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I do not anticipate that Earl Sweatshirt will be glad to talk with me. Before the rapper gets on the phone, I hear his manager tersely emptying a room full of friends and associates, and a palpable amount of joy seems to go away with them. But when the 21-year-old rapper and producer born Thebe Neruda Kgositsile picks up the line, he is lively, engaged, interested—essentially the opposite of the persona he has developed on record thus far.
That persona—a hermit, a recluse, a guy who grits his teeth through fan photo ops—is a mournful character that both haunts and pleases him. And it is a character: The word Earl uses is “snapshot.” “You get committed with what you put in songs,” he muses. "It made me wary of who and what I include, because that's there forever. That photo doesn't change.”
Over the last few years, Earl has been reckoning with his own snapshot. He named his new album I Don’t Like Shit, I Don’t Go Outside partly as a joke. “It was so accurate that it was funny,” he says. The record both undercuts and reinforces his prevailing story: That he is a misanthrope, maybe even a sad sack, someone enduring his fame. The title and all-black cover tell one side of that story, but his lyrics and self-produced music chart a squirmier, more humane path that finds a pained soul carefully tending the one precious currency in his life: legitimacy.
“I’ve read some pretty harsh criticisms of my music, but some of them I agreed with and actually sat with me,” he admits. “Because when it’s legitimate, then I fuck with it, and I’m like that with all aspects of my life. If you didn't fuck with me before I did music and you still don't fuck with me right now, I got love for you, because that's very real.”
For now, though, Earl seems to have made peace with his allergy to bullshit. After all, tolerating nonsense isn’t just a fact of music-business life, but of life life: Scorn all bullshit, and you might never leave the house; embrace it too eagerly, and you lose your soul.
Our conversation is full of amiable bullshitting: After he makes a stray remark about the color of a track on the album, I jokingly ask him what the corresponding colors are for the other songs—and it turns out he has a very specific answer for each one. “Grown Ups”? “That’s warm, like a nice red Persian rug at your homie’s house.” “Faucet” and “Grief” are like a “dark green, bottom-of-the-ocean thing.” “Huey” is the color of Nerds candy.
Oh, and the album cover was initially supposed to be white, but “Drake fucked that up,” he laughs. “That was gonna be my exact color scheme.” He's happy with how it all turned out, though, and considers I Don’t Like Shit to be his fullest work: “It's a dissertation on me.”
Pitchfork: You've said that you had the album cover visualized before you had the songs written. What else did you know about it at first? Did you know it would be 10 tracks long?
Earl Sweatshirt: Oh yeah! First off, you don't get paid over 13 songs, so niggas that be giving y'all more than 13 songs are very generous. Chew on that for a second and then look at a Prince album, or any classic, classic albums like Black Sabbath’s Paranoid, any classic Michael Jackson album. They’re all eight, nine, maybe 10 tracks—‘cause nobody got time for that shit, my nigga!
Pitchfork: Do you think classic albums say more with less?
ES: Definitely. I'm obsessed with proverbs because, to me, flexing is being able to say the most with the least amount of words. You know your words mean a lot if you can say something that would be cliche coming out of someone else's mouth, because people know you’re saying it and you're legitimate and you've been through some shit. That's what my whole shit is. And all the old heads that I look up to are like that. André , Jay Elec—these are all niggas that have spent time doing less and less as they get older, and that's what I'm on. It's about exclusivity. You don't get too much. True mastery is being able to come with your own proverbs.
Pitchfork: It's interesting to hear you say that, because one of the themes I hear in your music is miscommunication.
ES: Miscommunication is the number one cause of all problems; communication is your bridge to other people. Without it, there's nothing. So when it's damaged, you have to solve all these problems it creates. What you hear on this record is rampant problem-solving.
There’s a lot of me figuring shit out in the moment. On “Faucet”, for example, I touch on me and my mom, post-Samoa. First there was just this initial bliss of me coming home. But after that went away, the reality that it's still real life set in. A lot of it is about finding balance with both of my parents, going from one extreme to another, holding on too tight after I was pushing them away.
