February 17, 2018

My Gut Reaction: Earl Sweatshirt - I Don't Like Shit, I Don't Go Outside: An Album by Earl Sweatshirt (March 23, 2015)



So did Thebe “Earl Sweatshirt” Kgositsile bail from Tyler, the Creator’s Odd Future movement or what? At the time of the release of the guy’s second full-length album, I Don’t Like Shit, I Don’t Go Outside: An Album by Earl Sweatshirt, it sure seemed that way: upon its surprise announcement in March of 2015, many fans noted a significant lack of involvement from most of Earl’s Odd Future crew, a collective of rappers, producers, and singer-slash-rapper Frank Ocean from California that banded together in the face of the music industry and caused them to blink first. There’s never been a real answer given, but I don’t think it should matter: if we’re going to run with the “Odd Future is the new Wu-Tang Clan” comparison that everyone insists on using, that would make Tyler the leader, the RZA of the situation, and at this point in the careers of his charges, he was a lot more hands-off, so it makes sense that Earl Sweatshirt would venture out on his own without the safety net.


I Don’t Like Shit, I Don’t Go Outside: An Album by Earl Sweatshirt is a compact full-length that acts as his sophomore effort (after the mixtape Earl and his major label debut, Doris). Thebe considers it to be his true debut project, though, as he had full creative control and felt that he had poured his all into it. He also produced all but a single song on here (under his alias, randomblackdude), crafting a cohesive, coherent, and consistent vision for his fans to enjoy. Lyrically, he seems to have abandoned the shock-value threats and treats that early Odd Future projects lived and died by. That said, the motherfucker was only twenty-one years old when this project dropped, and yet his storied past (which we’ve touched on in earlier posts, so I won’t repeat much here) has provided him with far more life experiences than a lot of people twice his age, so there’s really nowhere for the kid to go but up.

I’m sorry these paragraphs are so short – I don’t have a ton to say about Earl Sweatshirt, and I feel you two will want me to just get to the fucking music already. So here you go.

1. HUEY
The opening verse takes place over an organ loop played over a drum beat, with our host using the instrumental to steady himself. He has the kind of flow that makes listeners believe there’s a deeper meaning behind all of his bars, but I feel that he really just means that he spends his days drinking and missing his grandmother (and, as of this writing, his grandfather, who recently passed). That flow is pretty good, though, and Earl shines on “Huey”, which eschews the rap album intro horseshit to skip to the music already. He gets his verse out as quickly as he is capable and moves on to his next idea, which was nice: there’s not a wasted moment on here.

2. MANTRA
The last thing heard on “Huey” was a female voice (credited to Paloma) cooing that the album is about to start, which would make “Mantra” the “actual” first song on I Don’t Like Shit, I Don’t Go Outside: An Album by Earl Sweatshirt (which I will continue to write out in full because now I know it pisses some of you two off). Earl’s production on here is fascinating: the drum machine marches in time into your brain while a lo-fi melody wiggles its way around. His bars are just your typical boasts-n-bullshit, but he delivers them with more passion than he ever exhibited on any Odd Future project, and when paired with the music, there’s no way around it: “Mantra” is pretty good. As most artists tend to do these days, the final third of the track sees a significant shift in sound, but it serves to underline the statements our host has made, not to distract from them.

3. FAUCET
I wasn’t entirely sold on “Faucet”. I enjoyed the musical aspect of it: our host’s instrumental keeps things moving admirably with a slower pace that should suit the man’s vocals. But overall, this was a miss for me. Earl uses “Faucet” to describe how he essentially lives in his head (don’t we all, though) because he doesn’t feel comfortable in his mother’s house. He’s still as antagonistic as ever (“It’s still ‘fuck you and whoever you showed up with’”, he proclaims at one point), but the ground underneath his feet isn’t as sturdy as he would hope, even as the money and the fame begin to roil in. Ah well. Moving on…

4. GRIEF
The first single, the video of which I expedited the release of I Don’t Like Shit, I Don’t Go Outside: An Album by Earl Sweatshirt after the label, Columbia Records, uploaded the clip too early or something.  Whatever, don’t give a shit. Apparently our host recorded “Grief” while housebound, not like the lead in the New Zealand flick Housebound (which is pretty entertaining, you two should check it out) but due to doctor’s orders, and the music reflects that sense of crushing isolation almost too well (at least until the end, where Earl switches things up, as though he were medically cleared and he decided to record exactly how he was feeling as he opened his front door). The lyrics themselves skew reflective, as Earl looks at where his work with Odd Future has taken him in his career, and while he doesn’t sound overly regretful for most of it, he sure as shit isn’t thrilled. “Grief” sounds like the end result of a dare Earl Sweatshirt accepted to record his own version of Drake’s Take Care, cramming an entire album’s worth of emotion into one single track. And I don’t mean that as an insult.

5. OFF TOP
The only real link between I Don’t Like Shit, I Don’t Go Outside: An Album by Earl Sweatshirt and Odd Future is “Off Top”, produced by MellowHype’s Left Brain. (This is also the only track on the project not produced by our host.) Did the man feel obligated to ensure some sense of connection to his friends? I don’t care. Regardless, “Off Top” flies by in less than two minutes, propelled by Left Brain’s busy-but-melodic instrumental, while Earl delivers a single verse that, while highly unlikely to be a true “Off Top” freestyle, still sounds more energetic than he was able to scrape up for “Grief”. The effect of the two opposing vocal tracks toward the end becomes very distracting, but this song didn’t take up too much of my time and it sounded pretty good, so I can dig it.

