The video that made Earl Sweatshirt a star lasts only two and a half minutes, and when it appeared on the video-sharing site Vimeo, on May 26, 2010, most viewers probably didn’t know what to make of Earl Sweatshirt, or why he was in a hair salon, beneath a dryer hood, especially since his head was shaved nearly bald. He was sixteen then, with an oblong face, camel-brown skin, and wide lips. In the video, he seems to be shorter than most of his friends, who join him on a psychedelic adventure that is certainly—though not obviously—staged. A prescription-pill bottle is emptied into a blender, along with cough syrup, malt liquor, and something that looks like marijuana; the result is a nauseous gray-brown slurry that swiftly proves its efficacy. After choking down as much as they can, Earl and his friends grab their skateboards and head out into Los Angeles. They hallucinate, tumble off their boards, fight, convulse, and bleed. Earl spits out two teeth and pulls out a fingernail; by the end, nearly everyone is catatonic, or foaming at the mouth, or both.

This was, by the way, a rap video, and it’s no small tribute to Earl Sweatshirt to say that his rapping was not in the least upstaged by the images that accompanied it. His voice has a pubescent twang, but he sounds disconcertingly calm and clear, especially given his chosen subject matter. The song, which is called “Earl,” turns scenes of horror-movie hedonism into tongue-twisting provocations:

Go on, suck it up—but hurry, I got nuts to bust and butts to fuck and ups to chuck and sluts to fuckin’ uppercut. It’s O.F., buttercup. Go ahead: fuck with us.

O.F. stands for Odd Future, the hip-hop crew that comprises most of the young people in the music video. (The full name is Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All Don’t Give a Fuck Loiter Squad—although that’s just one of many full names.) The “Earl” video, which has now been viewed more than three million times, led neophytes into the sprawling but insular world of Odd Future. There were eleven members, and dozens more affiliated skateboarders and scenesters; the group had a homemade Web page where fans could download their homemade albums for free, as well as a photography blog, Golf Wang (it’s a spoonerism), and a constellation of Twitter accounts. Their noxious attitude was seductive, and so, too, was their earnest devotion to the old-fashioned craft of hip-hop: subtle rhythms and unexpected rhyme endings, do-it-yourself beatmaking and engrossing storytelling.

In the year since the release of the “Earl” video, Odd Future has made a steady but extraordinarily steep ascent, which has been marked by a series of surreal milestones: the time Snoop Dogg registered his approval, on Twitter; the cover story in Billboard, with a headline saying that the group “may just be the future of the music business”; the performance on “Late Night with Jimmy Fallon,” which ended with one of the members jumping on Fallon’s back. Odd Future is the first major hip-hop movement that is primarily an online phenomenon, and, in that sense, the group’s sudden rise can seem not only inevitable, in retrospect, but overdue. The members became viral stars long before they were proven ticket-sellers, let alone record-sellers; they built their audience almost entirely through streams and downloads.

As Odd Future has barged into the hip-hop mainstream, it has charmed listeners by sneering at them. A recent article in the Guardian called Odd Future “the world’s most notorious rap group,” which is indisputable, although it should be noted that this title has been vacant for some time—in hip-hop, notoriety hasn’t been in fashion since the early days of Eminem. Odd Future’s willfully repugnant lyrics—the verses contain plenty of violent sexual fantasies, and “faggot” is frequently deployed as a term of address—are designed to nettle cosmopolitan listeners who have come to think of themselves as generally unnettlable, adding an unmistakable element of cruelty to music that can otherwise seem playful. There is something profoundly nostalgic about this strategy: Odd Future sometimes seems intent on resurrecting the bad old days, when hip-hop was scary, even if that means concocting sadistic fantasies or reinforcing old prejudices.

