It’s been almost three years since his return from one of the most heavily scrutinized celebrity exiles of the Internet era, but Earl Sweatshirt remains inscrutable, mirage-like. Aside from a few public streaks of youthful goofiness (a starring role in Adult Swim’s sketch comedy series Loiter Squad and a Twitter feed that occasionally espouses the joys of heated toilets), the 21-year-old rapper and producer has been notably spotlight-averse. His public persona has largely been built on insularity and a faint sense of misanthropy, perhaps best summed up by the title of his sophomore album, released in March: I Don’t Like S***, I Don’t Go Outside.
Like the rest of his catalog, Outside is ostensibly a dark record. The beats, produced almost entirely by Earl (credited as randomblackdude), are coated with lo-fi grime and sound like they’ve been rattling around in the trunk of a car for miles. His lyrics, meanwhile, delve extensively into depression, anxiety and frayed relationships with loved ones. It’s the kind of album that would seem like an exercise in tiresome self-pity if Earl’s focus wasn’t so sharp or if he didn’t display such a desire to understand his demons rather than simply to expose them. Instead, his willingness to pick at his own psychic scabs and to see what comes out has led to consistent acclaim since his debut proper, Doris, in 2013.
“Whether I like it or not, I’m a people person,” Earl says. He’s speaking on the phone from his tour bus, struggling to be heard over the raucous din of his tour mates (including pro skater Nakel Smith, who contributed one of Outside’s few guest verses). “That’s why I have a voice.” He intends for his music to help others, he says, “while simultaneously helping myself.”
“Really, I feel like although it’s super insular, it’s like any of the novels that they make you read in school, where it’s like a story of self that helps people for a really long time,” he says of Outside. “It serves as like a pamphlet on how to [deal with these problems]. Because it is a mystery.”
Where’s Earl?
For much of the first act of his career, the mystery has been Earl himself. In his recorded material, he’s insisted that his real name, Thebe Kgositsile, be reserved for use only by those who know him personally; he prefers the rest of the world to refer to him by his Earl alias.
His surname — Kgositsile, not Sweatshirt — comes from his father, Keorapetse Kgositsile, a South African writer and political activist who currently serves as that country’s poet laureate. The elder Kgositsile returned to South Africa six years after Earl’s birth, leaving him to be raised by his mother, UCLA law professor Cheryl Harris, with whom he shared a strained relationship because of his troublemaking tendencies (which were due in some part, he speculates on the song “Chum,” to his anger at his father’s absence).
In 2009, after posting self-recorded hip-hop songs on MySpace under the moniker Sly Tendencies, Earl was approached by fellow Los Angeles rapper Tyler, The Creator, and subsequently joined Tyler’s burgeoning D.I.Y. hip-hop collective, Odd Future. Earl’s 25-minute debut mixtape, Earl, was released the following year, when he was 16 years old.
Earl became one of the primary reasons for Odd Future’s ascent into the popular consciousness, both due to Earl’s prodigious technical skill and for the mixtape’s visceral luridness. Pitchfork’s Tom Breihan, in a review written the following year, described the tape: “a dark fantasia of blood and rape and evil, and I absolutely hated it the first time I heard it. Now, months later, I still can’t shake it, and I sort of love it.” (Earl, for one, has distanced himself from the heightened violence of the tape’s lyrics as he’s grown up. “That was my way of screaming,” he told GQ in 2013. “[But now] I’m an adult.”)
But as 2011 saw Odd Future reach national prominence, Earl was notably absent. It later surfaced that his mother had sent him to Coral Reef Academy in Samoa, a boarding school with the self-described mission of “helping troubled youth overcome emotional difficulties and substance abuse.” It was there in exile that Earl spent most of his rise to fame, aware of the media storm surrounding him only through surreptitious Internet visits.
The furor around Odd Future was no doubt buoyed by the sense of mystery lent to the group by its missing member, but it also elevated Earl himself into something of a mythic figure. “Free Earl” became a mantra at Odd Future shows and a slogan printed on t-shirts and hoodies. The New Yorker published a long feature titled “Where’s Earl?” interviewing Earl’s friends and family and, with his mother serving as a medium, Earl himself.
