Loosed from the nauseating gutbucket grit of EARL, Sweatshirt uses his Columbia Records debut Doris to convey a more varied palette of emotions. “Chum” was the most personal and direct he’d ever been on record it was gobstopping without relying on the trick of sullying the youthful zest of his voice with grim stories of death and defilement. In it Earl opens up about a life of struggles, from the absence of his father, one-time South African Poet Laureate Keorapetse Kgositsile, after a split from his mother (“I just used to say I hate him in dishonest jest/ When honestly I miss this nigga like when I was six”), to discovering drugs and petty crime, finding a big brother in Tyler, and the fallout from the Complex expose.
Built around a simple, affecting piano figure and clattering boom bap low end, “Chum” was a travelogue of a lost soul seemingly back on track. It wasn’t until the end of 2012 release of the single “Chum” that Earl addressed his story in song. He seemed to pick right up where the maleficent EARL left off, the new verses touting the same deadpanned orgies of bloodletting and misanthropy. 2 compilation, and tracks with OF compatriot Domo Genesis and Flying Lotus’ rap alter ego Captain Murphy. Bye.” He appeared on various ephemera afterward: a supremely anesthetized spot on “Super Rich Kids” off Frank Ocean’s Grammy Award winning Channel Orange, an unannounced freestyle on the posse cut “Oldie” from The ** OF Tape Vol. Barring an expository chat with The New Yorker, Earl fell silent after the reveal until turning up unexpectedly on Twitter one night in early 2012 with a new song called “Home” that closed with Sweatshirt giddily announcing his return: “I’m baaaack. It seems his mother, a civil rights activist and law professor, had shipped him overseas to clear his head after behavioral problems bled into his schoolwork. The group refused to provide an explanation for the lingering absence of its best rapper when pressed, opting instead to lead fans through a quixotic “Free Earl” campaign immortalized in t-shirts, records, and elaborate satirical fan fiction.Īfter a winding investigation, Complex was eventually able to trace Earl to a Samoan retreat for at-risk teen boys. Once a menacing presence over Tyler’s post- Neptunes synth wheeze, Earl was frustratingly absent from the group’s inaugural round of live shows and festival spots as well as the second round of Odd Future solo efforts. But just as Odd Future took off, Earl appeared to vanish.
The video for “Earl” (off the mixtape of the same name), wherein Sweatshirt and company down a risky drug cocktail and party until they begin to decay, was integral in setting the then-unknown collective on its crash course with hip-hop notoriety. It was Earl Sweatshirt, unbelievably young (15? 16?) and skilled beyond his years, a methodical wordsmith whose splatterpunk murder fantasies were rendered all the more unsettling by his incredible poise. When Odd Future first tumbled out of Southern Los Angeles County in 2010, it wasn’t the high-strung antics of the group’s de facto figurehead Tyler, the Creator that tipped them into the spotlight.
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