover, wearing a crown, to mock the royal wedding.

Burn shit! Fuck school! If Tyler is the cult leader, Earl Sweatshirt remains, even in absentia, the Odd Future member with the most flabbergasting lyrics. The contrast was instructive. Tyler is a clever but effortful rapper, working hard to squeeze jokes and ideas into his lyrics, and harder still to push his lyrics out with his inflamed bronchia. In one typically sturdy and obnoxious couplet, inspired by his disdain for the Los Angeles phenomenon known as jerking a briefly ascendant local dance craze , he seems to be repeating himself, though he is actually changing the meaning by tweaking the words:.

At his best, he pushes his lyrics to the brink of gibberish, delighting in the echoing syllables:. There was something mysterious, and therefore enticing, about this younger, quieter, nimbler rapper who seemed less eager to be known. By the third verse, the protagonist has revealed himself to be a kidnapper and a rapist. At the dining-room table, Tyler was trying to figure out a design for an Earl Sweatshirt sweatshirt.

He pulled up the T-shirt design on his laptop. Ocean, who joined the group around the same time Earl went missing, examined the image. Tyler frowned. He attended New Roads, a private school in Santa Monica, where one of his friends, and his first producer, was Solomon Allison, who produces hip-hop under the name Loofy.

He and Earl met during a ninth-grade field trip, when Loofy and some friends were beat-boxing and freestyling, and Earl started rapping. A few weeks later, he called Loofy at home, and Loofy held up his Sidekick Slide to the phone, broadcasting beats over the line so that Earl could rap along. Often, he falls back on quaint expressions of his lyrical superiority:. Listeners could also find traces of Sly on his old blog, slytendencies. In the first entry, from March 6, , the future Earl Sweatshirt reviewed his own career so far:.

I sucked ass until about seven months ago, when I hit an epiphany. I rap. Tracks by Sly attracted some attention on MySpace, and soon—sometime in the summer of —he was asked to join Odd Future, which was already building a reputation in Los Angeles and online. In early April, an obsessive fan from Texas, posting on a Kanye West message board, unearthed a vital piece of information: Thebe used to study a Korean martial art called Hwa Rang Do. Another option was to explore the digital trail generated by the short-lived career of Sly, which leads, eventually, to a long-abandoned Twitter page that has somehow escaped the notice of the Odd Future horde.

Ima Swag It Out. In , he was named the poet laureate, and he is a frequent presence at South African literary conferences and festivals. There is a gruesome, hallucinatory catalogue of racially charged horrors and insults, most of them phrased as accusations:.

In the final stanza, the recrimination builds to a furious italicized expression of poetic abnegation:. Something about this image—the poet, awaiting the end of poetry and the start of revolution—captured the imagination of a group of like-minded oral poets in Harlem, who called themselves the Last Poets, in tribute to Kgositsile. Starting in , the Last Poets released a string of fiery spoken-word albums that prefigured the rise of hip-hop. Of course, some people might say that hip-hop betrayed the promise of Kgositsile and the Last Poets, instead of fulfilling it.

During the apartheid years, Kgositsile lived in exile and travelled widely. While visiting Chicago in the nineteen-eighties, he spent time with a poet named Sterling Plumpp, who introduced him to an African-American woman who was active in political circles.

By the early nineteen-nineties, Kgositsile was dividing his time between Johannesburg, where his old African National Congress comrades were finally taking power, and Los Angeles, where he shared a house with his wife and had an adjunct teaching appointment in the English Department at U.

He beholds a boy endowed with the fierce decency of Betty Carter, the jazz singer, who had died a few years earlier.

But near the end, unexpectedly, comes a ringing admonition—the celebrant has said too much:. But that was four years ago. Nowadays, the rapper born Thebe Kgositsile—all of his friends call him Thebe, not Earl—insists that he feels most himself when he is out in the open, breathing fresh air, even soaking up some sun. He says he went to the beach almost every day last summer.

I wanna be self-sustaining, make my own food and weed. Just eat fruit and be rude. His mom sent him away to Samoa for being a hellraiser, just as his friends in Odd Future were becoming internet sensations.

Ever since, he has been chased by his boy genius legacy—small karma for being a teen terror. Everything he does now is a push not to be a prisoner to decisions he made as an immature savant, and decisions made on his behalf when he was half a world away. Mid-City, he says, is a transitional zone; the end of the hood. The area has a quiet, suburban feel, with Little Ethiopia nearby, and a Jewish Community Center just around the corner.

But the diverse community is rapidly gentrifying. He grew up nearby and moved back to reconnect with his sense of home. Perched on a stool in his living room, he rolls the first of two spliffs on a large wooden table.

Framed paintings by black artists depicting images of black people lean against the walls. A stray Akai drum machine sits on the sofa, and under the table is W. There are two stacks of books and magazines on the table, including a copy of Thrasher and Segregation Story , a collection of photo essays by civil rights photojournalist Gordon Parks examining racism in the American South.

As he offers thoughts and ideas on topics ranging from rap goof troupe YBN collective to the Man Booker Prize winning author Paul Beatty, his voracious hunger for both learning and sharing becomes clear. He wants to find the right balance between being bookish and being active.

His quest for self, he explains, involves his music, brain, and body. As a child of writers, he is starting to come to terms with the idea he was groomed for this life.

Thebe jokingly calls his childhood oppressive—growing up, his mom would make him write essays to explain why he should get anything he wanted. His ongoing education on black history and white supremacy had a clear impact on Some Rap Songs , which he calls an album explicitly geared toward black listeners.

Thebe has always been an artist whose ideas crystalize when he can see them through others, and falling in with the right camp feels instrumental to his process. Some of these artists contributed raps and production to the record, but their wavy style can be felt subconsciously, too. At the same time, the title is a mark of his effort to return to a more fundamental rap ethos, one inspired by watching 2 Raw for the Streets battles and listening to old radio freestyles.

Many of the tracks on Some Rap Songs were recorded in his home studio here in L. He recorded most of the vocals for the album alone in this quiet sanctum.