Earl Sweatshirt used to go outside.
In the video for his 2010 song, ‘Earl,’ the then-16-year-old and his cohorts—fellow members of the hip-hop collective Odd Future—guzzle down drug cocktails and hit the streets for a day of debauchery. Wild-eyed, Earl and his friends skate, mob and tramp their way across Los Angeles until each of them begins to literally deteriorate. Blood trickles from eyes, mouths foam and teeth and fingernails are ripped free in a flurry of youthful chaos.
While his days of horrorcore rhymes and shock value are long gone, Earl’s music hasn’t necessarily lightened up. And, on his new album, ‘I Don’t Like Shit, I Don’t Go Outside,’ Earl is darker than ever before. This time, he’s inside.
‘I Don’t Like Shit’’s soundscape reflects this reality. The production is handled almost exclusively by Earl himself, under the pseudonym randomblackdude, and the beats are lo-fi, murky affairs. Lead single ‘Grief’ begins with a groggy sample reminiscent of a quartet of toads croaking in slow motion. Punctuated by dissonant snares, its bassy synths are overwhelming and sound like what I imagine drowning at the bottom of a well sounds like. On a sonic level, the song is representative of the album as whole: the instrumentals all evoke the same shades-drawn, holed-up-in-a-room vibe.
Earl’s lyrics and delivery amplify his album’s dim production, and it’s easy to see how—his emotional range is limited to bouts of anger amid long stretches of sadness, while his flow, intricately woven as ever, varies accordingly from aggressive spitting to drawled musing.
‘I Don’t Like Shit,’ which clocks in at a concise 29 minutes and 56 seconds, is an intimate look at Earl’s journey into adulthood. No longer is he the teen wordsmith rapping about rape and bodies in plastic bags, and there is a newfound focus here that was absent at times on his last album, ‘Doris.’
‘Huey,’ a prelude, kicks off the ten-track project. With the click of a tape deck, a set of blunted keys comes in, combining with muted drums to form some kind of warped carnival music. The song starts off as a fairly upbeat boast-fest, but soon spirals downward. “I spent the day drinking and missing my grandmother,” Earl admits toward its end.
Drugs and mourning are present throughout the album. On ‘Grief,’ he ends his last verse with: “Thinking ‘bout my grandmama, find a bottle / I’mma wallow when I lie in that / I just want my time and my mind intact / When they both gone, you can’t buy ‘em back.” He identifies himself as a “face-drinking smoker” on ‘Inside,’ explaining that drugs “help [him] duck when emotion jab[s].” On ‘DNA,’ which features a heart-wrenching verse from skateboarder and sometimes rapper Na’kel, Earl reveals the depth of his substance abuse: “Stomach full of drugs and shit / My niggas on some other / Cleanse Sunday, binge Monday / Then another six days / Back to Sunday when it’s done again.” It’s a concerning confession.
‘I Don’t Like Shit’ also finds Earl struggling with relationship woes. “And the last couple months was the worst / Cause I smashed all the trust / That I earned in the past couple months / That we had as a couple,” he raps on ‘Mantra,’ venting. His relentless internal rhyme schemes in this song are dotted with lines like, “You used to say you like violins,” adding a human element to the otherwise aggressive breakup poetics.
But, his problems haven’t just revolved around drugs and girls: many of the album’s songs find Earl reflecting on friends and family, too. Backed by a sparse beat, Earl tries to sort out his inner conflicts with fame and family on ‘Faucet.’ “Ain’t step foot up in my momma place for a minute,” he says in the first verse, followed by “I don’t know who house to call home lately.” You can feel the despair in his voice, especially when the beat cuts out as he reaches the word “home,” leaving him alone and echoing—orphaned.
Earl’s isolation is seen in other telling lines—“can’t even trust my friends,” on ‘Grown Up’ and “all I see is snakes in the eyes of these niggas,” on ‘Grief.’ He is constantly questioning, often paranoid and always conflicted: “Now you surrounded with a gaggle of 100 fucking thousand kids / Who you can’t get mad at, when they want a pound and pic / Cause they the reason that the traffic on the browser quick / And they the reason that the paper in your trousers thick,” he barks on ‘Mantra.’ He certainly comes off as a more confident and capable emcee than his past-self, but it seems Earl hasn’t quite adjusted to the complications fame entails.
Earl Sweatshirt’s ‘I Don’t Like Shit, I Don’t Go Outside’ is another solid addition to a discography that has already cemented its author as one of the best emcees in modern hip-hop. There’s no filler on this project: it is lean and hard-hitting. While at first I was disappointed with the album’s brevity, I now think it works perfectly. Its scope is small but has everything you could want from an Earl Sweatshirt tape: clever wordplay (“Call me Lou, if I’m on the track, these niggas skip to me” gets me every time), mind-bending rhymes and an uncanny ability to stitch together words in a unique and refreshing way.
With this release, Earl shows us that he can still think outside the box, even when he’s trapped inside it.
Trombly is a member of the class of 2018.