Earl’s response to The New Yorker’s queries seems, in retrospect, extremely characteristic. “The only thing I need as of right now is space,” he wrote from Samoa. “I’ve still got work to do [. . .] If you sincerely care than [sic] I appreciate the gesture, but since you know the hard facts from the source, you no longer need to worry.”
Earl returned from Samoa in February 2012, but his return was far from the explosive homecoming some might have hoped. Aside from a few guest turns on friends’ albums — an appearance on Frank Ocean’s “Super Rich Kids”; the climactic verse on Odd Future group track “Oldie” — his approach to his newfound fame was deliberate. While he toured with Odd Future in the months following his return, he also took steps to ensure his independence from the group. He established a vanity label, Tan Cressida, as a subsidiary of Columbia Records in a deal that allowed him to continue working with Odd Future while remaining separate from them.
His debut album, Doris, was released in August 2013 to critical acclaim. The record, which featured numerous guest collaborators including Pharrell Williams, Vince Staples and the RZA, appeared on many year-end best-of lists. It was followed 19 months later by Outside, a stripped-back album released unceremoniously early due to a label error. If Doris had seemed happy to be distracted by guest verses and bright production, Outside instead defined itself by its willingness to dispense with everything considered even remotely inessential.
“I want them to be interacting with me”
“I just don’t want to make music with walls anymore,” Earl says. He’s talking about what he means when he calls Outside the end of his “teen” music. His thoughts are littered with long, thoughtful pauses; there’s the sense that he’s rewriting his sentences even as he’s speaking them. “I want to do different [expletive] sonically, you know? I Don’t Like S*** is kind of the extent that that [sound] could go, if you follow the trajectory from Earl to Doris to that. But you know, I say that now, but there’s still some beats that are like — I don’t know. I make beats differently now, like I’m going for different [expletive]. My peers are different now.”
Odd Future’s quiet dissolution earlier this year didn’t affect Earl much. Like fellow group member Frank Ocean, Earl had long since moved on from the collective, arguing in interviews that he didn’t want his career to be defined by a group he had been a part of as a teenager. He remains friends with Tyler and other Odd Future alumni, but he’s positioned himself artistically as an equal to other figureheads of indie hip-hop such as MF DOOM (once an influence, now a collaborator), Flying Lotus and Freddie Gibbs.
Maturation, particularly for someone plunged into the spotlight at such an early age as Earl, isn’t an easy process. Earlier this year, he embarked on a regimen to improve his health (a protracted illness had led a slate of shows, including one scheduled for Iron City in May, to be postponed), which involved cutting back on marijuana — though the stresses of being on tour altered that plan.
“I don’t know man, I ain’t even gonna lie, we got back on the road and [started back] smoking,” he says. “But it’s not like I’m not aware. What I’m happy with now is I have control. I know how to time it right, and I’m not oblivious about what weed does, so if I want to smoke in the morning I’ll smoke and give myself enough time to be who I want to be before a show.”
“There’s a lot on tour that’s out of your control,” he adds. He seems to relish situations in which he can exert some influence, particularly in the way he presents himself to the world. After spending years as an absent, legendary specter with no control over his image, he’s careful now to make sure he’s able to “speak for myself.”
“My [life] is never going to go back to the way it was,” he says. “It’s forcing me to do some [expletive] that I would feel good about being recognized for publicly, you know what I’m saying? If I have to be dealing with the world for the rest of my life, I want it to be on my terms. Well, not my terms, but I want it to be them interacting with me as opposed to, like, some weird projection.”
The real Earl Sweatshirt — at least, the one sitting on his tour bus with his friends on the other end of the phone — isn’t quite the serious, introspective character you might expect. At one point, midway through a thought on the “soul-baring” aspect of his lyricism, he breaks off. A hip-hop beat, distorted by the phone connection, blares over the bus’s speakers for several seconds. Earl and his friends cheer in the background. When the music ends, Earl returns to the phone with an almost post-game exhilaration.
