NME Earl Sweatshirt Profile, 2013
In 2013, Laura Snapes, then at NME, gave me the chance to profile Earl Sweatshirt. It was my first time writing a piece this long or a profile of someone this famous and it took a lot of hand-holding from Laura to get it to the point where it was readable.
This was a really interesting time for Earl, because Sony very badly wanted him to be a star, and he was not about that life, at all. I’m posting it back here because it’s not easy to find online and I think it gives a good backstory for the direction that Earl has taken since Doris dropped. I’ve made some minor edits where I was just too embarrassed by the writing to let it stand but left the NME-style Briticisms intact.
A sweatsuit-clad Questlove – aka Ahmir Thompson, drummer, producer, and DJ with The Roots – is sat behind a high-rise drum kit on the set of US talk show Late Night With Jimmy Fallon, a programme renowned for giving emerging artists a television platform – the likes of Grimes, Chvrches, Glasser. The 26-year-strong Roots are the show’s house band, and right now they’re Earl Sweatshirt’s backing group as they rehearse for the Odd Future rapper’s debut solo network television performance later this evening. Back in April, Earl appeared on The Late Show With David Letterman alongside his Odd Future associates Domo Genesis and Tyler, The Creator, to perform ‘Rusty’ from Tyler’s second album, ‘Wolf’. But tonight, Earl – Thebe Neruda Kgositsile on his birth certificate – will be rapping alone on ‘Burgundy’, the heavily conflicted second song from his new debut studio album, ‘Doris’.
The Fallon studio is freezing: Questlove and the rest of The Roots knew to come wearing sweats; Leila Steinberg, who once managed Tupac and is now part of the team that supervises Odd Future, is in a heavy winter jacket. So are Earl’s PR people and the various executives from his parent label, Sony.
But Earl is shivering in a thin long-sleeved shirt and khaki shorts, as is Lucas Vercetti, Odd Future’s merch guy, who’s watching from the audience benches in a custom-made Odd Future mesh football jersey. Earl’s attire reflects his inexperience. Although Odd Future “has been on for three, four years”, he tells me, “this is my first year. My first show was last year after everyone was weathered. I don’t have the same shit set up that everyone else has.”
Eventually someone brings him a jumper. He takes a breath, and repeats himself. “This is my first year.”
In the prologue to Questlove’s new memoir, Mo Meta Blues, he writes of The Roots, “We’re the last hip-hop band, absolutely the last of a dying breed. Twenty-five years ago, rap acts were mostly groups. You had Run DMC and the Beastie Boys and Public Enemy… I grew up looking at that model, at the sense of community and of a larger purpose. But today it’s all solo acts. Maybe it’s just simple economics. Everyone thinks, ‘I’m Michael Jordan and I can do this on my own and pick up the big check.’ And maybe you can’t blame people for that.”
Writing that passage, Questlove must not have considered the new rap collective that had swarmed out of LA via Tumblr just three years earlier. With their string of amateur-sounding but utterly compelling albums, violent, often misogynist lyrics, and the ferocity and skill with which those lyrics were delivered, Odd Future speedily went from underground online phenomenon to rap pariahs, their mantra – “Kill people, burn shit, fuck school” – making them the mainstream media’s new favourite scapegoats for irresponsible juvenile behavior.
Their most infamous member was also their most insistently repellent: on ‘Earl’, the second song from Earl’s album of the same name, the then 15-year-old demands, “Go on suck it up, but hurry I got nuts to bust/And butts to fuck and ups to shut and sluts to fuckin’ uppercut”, and warns that fucking with the collective is “a sure-fire way to get your mother fucked… shove a trumpet up her butt/Play a song, invade a thong, my dick is havin’ guts for lunch/As well as supper, then I’ll rummage through her ruptured cunt”. The comically brutal, well-staged video sees the crew gorging on narcotic cocktails until their eyes and teeth burst from their faces. Elsewhere on ‘Earl’ is a song called ‘Epar’ (read it backwards) where he raps about throttling a girl for preferring Jay Z’s ‘Blueprint’ to Eminem’s ‘Relapse’. If Odd Future were the new wave of terror, then Earl was the crest, his gleeful urge to shock an apparent one-way ticket to the kind of solo status Questlove writes about.
