Other people feel the same way: When I saw Sweatshirt perform that night in San Francisco, fans nimbly rapped his lyrics back at him - no easy feat. Listening to “Sick!” I find myself hunching over as my head bops, thumb hovering over my phone screen, ready to rewind every few bars to untangle a particular knotty turn of phrase. Either you want to be a part of it, or you don’t. “Back off,” he warned listeners in the 2018 song “Shattered Dreams,” describing himself as “standoffish and anemic.” It’s an emotional stance audiences will either collapse into or run away from. This is not music to dance to or find solace in it invites us to listen attentively even if he uses his facility with language to foil our understanding of his politics and personal life. “East,” the second track off “Feet of Clay” (2019), was a drumless loop over which Sweatshirt rapped in such a way to suggest where the drums would be if he wanted to give them to us. Songs like “Grief,” from his 2015 album, “I Don’t Like Shit, I Don’t Go Outside,” buried drums deep in the mix until they sounded as if Sweatshirt were trying to smother them to death. Where his music once provoked, it is now insular, thoughtful, even withholding, prone to elliptical phrasing, meandering rhymes and off-kilter production that shrugs at popular rap music’s conventions (you’d be hard pressed to find anything that resembles a hook on “Sick!”). Talking with Sweatshirt, you get the sense of a restless but engaged mind.īut despite making music for the past 12 years, Sweatshirt remains one of rap’s more confounding artists. I’m trying to tell you!”) to the contemporary resonance of the West Indian political philosopher Frantz Fanon. Our conversation pinballed from the importance of memes (“They’re repositories of culture”) to the wonder of semiprivate jet services (“JSX, bro. Alternately cagey and frank, he’ll seem lethargic one moment only to flash his boyishly devious smile the very next, before wading into a heady discussion of - well, anything. In conversation, he oscillates between silliness and earnest reflection on his life and art.
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Sweatshirt emerged fully formed from the internet like Athena from Zeus, if Athena were a teenager rapping about serial murder and cannibalism. His father, the famed South African poet laureate Keorapetse Kgositsile, who left the family when Sweatshirt was a young boy, was a key influence on African American poetry in the 1970s and, through the Last Poets, the Harlem-based Black-nationalist collective, hip-hop. His mother is the legal scholar and critical race theorist Cheryl Harris, who teaches at the University of California, Los Angeles. A baby-faced 16-year-old who emerged alongside Frank Ocean and Tyler, the Creator as a member of Odd Future - the Los Angeles-based hip-hop collective that borrowed as much from the antics of “Jackass” as it did from Gucci Mane or L.A.’s history of punk performance - Sweatshirt projected a nauseating, slyly funny nightmare of adolescent rebellion.īorn and raised in Los Angeles, Sweatshirt was probably destined to be an artist. I first encountered Sweatshirt’s music in 2010, when his debut mixtape, “Earl,” dropped and he was anointed as rap’s nascent enfant terrible. But here he was: a master of language who didn’t necessarily seem interested in explaining himself or his work. Sweatshirt’s music tends toward logorrhea, and I expected him to be loquacious in person. Slouched in an uncomfortable-looking leather armchair, with his hood halfway pulled up over his long dreads, he had scruffy facial hair that made him look uncannily like Bob Marley. He arrived the day before after shows in San Diego and Los Angeles.
When I met Thebe Kgositsile, the rapper and producer who performs as Earl Sweatshirt, in the greenroom of the Warfield in San Francisco, he was on tour for his fourth studio album, “Sick!” which was released in January.
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