Earl Sweatshirt And The Artist’s Right To Disappear

Earl Sweatshirt was an exception to the music industry, the one who slipped through the gaps of its poison-spiced net. The “mainstream” is a carefully designed beast, one made to nurture the careers of artists with grand bag-grabbing dreams and a constant obsession with relevance while chewing down on those who refuse to submit to the rat race. 

Despite falling in line with the latter, Earl found himself within the beast’s clutches through the disguise of the (at the time) money-printing Odd Future. The assimilation which was fed to Earl immediately found itself rejected like an incompatible organ. Sweatshirt could not survive in this place. Between 2015 and 2018 Earl manoeuvred through a great escape, one that was born from him exercising his right to disappear. 

The John Legend Hook

Conflict and turmoil were in Earl’s destiny from the moment he stepped in the spotlight. The blossoming of Odd Future is something Earl would largely miss, spending some time at a boarding school in Samoa at the request of his mother between 2010 and 2012. Being physically away from America did nothing to reduce Earl’s rising fame back home. 

The combined support for his solitary release at the time, the mixtape EARL, and the sheer volume of Odd Future fans desperate to hear more from the potential starlet led to the ‘Free Earl’ movement. Giving the impression that Earl had been locked away abroad by his mother created a hugely damaging narrative. The result was harassment of Earl’s mum online and Complex employee’s taking an ill-advised trip to Samoa to find Earl under the front of “investigative journalism.”

Along with the jubilation that met Earl’s return came the immediate weight of expectation. The promise shown on EARL was blindingly clear, but Earl’s newly signed record deal with Columbia was a new pressure to deal with alongside the anticipation of fans. Within this newfound label relationship was where further conflict between Earl and the industry grew. 

“There was that period of time when no one from the label got what I was trying to do so they was tryna put me in the studio with just the wrong n****s. Like, I got a beat that had a John Legend hook on it already. It was just very messy for a period of time and I was like ‘oh my god I’m fucked’.” – Earl Sweatshirt for Microphone Check (2013).

Ill will towards the label, towards expectation and towards his situation in general strengthened in Earl during the recording of Doris. The release marked an inopportune time to be so preoccupied as Earl’s grandma was simultaneously living her last moments. Earl’s issues with Columbia would continue through to the release of his sophomore project, I Don’t Like Shit, I Don’t Go Outside (IDLS), where once again they failed to anticipate how Earl wanted the music to be revealed to his fans, something he spoke on in a later Microphone Check interview.

Frustration and regret was present in Earl and was unleashed on wax. Opening the track “Burgundy,” Earl writes “My grandma passing / but I’m too busy trying to get this fucking album cracking to see her,” while Vince Staples plays the role of the industry, taunting Earl with lines like “Don’t nobody care about how you feel/ We want raps.” 

Vulnerability and anger were used as weapons of rebellion by the then 19 year-old, unsheathed on songs like “Chum” where he laid out the consequences of the ‘Free Earl’ movement “Thanks so much you made my life harder / And the ties between my mom and I strained and tightened / Even more than they were before all of this shit / Been back a week and I already feel like calling it quits.”

After further honing in on the costs of his fame on IDLS, Earl did something akin to quitting the industry. Following his sophomore project and the 10-minute EP Solace, Earl had fully deconstructed himself on wax, a public display of how the music industry corroded his peace. Earl needed to get away.

An Exorcism of Expectation

The gap between 2015’s IDLS and 2018’s Some Rap Songs was a performance of real delicacy for anyone tuned in. In fact, within those three years, Earl reinvented the idea of relevancy while also somehow reinventing reinvention itself. The musical path ahead of Earl veered so heavily that anyone who still considered his sound as one of the extending arms of Odd Future would have that connection completely severed. 

The fear that arises when switching lanes is that an artist could lose their fanbase, but this was something Earl was willing to do. He wanted a clean break from the hurricane he found himself in from the moment he stepped back on American soil. Earl needed to rebuild relationships, rebuild his confidence and thus he rebuilt his sound. 

During those quiet years, grainy live show footage and mysteriously sourced mp3s felt like transmissions from a different dimension, Earl’s hints towards a new artistic direction that only found their way to a select few. Sweatshirt maintained relevance to his core supporters by guiding them through his artistic evolution and personal growth, fostering a deeper relationship with his fans, to his music, while being completely invisible to the industry at large. 

On November 8th 2018, Earl made his second grand return, but this time to a much less public eye. “Nowhere2go”, a short, experimental track lacking resemblance to both Doris and IDLS acted as a firm boundary between eras. A jumping-off point for some was a confirmation of dedicated fandom for others. 

Some Rap Songs also represented the fulfilment of Earl’s Columbia contract, leaving him unburdened by the expectations of both fans and the industry. Exerting control had historically been a form of rebellion for Earl and the release of Some Rap Songs affirmed control as one of his rights. Once again sifting through the walls of the music industry and pulling off the most impossible of escapes enabled by a delicate disappearance, Earl is finally free.