The Odd Future charge has been led by the group’s founder and mastermind, Tyler Okonma, known as Tyler, the Creator. He is a twenty-year-old auteur, rapper, designer, and musician (he created the murky but propulsive beat for “Earl”), who might be described as “lively”—but only by someone prone to understatement. The rise of Odd Future has turned Tyler into a new-media celebrity, a role he was born to play. After a recent performance at the Coachella festival, he wandered into the festival grounds and wasn’t entirely unhappy when well-wishers noticed him and gave chase. On his @fucktyler Twitter account he wrote, “OMG Fucking Just Ran From A Pack Of Fans Threw Coachella. Shit Was Wild!”

The other members of the group have become cult celebrities, too. Hodgy Beats, a diminutive, quick-tempered rapper, is the group’s hip-hop traditionalist and also its self-proclaimed “vice-president”; he is half of the duo MellowHype, along with an eccentric and laconic producer who calls himself Left Brain. Two more rappers, Domo Genesis and Mike G, are known for unhurried verses that both proclaim and evoke their shared dedication to marijuana. Matt Martians makes spaced-out funk. Travis Bennett, known as Taco, and Jasper Dolphin are members but not really musicians; their uselessness has become a running joke. Taco’s sister, Syd (the Kyd) Bennett, is the group’s d.j. and recording engineer. And Christopher (Lonny) Breaux, known as Frank Ocean, is in many ways an anomaly: both the newest member (he was inducted last year) and the oldest (he is twenty-four), he is also the group’s lone singer and the only member with a major record deal—he signed with Def Jam Recordings before he joined Odd Future.

For the past year, though—since shortly after the release of the “Earl” video—Earl Sweatshirt himself has been missing. He hasn’t been making public appearances with the group, and it seems he hasn’t been making private appearances, either. Last summer, a gnomic message appeared on the group’s Tumblr page: “Free Earl.” In July, when the group announced its first proper home-town concert, at the Key Club, in West Hollywood, the official flyer had Earl’s name crossed out and a terse explanation: “Will not be there due to mom.” Earl was still absent in October, when the group played a show in London, at the invitation of the British independent label XL, and, later that month, in New York, where teen-age fans and music-industry executives crowded into a basement and rapped along. But by then Odd Future had turned “Free Earl” into a rallying cry, and it was chanted long and often during the New York show. Because the members declined to say where or what, precisely, Earl needed to be freed from, many fans assumed his mother was the culprit. He was some sort of hip-hop prodigy—the most exciting rapper to emerge in years, a virtuoso who was just starting to figure out what he could do with words—but he was gone. One day last December, Tyler sent out a Twitter message that was at once uninformative and, in its way, deeply affectionate: “DAMN, EARL AIN’T HERE. LETS SWAG IT OUT FOR THAT UGLY ASS NIGGA.”

In 2000, Americans bought about seven hundred and eighty-five million albums, according to Soundscan, and about a hundred million of them—13.4 per cent—were classified as “rap.” By last year, total album sales had dropped by about half, and rap-album sales had dropped even faster, to twenty-seven million—about six per cent of the market. No form of music has suffered more from the industry collapse than hip-hop, a restless, technologically savvy genre wedded to a stubbornly old-fashioned business model. Country music has listeners still eager to buy CDs, and indie rock has bands willing to think of themselves as online startups (and supporters willing to go along); hip-hop is stranded somewhere in between. Fans gorge themselves on free online mixtapes, which are often more vibrant than the albums they ostensibly promote. At the same time, even established acts find themselves hard at work in the old industry, chasing terrestrial radio airplay and night-club spins in pursuit of a diminishing customer base. For the members of Odd Future, hip-hop looks less like a road to financial salvation and more like a playground, full of rusty old attractions and rickety new ones; its dilapidated condition only offers more opportunities for mischief. One night, Tyler was discussing an emerging hip-hop star who had recently spent sixty thousand dollars on a chain. Tyler said, “You know how many fuckin’ tree houses you can make for sixty thousand fuckin’ dollars?”

