Dorian Lynskey 

Earl Sweatshirt review – Odd Future graduate is on fighting form

The precocious American MC is a winning combination of brains and brawn, writes Dorian Lynskey
  
  

Earl Sweatshirt, live review
'Artistic powerhouse': Earl Sweatshirt at O2 Academy Islington, London. Photograph: Joseph Okpako/Redferns via Getty Images Photograph: Joseph Okpako/Redferns via Getty Images

Rapper Earl Sweatshirt opens the last show of his UK tour, as is customary, by asking the crowd to make some noise, but he feels that it bears repeating. "I still don't think you understand the gravity of what I'm saying here," he says with mock solemnity, skinny and agile in a black sweatshirt and baseball cap. "This has to be the most fucked show of the tour. I don't want you to feel safe tonight. Impress me with some wild shit." The fans at the front, mostly white teenagers but not exclusively male, oblige by cheerfully punching one another as soon as the music starts, as if they were in a hardcore punk moshpit.

For the faithful, an Earl Sweatshirt show is a contact sport. Earl, born Thebe Neruda Kgositsile, is the youngest member of Los Angeles hip-hop collective Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All. After a batch of free online mixtapes, they established their reputation at South by Southwest three years ago with a string of buzzworthy shows that made the average hip-hop set seem as sedate as Glyndebourne. Far from aspirational, they appealed to contrary young misfits like themselves. Like a hip-hop Sex Pistols, they flipped between stark admissions of emotional vulnerability and obnoxious provocations calculated to weed out any listeners who didn't get the nihilistic joke.

Their star has waned in recent years. Odd Future founder Tyler, the Creator's 2011 album Goblin ignited more controversy than any hip-hop record since Eminem's debut but last year's follow-up, Wolf, made minimal impact, as did Odd Future's major-label debut, which must have given their new paymasters at Sony some heartburn. Their most grown-up member, R&B singer Frank Ocean, is thriving on his own. When Tyler repeated his crowd-baiting antics at this year's South by Southwest, he was arrested for inciting a riot.

Earl has thus become the crew's artistic powerhouse. He was always their most technically gifted MC, uncannily self-assured even at 16, but he missed out on Odd Future's rise after his mother, a law professor, dispatched him to an academy for at-risk teenage boys in Samoa. His long disappearance, which inspired a "Free Earl" campaign, enhanced his mystique: the boy genius whose mother wouldn't let him rap. Intriguing, too, was the revelation that his absent father was South African poet Keorapetse Kgositsile, whose work inspired the name of rap forefathers the Last Poets 40 years ago.

The hiatus evidently did him good. Last year's Doris album was an impressively mature piece of work, sombre and dense, with a flair for compression ("Trying to stay Jekyllish/But most niggas Hyde") and confession: on the best track, Chum, he described his 16-year-old self as "hollow, intolerant" and admitted: "I'm indecisive, I'm scatterbrained and I'm frightened." He's from a generation of MCs that includes Kendrick Lamar and Chance the Rapper who think that insecurity should be weaponised rather than concealed, and don't mind hinting that their hard-man posturing is to some extent an act.

On stage, however, Earl is a much more boisterous, outgoing presence. He's just turned 20 but unlike Rakim, who looked and sounded old enough to be his own father when he made his debut at the age of 19, he has the kind of face that will look adolescent for years to come. The stage backdrop, a grimacing chalk-white face doodled with graffiti, sports the message, "GRADES AREN'T IMPORTANT", as if he were still in high school.

Sombre never translates well to live hip-hop so Earl and his hyperactive DJ give every track from Doris, which the fans know intimately enough to finish his lines for him, a hectic, bass-heavy makeover. The introspective lyrics are still there ("They called me soft in high school/Thank God I'm jagged") but the blunter lines get the loudest reaction. The crowd chants the anthemic chorus of Whoa like a war cry and gleefully repeats the grim refrain from Molasses.

Earl's funnier than you'd expect, too. Men who climb on to their friends' shoulders are given new names: Geraldine and Ronald. "Now all your mail is going to go to Ronald," he says. "It's official what we do up here." He introduces his debut single Earl, on which he's as knotty and lurid as a young Eminem, with a knock-knock joke. Although he's much less abrasive than Tyler, Earl's humour can be prickly. At one point, seemingly irritated by all the whooping and hollering that, after all, he had specifically requested, he snaps: "Stop yelling. You yell too much." You assume he's joking but he has a way of keeping the crowd slightly on edge.

The show lasts for 45 high-intensity minutes, which is about as long as anyone wants to spend punching and being punched. The teenagers at the front file out sweaty and elated, bruises beginning to bloom on their arms. Despite Earl's introduction, they did feel safe tonight, participating in a cathartic ritual that looks hostile yet is fundamentally harmless. Earl Sweatshirt is a clever man but he gives his younger fans permission to be stupid together.

 

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