6. GROWN UPS (FEAT. DA$H)
After that Left Brain-addled detour, I Don’t Like Shit, I Don’t Go Outside: An Album by Earl Sweatshirt gets back to its regularly scheduled programming with “Grown Ups”, an internalized, slightly paranoid and anxious performance by Earl Sweatshirt that ultimately didn’t do much for me. Our host passes the microphone back and forth with guest Da$h, but both spitters sound so similar that they may as well be the same guy. Musically I found this to be fairly ambitious: kudos to Earl (sorry, I mean randomblackdude) on finding inspiration in samples that most wouldn’t locate the rhythm within. But you can still skip “Grown Ups” with impunity. Moving on…

7. AM// RADIO (FEAT. WIKI)
Not called “AM Radio”, as any normal human being would assume, as “AM” and “Radio” are separate compositions. While “Radio” is an instrumental (apparently one based on a beat our host gave to another unrelated project), “AM” is a duet featuring Thebe and Rat King’s Wiki, who opens the slightly-more-conventional-well-for-Earl-Sweatshirt-anyway track. Unlike “Grown Ups”, on “AM” the invited guest has a verse all to himself, a formula that seems to invigorate our host: Earl delivers one of his best performances of the entire project, mixing his boasts and threats with a rambling sense of unease that just clicks. The instrumental, “Radio”, which sounds wildly different from the track it’s been partnered with, is alright enough: it doesn’t stick around long enough to form any sort of impression, anyway.

8. INSIDE
Another track that speeds by in less than two minutes. Thebe was famously out of the country when Odd Future first started making waves within our chosen genre, so upon his return, he found himself more popular than he was comfortable with being, and he had no real time to acclimate. That’s what “Inside” is all about: his internal stream of consciousness thoughts regarding the life he found himself living, with all the trappings and benefits within. We’ve all heard bars about only trusting the people in your circle and not having anyone to spill your innermost anxieties to (whether by choice or not) before, but Earl’s unique perspective earns “Inside” more than just a cursory listen. It was okay, is what I’m saying.

9. DNA (FEAT. NA’KEL)
The hook I could have done without, and not just because it treads similar territory as Kendrick Lamar’s later, and far superior, “DNA.” It just weakens the track by grinding everything to a halt, which is a shame, as “DNA” is a keeper. Our host’s verse is a bit puzzling, as his voice truly isn’t suited to a faster-paced flow, and becomes more than a bit distracting. But guest star Na’kel  (Earl’s rhyme partner in the Hog Slaughter Boyz, not to be confused with the Bo$$ Hog Barbarian$) walks away with what is probably the best verse on the entire goddamn album: you can literally feel the man still processing his thoughts, as he apparently found out that his brother passed away fifteen minutes before stepping into the booth, and he was tripping on acid all the while. His line, “My bro left today… fuck” (emphasis mine) is all the more powerful because he stays silent for an extra bar before picking back up with what has unexpectedly turned into a eulogy. Fuck, man.

10. WOOL (FEAT. VINCE STAPLES)
Forgot to mention that Earl’s instrumental for “DNA” was pretty great. And his fine work continues on the album closer “Wool”, which kicks off with critical darling (and “Hive” scene-stealer) Vince Staples dropping another entertaining verse. Earl continues his tendency to stumble to the finish line whenever Staples is around, although thankfully he’s able to recover much more quickly on “Wool”. This wasn’t much of a way to end an album, but then again, there wasn’t an intro, either.

THE LAST WORD: I Don’t Like Shit, I Don’t Go Outside: An Album by Earl Sweatshirt works best if you imagine it as a glance intro Earl Sweatshirt’s psyche that just so happens to last the length of roughly ten tracks, with more of them being good than bad. It’s tightly-paced and much more focused than its predecessor, the bloated Doris (even though Doris still contained a few great tracks). It’s easy to claim that his severing most ties to his Odd Future past (allegedly) may have resulted in as concise a project as this, but the reality is that he finally felt free enough to channel his emotions and thoughts into his music, and the lack of the Odd Future association was just an added bonus. Listening to this album, I can tell why hip hop heads have long claimed Earl Sweatshirt as one of the many future stars of this rap shit that we may witness within our lifetimes: he has a way with twisting a sentence to gift it more meaning than another artist may have been able to pull off, and in producing the majority of this project himself (he did a lot of Doris, as well, but not as well as on here), he shows promise behind the boards, as well. I honestly didn’t expect to like this one as much as I did, but here we are. And Na’kel’s performance on “DNA” is outright haunting, which is definitely not a word I had ever thought I’d use in a write-up for fucking Earl Sweatshirt. This was a triumph, and there’s much more to these songs than what you hear on surface level: now I’m looking forward to whatever the kid has coming next.

-Max

RELATED POSTS:
You can read my thoughts on the other Earl Sweatshirt projects by clicking here.



9 comments:

  1. I'm with you Max.
    Inside and the track with Wiki were my favorite ones.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Only heard Molasses and you know why I sought it out. Wasn’t impressed.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. shoe in you a hater man, only give negative comments about an artist based on a grasp of a few of their songs

      Delete
  3. glad you liked this. I think because of the lack of OF affiliation and general fanfare surrounding it at the time it remains a really underrated gem. Earl needs to come out with another though, although his verse on Really Doe is enough to keep me going for now

    ReplyDelete
  4. I just never enjoy listening to Earl. I can hear the skill behind the boards and as a lyricist, and I fully understand people liking him. But something about his voice/flow just bores me to tears.

    ReplyDelete
  5. I heard Housebound was quite good. Suggest you check out What we do in the Shadows. Top Kiwi humour.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. What We Do In The Shadows is fucking hilarious.

      Delete
  6. One of my favorite albums of all time.

    ReplyDelete
  7. I second this last anonymous. This album is perfect front to back imo. Classic.

    ReplyDelete