TYLER, THE CREATOR & EARL SWEATSHIRT

Heavily influenced by Three Six Mafia and Eminem’s early work that used brazenly violent imagery and hateful rhetoric, Odd Future reinstituted these touchstones to demand attention via shock value. At the time, OF also revived a long-time absent dynamic (near and dear to every hip-hop fan’s heart)—the rap collective; simultaneously a group and separate artists, their body of work resembles that of the Wu-Tang Clan; Tyler, The Creator being the leader and director (i.e. the RZA of the group), producing many of the beats for the group albums and the individual projects. Being composed of young kids at the time, most of them under 20, the group gained a huge amount of attention when Tyler, The Creator dropped the nearly unbelievable ‘Yonkers’—introducing the world to the OF aesthetic of in-your-face-debauchery. The lurching beat, deeply gravel-voice of Tyler, and sinister imagery of the video and lyrical content launched a storm of backlash, think-pieces, critical acclaim and declaim, and a huge cult following among edgy teenagers.

There was the shock value; there was the repeated crutch of using rape and the term ‘faggot’ to bolster it; there was the song with the refrain “Kill people, burn shit, fuck school”; there were the reports of Tyler inciting riots at his shows and events; there was the insidiously threatening Fallon performance showcasing Tyler’s relentless commitment to the group’s punk-aesthetic, thrashing with such vigor as to make Fallon’s other guests nearly cower—and oh, don’t forget Mos Def showing up at the end to yell “Swag, Swag!” into the camera—the only two options when confronted with Tyler’s aggressive energy being either to cringe away or reciprocate; there were the allegations that one of the members slapped a female photographer at a festival; there was the time Tyler got arrested after one of his shows; then that other time when he called Australia racist (“They hate niggas out here”) and then later got banned from the entire country; but behind all the headlines, controversy, one question rang clear through the noise: Who is Earl Sweatshirt? and more importantly, Where is he?

As fans began digging through the group’s earlier work in 2010, Earl emerged from and simultaneously dissolved into the ether of a single album and an accompanying music video, simply titled, EARL. The youngest member, 16 at the time, Earl’s precocious rhyming ability quickly became the focal part of the group’s intrigue. And yet, as OF was taking the spotlight, Earl was nowhere to be found in the interviews, shows, or subsequent albums released by the various members. And then there was the chanting of “FREE EARL” at OF shows, encouraged by the group, without explanation, demurring when asked where the young member was. Then came the insinuations that Earl’s mom was responsible for his disappearance. Then the backlash: “Free Earl” suddenly became synonymous with—or at least intimated—a violence towards Earl’s mother.

Like Tyler, Earl’s rhetoric on his eponymous album leaned heavily into the profane: highly misogynistic, violent, and homophobic in content; Earl was undoubtedly Tyler’s more gifted protege. So when Complex claimed to have found him, just months later, via some internet sleuthing, at a Somoan reform-boarding school, so too came the flurry of biographical details fans had only gossiped about previously. Complex’s circumstantial evidence fueled the rumor mill that Earl’s mom sent him away to keep him from Tyler’s and OF’s violence. And then The New Yorker got in in the action, resorting to actual reporting rather than the facebook scrounging of Complex1; NY got in contact with Earl via his mom for an exchange of emails and discovered that his father was the “South African poet Keorapetse William Kgositsile, whose best-known work inspired members of a legendary New York proto-rap group to name themselves the Last Poets in 1968.” In the correspondence Earl pleaded with his fans to stop chanting “Free Earl” because of the implicit message of vilifying his mother. In the spirit of OF’s “kill-em-all-attitude”, fans were left questioning whether it was really Earl drafting the responses or his mom, or the school he was staying at.

To me and my friends, the plea by Earl felt like a dim glimpse of a changing purview; that Earl really was in the process of a very real, and sobering maturation. And the glimmer of hope was ignited that when he eventually did come back he’d put the full force of his sheer talent and skill into something more meaningful than the vacuous horrorcore that OF claimed their fame with. For the time being, all we had was EARL, a few tracks on the first OF group album, Radicals, and a few loosies that emerged from the depths of the internet from when before Earl met Tyler, when he called himself Sly Tendencies. These early tracks are all the more impressive for the fact that Earl was alleged to be 14 or 15 when he recorded them. (Below is “Dat Ass”, and to this day I can’t get over the flow and some of the lines—”Even Christ said, ‘Christ he flows quite nicely'”)

For all their misanthropy, what we came out with by the end of 2011 was getting to know this precocious group of young kids who were using hip-hop as their voicebox to launch into a short-lived mainstream fame that would peter out over the subsequent years to a more quiet slew of offerings from the individual members. Tyler’s music has shifted away from the horrorcore antics, but continues to plumb the same introspective, self-destructive and -renewing themes he’s been plying since his first mixtape Bastard. As you listen to more of Tyler’s work, it becomes clear that the violent rhetoric is just a strategically chosen facade for exploring the difficulties of being an angry youth coming to terms with the world around him. As Pitchfork’s review of Goblin put it:

Goblin is at its best when Tyler sounds isolated, frightened, and confused. It’s the work of someone trying to figure out the world around him and his place within it, someone who often doesn’t like the conclusions he’s drawing. […] In short, he’s made this record for alienated kids like himself. If you don’t already like his music, you probably won’t like Goblin. And that’s apparently the way he wants it.

[…]

His fantasies and lack of filter are still huge roadblocks for many if not most listeners. They’re depraved and despicable, tied in part to a long and unfortunate legacy of gangster and street rap. […] That’s not to claim Tyler is making some broader commentary about the world, or gender politics, or adding multiple layers of complexity to his more violent thoughts; he’s not. Instead, his more reprehensible lines come across like a pathetic attempt for an underdeveloped, disconnected mind to locate some emotionality, control, or simply attention.

FURTHER LISTENING // VIEWING

“Oldie” features [@7:05] Earl’s first verse (and some sweet dance moves) upon returning from Somoa. It’s fire. Frank Ocean [@5:10] also shows up for a rare verse that is also fuego.

“Uh, back like lateral passin’ / With that mothafuckin’ gladiator manner of rappin’ ”

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1.What’s worse, Complex released a follow-up article declaiming the legitimacy of the New Yorker’s correspondence with Earl. Complex got in contact with on of Earl’s boarding-schoolmates, Tyler Craven, whose accounts of his time with Earl at the Somoan school would fuel the enduring belief that Earl did in fact hate his mother and was still repping OF’s attitude in staunch defiance to the program in which he was enrolled. Complex’s shitty proliferation of Tyler Craven’s blatant abuse of his privileged information just to catch some headlines made for well-deserved ire at the OF camp when Earl eventually did return. Having just about no communication with the outside world at the time, and therefore zero control of his public image, Earl would “return to Fahrenheit” to a PR mess and have to step into an allotted fame that he may not have even wanted anymore.

The whole debacle made for an interesting commentary on the influence of hip-hop’s less family-friendly values on youth—and the role parents play in moderating and censoring what their children are exposed to; in this case a carefully plotted trajectory of an obviously prodigal rhymer to be allowed to finish his schooling and maturation away from the spotlight before the debauchery of the OF fame circus could corrupt the young man; I truly think that Earl’s mom made the right decision for her son, and I imagine that Earl feels the same way.↩