Odd Future was a social club before it was a hip-hop collective, and the members maintained their recreational approach even as they got more serious about music. They started putting together albums long before they had a clear idea how, exactly, to make this activity profitable. After school and on weekends, they got together to make beats and record their raps, often at a place they call the trap. In Southern hip-hop, a trap is a house that serves as a drug dealer’s home base, but this trap, on a green and quiet street, is a small apartment above a garage on the Bennett family’s property. Taco and Syd the Kyd live with their parents in the elegant house the garage belongs to.

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The album that best encapsulates the Odd Future spirit is “Radical,” a compilation that appeared online a year ago. Over a selection of famous and obscure hip-hop beats borrowed—or, if you like, stolen—from established acts, the members introduce themselves. Earl Sweatshirt begins one track by sneaking some autobiography into his wordplay:

I’m half-privileged, think white and have nigger lips. A tad different: mad smart, act ignorant— shit, I’ll pass the class when my dad starts giving shits, but as long as our relationship is turdless, I’m-a keep burning rubber and fucking these beats with burnt dick.

This isn’t a plea for sympathy—it’s a declaration of independence, and a motivational statement. Earl insists that rapping well (“fucking these beats”) is the best revenge, and its own reward. Tyler’s approach is similar, but more confrontational. He begins the album with “Splatter,” which was recorded, after numerous false starts, when his voice was hoarse and his mood was foul. In the song, his barbs are absurd (“beating midgets up with ladders”), menacing (“This isn’t rape—this is fuckin’ without a condom on”), and personal (“Deep down, I’m a emo fuckin’ faggot that’s depressed”).

Fans looking to defuse lyrics like these have sometimes pointed out that the group includes one lesbian, Syd the Kyd. But her presence onstage isn’t likely to sway listeners who find the slurs and insults unfunny or pernicious. When a fan wrote to her to complain that the group’s constant use of the word “faggot” was homophobic, she didn’t back down. “Im sorry if the word faggot offends you,” she wrote. “It doesnt offend me. Neither does the word nigger. I got over that long ago.” Syd the Kyd is an emerging heartthrob—she posts some of her fan mail on her blog—and, instead of criticizing hip-hop iconography, she seeks new ways to deploy it. She is half-seriously talking about creating her own brand: the tag line would be “Syd got bitches,” accompanied by a cartoon of her smiling face squeezed between two cartoonishly large breasts.

Although all the members of Odd Future are African-American, their music, especially the raps of Tyler, the Creator and Earl Sweatshirt, sometimes recalls that of the Beastie Boys and Eminem, white rappers who used exaggerated truculence, early in their careers, to prove that they belonged. They won acceptance from black listeners and adoration from white ones. Odd Future, too, seems to attract a largely white audience, which is by no means unusual or irremediable but which remains a sensitive subject. Tyler once answered a question on this topic with a mixture of pride and resignation. “It Seems Like Skinny White Kids Are My Biggest Fan base,” he wrote. “But Fuck It, At Least I have One, It Was A Time Where No One Gave A Fuck.”

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. He grabbed his skateboard and did a few laps around the parking lot, sending skyward a stream of idle and sometimes incoherent thoughts: “If I’m a fuckin’ bitch—guess what! Maybe I am!” He sat down on the sidewalk next to Jasper Dolphin. An older white man shuffled past with his family, dragging a bag on wheels. “Fuckin’ loser has a roller backpack,” Tyler said, plenty loud enough to be overheard. The man stopped, turned, and stared. “He would have got fucked up if this was seventh grade,” Tyler said, not making eye contact, and the man stared some more.

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. “Hey,” Tyler shouted. “You dropped your wallet!”

The man looked down, realized this was a prank, and looked up at Tyler, registering the face and the famous tube socks. “Aren’t you Tyler, the Creator?” he said. For a brief, rare moment, Tyler was speechless.

