Earl Sweatshirt, in recent years, has come to occupy a space not unlike that of Elliott Smith. If it’s fair to anoint Smith the “patron saint of sad boys,” as a piece by Darran Anderson in tQ earlier this year so aptly did, it’s helpful to think of the ex-Odd Future member (AKA Thebe Kgositsile) as a reluctant prophet for the wounded and weary – an irreverent yet deeply perceptive oracle who continues to capture a generation of chronically online depressives with his grim clarity.
Like Smith, evangelists are drawn to Sweatshirt for the unadulterated intimacy present in his music. ‘Solace’ (a companion piece to the rapper’s 2015 album I Don’t Like Shit, I Don’t Go Outside) holds possibly the most haunting, schizophrenic flip of an Ahmad Jamal song in existence – audio clips of the track are now an instant, legendary semiotic for manic depression online. The sample, with its slurred notes and narcotic glissandos, opens and closes like a depraved wide tooth smile. “It’s me and my nibbling conscience / N**** I’m fixin’ to give up / I’ve been alone for the longest” Earl Sweatshirt raps, the mix swallowing his voice. The song has become such a touchstone for poor mental health that fans operate subterranean therapy session networks in its comment sections.
But when an artist becomes such a profound figure of shared suffering for their fans, there’s always the risk that joy – or even change – might alienate their base. Live Laugh Love, with this in mind, may seem like a bit of a sardonic title – self-deprecation, for one, from a musician notorious for his dark repertoire, but also a dig at a world where powerful people commit atrocities for breakfast. Indeed, the album may have initially been conceived this way, but on Live Laugh Love, cynicism is hardly the answer. A record for Earl Sweatshirt’s generation, it’s the latest in a spate of projects from vibe defining 2010s kids who’ve grown weary of making sad music and instead discovered the fleeting joys of parenthood, relationships and adult life – all at the same time. Think King Krule’s Space Heavy, Alex G’s Headlights and Bieber’s Swag.
On Live Laugh Love, Earl Sweatshirt’s songs shift between playful and heroic, introspective and outright transcendent. On ‘Static’, Earl Sweatshirt is soundtracked by an Arthurian style cavalcade of horns, bells and thunder, while ‘exhaust’ casts him the captain of a ship, surrounded by angels and lightning. On ‘Gamma (need the <3)’ Earl Sweatshirt slips between sly Roy Ayers reference, rap maximalism critique, and the proverbial: “Stakes plummet when you play funny games, cat in the bag / Everything you utter doesn’t escape, running man” he raps, a nod to his youth via Michael Haneke reference and a line that wouldn’t sound out of place in the mouth of a Samuel Beckett character.
The album’s power lies in Earl Sweatshirt’s instinct for navigating the demilitarised zone between substance and brevity, a space where most rappers collapse into vagueness or verbosity. There, Earl thrives, refusing the ballast of taking shit too seriously, while producing a record with stark emotional depth. The tracks are skeletal, repetitive and fuzzed-out to the point of abrasion; it could be an easy mistake to think they’re disjointed sketches. In truth, they cohere like a shattered mosaic of memory, pieced together into a triumphant chronicle of growth. On Live Laugh Love, Earl Sweatshirt recounts these formative moments with precision and joyous elasticity. The record is as intense as you’d like it to be – if not, it lingers quietly, only to resurface later with unexpected force. One listen, you might find you can’t stop thinking about the heft of line like “everything you utter doesn’t escape.” Two lines later, you’ll be smiling at the floaty vowels, consonants and cartoonish bravado of “maximum stats, maximum bitches, and massive fuckin’ plates, ayy!”
Thanks to supporters on the internet – who seem genuinely joyous for the rapper’s stability – and the next generation of avant-rap fans and artists, it feels like it wouldn’t really be fair to dub Earl Sweatshirt an avatar of despair anymore. On Live Laugh Love, he’s an emblem for what lies beyond it.
