#TABULA RASA EARL SWEATSHIRT FREE#

To see his recovery play out over this 24-minute album is a revitalizing experience. But things like his new fatherhood, and his reconnection with his roots have given his life meaning.

#TABULA RASA EARL SWEATSHIRT FREE#

He isn’t “cured,” and he isn’t free of his problems. His newest album, on the other hand, is almost a sequel. This comes to a pinnacle in his aforementioned 2018 album, which is an overwhelmingly personal and dark listen that leaves you feeling nothing more than empty. In an almost painfully honest fashion, he details his struggles with addiction, depression, and self-loathing. In his earlier releases, like 2015’s single, “Solace,” or especially what many consider to be his magnum opus* 2018’s pointedly named Some Rap Songs Earl explores themes of mental health. Though this album certainly works without context, it is all the more interesting to consider Earl’s past works. And his album out this past January, SICK!, is no exception. But whatever it is that makes his music so captivating, he continues to cement himself as one of the most compelling and versatile rappers of the modern scene.

It might even be his refusal to commit to a signature sound that keeps listeners always wanting more. It could be his dynamic and poetry-like flow or his experimental production. Maybe it’s his personal, but (often crushingly) engaging lyrics. “All praises due, the juice unobtainable/Like Tang in the booth, dark face on the news/Clouds gray, on the move/On the way like the truth,” he rapped on 2018’s “Ontheway!”-a mission statement if he ever had one.There really is no one quite like Earl Sweatshirt. As Earl's music deepened, it took on qualities both of classic underground rap and free jazz, filled with unstable rhythms, stream-of-consciousness flows, drumless beats and a sense of fragmentation that made them feel dense but startlingly alive.īy the time he was in his mid-twenties, he was already a kind of elder statesman, the progenitor for a new wave of artists dismantling the dusty, downcast sound of ’90s boom-bap and building something entirely new. And after all, he was only in his early twenties-how could he possibly pretend to know exactly how he felt?īorn Thebe Kgositsile in Chicago in 1994, he was raised primarily in Los Angeles, eventually hooking up with Odd Future founder Tyler, the Creator, via MySpace-an orientation toward the social possibilities of the internet that helped make the collective one of the first success stories of its kind. So while the essayist James Baldwin’s use of the phrase “imprecise words” referred to the ways in which language can, when generalised, help perpetuate inequity in structures of power, Earl’s sampling of it at the beginning of 2018’s Some Rap Songs sounded more like an endorsement: Yes, abstraction can harm, but it can also be liberating, a light shone down an unexplored hallway. But like the Wu-Tang Clan or Lil Wayne, Earl’s raps could make even violence and vulgarity sound surreal-not just instruments of parental disturbance, but wet clay in the hands of a lyricist bending metaphor into strange, unfamiliar shapes. When Earl Sweatshirt started out with the Odd Future collective in the late 2000s, it wasn’t clear whether he’d mature at all, let alone into the artist he became.

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