Tyler was born in 1991, the son of a social-worker mother and an African father, who is a conspicuous presence—that is, absence—in his son’s rhymes. Tyler’s first album is called “Bastard.” The title track is an orgy of self- and non-self-loathing, building to a bitter punch line: “My father didn’t give a fuck, / so it’s something I inherit. / My mom is all I have, so it’s never ‘Meet the Parents.’ ” In person, he offers only a little more biographical information. “My father’s from Nigeria,” he says. “That’s what my mom told me—but she also told me she loved me, the other day.” His mother is a cheerful, voluble woman who must be at least partly responsible for Tyler’s verbal exuberance, and though she declines to comment about Tyler’s relationship with his father, she says she is nothing but impressed by her son. “I don’t have any problems with what he raps about or what he says,” she says. “If people want to take that shit seriously, about whatever, then that’s on them.” She also says that the passion Tyler inspires is proof that he’s onto something: “People can relate to his music because either they’re going through something or they remember the hell that they were going through—tough times, as a teen.”

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. One of Tyler’s early efforts was a silly but carefully constructed track called “Herpes on My Lip,” in which he pitch-shifted his voice, to make himself sound like an R-rated baby, and added woozy keyboard chords. “Any criticism toward his work back then, it was strictly toward the content of his lyrics,” Slade says.

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. When one listener accused him of ripping off the Neptunes, Tyler wrote, “If its not ‘original’ enuff, fuck it, ill take my chance.” (Like many provocateurs, he is intensely sensitive to criticism.) And in September, 2008, when an affiliated music blog called Hypetrak called him “one of those artists that deserves to be heard on a larger scale,” Tyler didn’t hide his exultation. “O shit,” he wrote. “I made it.”

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. Hodgy found his way to Odd Future through Left Brain, who had known Tyler since middle school. “He says no to everybody,” Hodgy says. “But he said yeah to me.” Frank Ocean received his formal invitation during a casual conversation with Hodgy. And Mike G found out he was an official member only when he overheard Hodgy describing him that way to someone else.

Part of Odd Future’s appeal is its autonomy: members share a visual aesthetic (Tyler designs the album covers) and a vocabulary (“swag” figures heavily: a noun, an adjective, a verb, and an all-purpose expression of agreement or endorsement), and they have no special connection to the Los Angeles hip-hop scene. Many of them first interacted through MySpace, and, by the time any of hip-hop’s gatekeepers took note of them, they already had an online identity and had released nearly a dozen albums themselves.

Last summer, Odd Future acquired a pair of well-connected managers, Christian Clancy and Dave Airaudi, both veterans of Interscope Records, the home of Eminem, Dr. Dre, and 50 Cent; some observers viewed this as proof that Odd Future was about to join the mainstream record industry, or already had. Jay-Z met with the group, in hope of signing Odd Future to his Roc Nation label, and Sean (Diddy) Combs energetically pursued a friendship. Steve Rifkind, a veteran hip-hop executive, delivered his pitch in public, on Twitter:

Hey @fucktyler and @oddfuture have not been this excited since 1993 when I heard a group called @wutangclan. Tyler fired back a dyspeptic response, also on Twitter:

@steverifkind You Sound Like The One Dude Who Goes To Schools And Tell Little Boys That You Have Puppies And Shit. No “Offense.”

Earl Sweatshirt, shown on a sticker made by fans of Odd Future.

Tyler eventually met with Rifkind, but, instead of signing a big record contract, the members signed a series of small ones. Tyler agreed to a one-album deal with XL, and MellowHype arranged with Fat Possum, a small label based in Mississippi, to issue a retail version of “BlackenedWhite,” the duo’s 2010 online album. Frank Ocean, who already had a record contract, released his début album, “Nostalgia, ULTRA,” in February, as a free download; the album, which is by far the subtlest and prettiest item in the Odd Future catalogue, instantly transformed him into one of R. & B.’s most acclaimed singer-songwriters. (Soon after its release, Ocean tweeted a photograph of himself in the studio with Beyoncé.) Last month, the group itself signed a distribution deal with a subsidiary of Sony, which is supposed to preserve the members’ autonomy while providing them with something most of them have never seen before: royalty checks. Earl Sweatshirt remains a free agent—and a question mark.