But in mid-2010, just after ‘Earl’ was released, the notorious prodigy disappeared. He stopped showing up to Odd Future events and concerts. “#freeearl”, Tyler tweeted, introducing the idea that Earl needed liberating from something, and repeating the mantra in his songs ‘Transylvania’ and ‘Sandwitches’.
It became a war cry chanted at gigs, even audibly yelled by an audience member before Tyler and Hodgy Beats introduced America to Odd Future on Fallon in February 2011. When publications Complex and The New Yorker revealed that Earl’s mother had sent him to a reform school in Samoa out of fear for the path his life was taking, Odd Future’s anti-authoritarian rhetoric was bolstered by the fact that one of their own was apparently incarcerated against his will. Earl’s own profile skyrocketed in the vacuum he left behind. Fans threatened his mother’s personal safety. When he returned to LA in spring 2012, people at the airport – tourists, even the police – shouted his name.
Earl doesn’t enter his Fallon dressing room looking or acting like a star. He has the stretched appearance of someone who has recently gone through a growth spurt, and his mouth hangs open when he isn’t speaking. He introduces himself as Thebe and makes a beeline for the piano in the room, noodling around with chords while everyone else takes to their smartphones.
He practises what you might call a kind of practical iconoclasm: he’ll put up with the gruelling demands of his ‘major artist on a major label’ schedule, but he won’t smile for the cameras or pretend that he’s anything other than extremely tired and nervous about tonight. He won’t actively engage with the process, but he’ll endure it – though he will say it’s “sick as fuck” to play with The Roots, which he asked to do. At tonight’s taping, he seems almost reluctant to perform even his own song, rapping the lyrics to ‘Burgundy’ at a fiery clip, but hardly moving much, apparently ignoring the fact that he’s on television.
Earl’s new level of fame and exposure preoccupies him. When he returned from Samoa, he was lumped with a reputation created in his absence, and seemingly one that he’s not comfortable with. In the first verse of the Neptunes-produced ‘Burgundy’, Earl raps about the warped priorities he’s had to make since returning from Samoa – “Grandma’s passing, but I’m too busy trying to get this fucking album cracking to see her” – and rolling his eyes at the absurdity of a situation where “I’m stressing over payment, so don’t tell me that I made it/Only relatively famous in the midst of a tornado”. ‘Doris’ – named for his late grandmother – is filled with mentions of fame. On ‘Sunday’, where Frank Ocean drops a rare rap (“Frank is a very good rapper,” he says), Earl reminds his girlfriend that he’s been faithful to her under odd circumstances: “I’m fucking famous, if you forgot”, while also apologising for his inattentiveness.
“My known ratio doesn’t match up to my fucking money,” he says of the disparity between his reputation and the reality. He tells me that he doesn’t want to be more famous – “I’m very reclusive” – but he’s willing to forsake the fact that he can’t “do shit” like a normal person because “you get to do what you love and get widely praised for it. The pros outweigh the cons. Someone out there is thinking, ‘Holy shit, my life is going to get better after [‘Doris’] comes out.’ Someone has all their hope riding on this album, and that shit’s cool, I fucking love it. But there are very huge expectations for this album. It’s just songs that I like that I did.”
‘Doris’ is Earl’s chance to reset his career on his own terms, wresting control back from demanding, expectant fans, reputations and record labels. For all that it’s been amplified by hype, ‘Doris’ is a strange little album, and so collaborative that it seems more like a Director’s Cut version of an Odd Future project than a solo album. Earl hides behind first verses delivered by the likes of Vince Staples, Domo Genesis and SK La Flare. “It’s easier to get a song done that way,” he says. “There’s a lot more shit going on than sitting there with your thumb in your ass. There’s someone to bounce ideas off, you’ll hear something they do that excites you.” Most of the songs – many produced by Earl himself under the telling moniker randomblackdude – have a lo-fi, homemade quality, vestiges of the DIY approach that made him famous.