I looked up one day and I had been touring and I hadn't been with my fucking family at all. On Mother's Day, my mom texted me something about, like, the 12 millionth thing that I missed at her house. I was hella sad, because me and my mom are at the point now that she's not about to call me and fucking yell at me. I convinced her that I'm grown, so she's treating me like I'm grown. If I don't show up, it's just that she's sad and hurt.
Pitchfork: The record isn't all dark, but there are some bleak moments. "Grief", for instance, is all about paranoia, regret, addiction, panic.
ES: I was fucked up when I made “Grief”. I had been prescribed to be inside because I had fucking medical exhaustion, so I was asleep for, like, three weeks and then I fucking went outside and tore my meniscus and limped around on that for two weeks. My leg atrophied. It got hella small, along with my self-esteem. I wasn't taking any pain pills or nothing, but then I took a Vicodin and went home and that song all just happened at once. There are technically better beats I was making, but the way that “Grief” felt and how everything settled really captured 100% where I was at—everything I wanted to say to the world and the niggas that was close to me and shit.
“Grief” could've been the last song on the album. What's fucked, though, is that the tracklist got fucked up. There was a song that’s so crucial for the balance of the album called “Mirror” that was supposed to come right after “Faucet”; as far as the mom dynamic thing goes, the juxtaposition of “Mirror” against “Faucet” was so crucial, but the fucking sample didn't get cleared. I’m gonna put it out, though.
Pitchfork: What is “Mirror” about and how did losing it affect your feeling of the album?
ES: It's just way more progressive and it's not produced by me. It's just one verse and a hook and I was just snapping on that shit. It's funny: When I was making the album, I was talking about making “mirror raps,” which are fly for you when you're getting ready to go to school. Raps you're trying say in the damn mirror.
Also, “Grown Ups” was gonna be a secret track. That's why I didn't want the tracklist out, ‘cause I could've been like oooh. Keeping shit a mystery is impossible, but I’ma figure it out. At this point, though, it’s about just doing the full opposite ‘cause mystery shit is lame. That's why I came out with it so plain and put myself on a fucking platter. If you got mystery, then it just leaves room for people to make shit up about you.
Pitchfork: You talk to her a lot in your music. Did you ever sit her down and play that track for her?
ES: I haven't even showed her the whole shit. When she comes over, she’s just overhearing stuff that I’m playing from my room, so she'll just catch pieces of it and be like, "Oh, this sounds good." But convincing her that I'm grown—it wasn't music that did that. It was the way I started addressing her and how I started handling my life. It sounds crazy, but you get to a point where, at least on my side of things and with the adults that are around me, there's a human moral truth that they all relate to. So when I got to the point that I was speaking with that, then the relationship with my mom was different.
Pitchfork: Why do you think this is your most complete project so far?
ES: Historically, even in my writing outside of music, I start so strong, and then I don't care. I can finish. I know how to. It's just getting the willpower to. That was always my mom’s beef with my shit. So I did way too much with this album, just in terms of conceptualizing it. I’m doomed to being obsessed with the meaning and purpose of a story; I had to read too much when I was younger. The album is very much its own thing to me.
Pitchfork: Does your last record, Doris, feel less like “you” to you?
ES: What was crazy about Doris is that I would be fully in myself when I was writing a lot of that shit, but then immediately jump out when I was done, so it was almost like me performing someone else's songs. I'll always regret how I recorded “Burgundy” ‘cause it's not how I felt. The words that were coming out of my mouth and how I mean them, it’s so much different.
Pitchfork: Who are some other rappers who inspire you right now?
ES: Bro, it took me a second, but Future is going so crazy right now. The 56 Nights shit is cool, but you can still fuck with Monster and Beast Mode because this nigga's one-liners is the craziest shit ever. He just randomly sneaks in such things that be having me stuck. This man said, “I don't know what type of love is this.” I fucking feel you, dawg! I fuck with Future because Future fucks with Future so heavy right now. He's really all the way in it.
Other than that, I listen to M.O.P. everyday.
http://pitchfork.com/features/interviews/9621-the-proverbial-wisdom-of-earl-sweatshirt/ ******************************************
Falcons, Braves, Bulldogs and Hawks
Geto Boys, Poison Clan, UGK, Eightball & MJG, OutKast, Goodie Mob
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