“Oh my goodness!” he exclaims. “Sorry! I just heard this beat that I thought was [expletive] ridiculous!” This is the Earl who, at last year’s Iron City show, insisted on Rae Sremmurd’s drugged-out party anthem “We” being played multiple times in the middle of his set.
“People also don’t pay attention to the other side of my music, which is basically me just being a d***head,” he laughs. “Like, I grew up listening to [rappers] talking about themselves, you know, just finding super creative ways to flex about themselves and what the difference is between you and them.”
Even for songs that are unapologetically dark, Earl is careful to work in moments of lightheartedness, even silliness. In a performance on Jimmy Kimmel Live earlier this year, Earl was joined by Canadian jazz trio BadBadNotGood and experimental musician Gary Wilson for a performance of “Grief.” That song samples a slowed-down version of Wilson’s upbeat jazz tune “You Were Too Good to Be True” — but when Wilson was called onstage for the song’s upbeat outro, he shrugged, dropped to his knees, and proceeded to wrap a roll of duct tape around his head.
I ask Earl if he and Wilson had talked about the similarities in their career arcs — Wilson entered a self-imposed exile for decades following his 1977 debut album You Think You Really Know Me — but Earl dismisses the question before it’s even finished. “Nah, me and Gary talked about a bunch of [expletive],” he says. “We talked about chords and burgers and [expletive].” Earl’s moved on from that narrative of his exile, it seems. It’s the future that’s more important.
“When you can say the least but it means the most”
“I’m trying to get to the point where I don’t have to say [expletive],” Earl says. “That’s the hardest [expletive] ever, trying get it down to some proverbial [expletive].” He points toward the closing lines of “Grief”: “I just want my time and my mind intact / When they both gone, you can’t buy ‘em back.”
“It’s like my little proverb,” he says. “I made a proverb.”
With that goal, along with the lo-fi beats of Outside, is he aiming toward a minimalist aesthetic? “I mean, vaguely,” he says. “It’s not like a frontal goal of mine. I just feel like that’s the illest [expletive] ever, when you can say the least but it means the most.”
“The vein that I chase is just truth,” he adds. “I just trust people’s most honest moments.”
That seems to be the case with Earl’s most recent release, a ten-minute piece titled “Solace” that he told NPR was inspired by his mother. It’s the most avant-garde entry in his discography, a wandering, three-part bloodletting with lines — such as “I got my grandmama’s hands / I start to cry when I see ‘em / Cause they remind me of seein’ her” — that cut straight through the artifice of Earl’s typical technical prowess and read instead as purely confessional.
“It was just another one of those moments, where you’re vulnerable and being super sensitive and in tune with yourself,” he says. “I feel like that’s just perfect, man. When I was done, I was done.”
Though he’s reluctant to discuss his plans for a third album — it’s a project that he’s hinted on Twitter might even be released under a new pseudonym — he seems confident that it won’t be as experimental as “Solace.”
“That [expletive] would bore the [expletive] out of me!” he says. “I got shows to do, you know what I’m saying? I’m just doing whatever comes naturally. I guess it is, I just go with that [expletive] how it comes. To narrow it down, though, right now I [just] want to rap.”
As someone who has been famous from the very beginning of his career, Earl seems well aware of the pressures that come with every bit of music he releases. “It just means the stakes are higher,” he says. “I could [expletive] up, you know what I mean? Like, terribly. I don’t know, man. It makes there be less of an option, and ultimately gives me less distractions at the end of the day, because I have some [expletive] to set my mind on, which made me get over a lot of little kid [expletive] early and just made me focus on bettering myself.”
Earl Sweatshirt will perform at Iron City on Friday, Sept. 11. NXWorries and Remy Banks will open. Doors open at 7 p.m.; the show begins at 8 p.m. Tickets are $25. For more information, visit ironcitybham.com.