Earl isn’t a particularly talkative character, but get him onto the nitty-gritty of making an album – in particular, making an album for a demanding major label – and that’s where he grows excited. ‘Doris’ was originally slated for a May release, a delay Earl puts down to the artwork “coming out all grimy”, though that doesn’t really seem like the real reason. His frustration with getting ‘Doris’ finished is evident.
“It’s like you finished a painting and just kept going over one spot with black. There’s a big-ass canvas over there that’s blank as fuck, you could do whatever the fuck you wanted with it, but you gotta just stay on this big-ass painting that you took hella time to work on, just sit there and…” He mimics painting over the same spot, over and over and over again.
Unsurprisingly for someone with such a meticulously constructed, elemental flow, Earl is a perfectionist who’d rather scrap than salvage material if it’s not working for him. He becomes increasingly animated as he takes me through the saga of the song that became ‘Sunday’. A hard drive crashed, files were corrupted, he managed to reassemble the song, then decided that he hated the mixes. “Then the last thing was like, ‘Oh yeah, we can’t mix this song, so you’re going to have to redo it or do a new song.’ I threw a tantrum. I did a new song.”
His equally vocal admiration of Kanye West is instructive in that respect. “I like how Kanye pretty much does everything,” says Earl. “That fool is wild. And he doesn’t give a fuck. Like, he does, but he’s so crazy, so tight, so open about being so far removed from everyone else’s shit. No-one’s on the shit that Kanye’s on.” He recounts an anecdote that Tyler told him about working on ‘Yeezus’, about how Kanye “pieces [records] together all crazy”, taking elements worked on by different individuals and combining them into “a medley of shit that he worked with”.
After the protracted, frustrating making of ‘Doris’, in the future Earl plans to record in the same way Kanye does, holed up with collaborators for short, intensive periods of time to produce music that feels unified by a coherent set of ideas. One mooted future project is his album with Tyler as EarlWolf – the duo have been touring recently, supporting Eminem and performing at Reading and Leeds.
“We’ll do the record at a point where we’re ready to sit down for a month and a half and do it in one. It’d be shitty if it was spread out. That’s how I want to do shit from now on; that’s what I learned from doing this album. Trying to piece shit together that’s hella spread out kinda sucks. You hit a lot more walls trying to make it sync.”
In spite of the problems he had while making it, ‘Doris’ is a surprisingly cohesive album, though perhaps not in the way that fans would have expected. Everything about the record suggests that Earl won’t adhere to the blueprint that was laid out for him while he was away. There’s no pandering to the elements of his fanbase that still crave the darker stuff – something he swore off post-Samoa, where he was made to work in a rape victims’ centre, opening his eyes to the realities of his lyrical imaginings. Fans vilified his mother for sending him away, but by naming the record after one of the strongest maternal figures in his life and paying tribute to his mother (albeit in a roundabout way) on ‘Chum’, he’s pushing against one of the legends that’s come to define him. Sony’s aggressive NYC marketing campaign may push him as a future solo star, but he’s adamant that everything’s “cool” with Odd Future – no-one’s breaking off in spite of “everyone doing their solo shit. Still have the OF pillow to fall back on.”
Later in the evening, when Earl Sweatshirt gets in front of the camera to film his first-ever solo segment for national television, everything is pretty much the same as it was going into rehearsal. He’s wearing those same red Vans and khaki shorts. He’s not dancing, or even moving all that much. But every word is there and the crowd hangs on every bar. Maybe he isn’t putting on the breakout performance that Sony would want. But he’s maintaining his image, his brand: putting out a small, personal record, promoting it in his small, personal way and allowing the label and the media to do the work for him. The only thing that’s changed since this morning is his T-shirt—he’s traded it for something warmer.
