Delfin Finley
The 2010s was a revolutionary time to be coming of age as a music fan. All you needed was an open mind, solid broadband connection, and a sizable iPod Classic, and the world was your oyster. It was around this time the traditional walls between genres began to erode and the pipeline from artist to fan became shorter, leading to a different kind of artist to emerge. It’s this generation of inquisitive and probing artists, who were crafting the 2010s in their image, that Liam Inscoe-Jone writes about in his new book Songs in the Key of MP3: The New Icons of the Internet Age. Out April 3, Inscoe-Jones explores the era through five artists who established themselves in such an open and amorphous time: Dev Hynes (Blood Orange), FKA twigs, Oneohtrix Point Never, SOPHIE, and Earl Sweatshirt. In this exclusive excerpt published on The FADER today, Inscoe-Jones writes about Sweatshirt’s 2015 album I Don't Like Shit, I Don't Go Outside as the landmark solo effort celebrates its 10th anniversary.
Thebe Kgositsile came up with the title of his second album while he was still touring his first. I Don’t Like Shit, I Don’t Go Outside. It was supposed to be funny; he was very much outside, travelling Europe and touring relentlessly. Before long, it became his reality.
In 2012, Thebe was exiled to a boarding school for troubled kids in Samoa. Upon his return, Thebe’s friends had assumed that “Earl Sweatshirt” would simply slot back into the flourishing Odd Future roster and, at first, that was true. Behind the scenes though, Thebe was already carving a trajectory distinct from the rest of the group. Witnessing the hype surrounding her son in his absence his mother had realised, for the first time, that Thebe’s ambitions of a rap career could actually become reality.
While he was in Samoa, she arranged for Leila Steinberg, who had managed a teenage Tupac, to become his manager. While he was still at the Academy, Steinberg even began sending him writing exercises via email. When he returned home, she and his mother helped him sign a distribution deal with Columbia Records. The deal put him within Sony alongside the rest of Odd Future, but written into the contract was a guarantee that he could start his own imprint, Tan Cressida, too.
Before he could start, Thebe’s mother made sure he finished the business of being a teenager first. She moved them to Toronto so that he could finish his senior year there, even if he spent it itching to begin his career; the only kid in class without a question mark at the end of everything. Once he did begin touring with Odd Future though, Thebe began to resent the collective’s following. At the end of 2015, SPIN asked him what he’d like people to understand about the history of the group. “That it didn’t start as a bunch of people who were friends who then miraculously discovered that they all had some sort of innate music ability,” he answered. “We came together for a job, and we disbanded as a job.”
Earl Sweatshirt
Delfin Finley
In 2014, after the release of his debut album Doris, Thebe embarked on his first solo tour. He spent most of it eating less and drinking more. After losing his grandmother he took to filling the waiting hours with weed and emotionless sex, which quickly became part of his writing process. After long nights getting wasted, Thebe would sit down, head spinning, and begin writing verses for the record.
“A lot of shit was written right in the moment, if I’d just stayed up an entire night and it’s like, eight in the morning,” he told CRACK in 2015. “That’s when you just be having bars. Because you’re tired, so you’re kind of discombobulated and you’re not as quick to throw up the defences that you subconsciously throw up during the day.”
Delfin Finley
As the tour stretched into Eastern Europe, where all they seemed to serve was pork (which Thebe doesn’t eat), he almost stopped eating entirely. In two years he lost nearly three stone and, at his lowest, weighed only eight stone in total. In July 2014, he cancelled the tour’s final leg with concerns for his health. Not going outside was actually the directive the doctors gave him and Thebe obeyed, embarking on a hermitic period of recovery. After three weeks of straight sleeping he left the house to skateboard and immediately tore his meniscus. It made his leg atrophy, and he was confined to his bed again. It was there, dosed up on Vicodin, where he made the rest of the album.
There is no better title for the record. If it wasn’t called that, that’s how I’d caption it in my brain.
Early in the process Thebe had attempted to recruit Flying Lotus to produce the record but, after hearing some of Thebe’s own production, FlyLo suggested that he should produce it himself. The album is short, less than thirty minutes long, but it couldn’t be longer: an aberrant black hole of a record, weighted down by thumping drums, swirling samples and bars delivered with utter contempt. “I spent the day drinkin’ and missin’ my grandmother” he raps on “Huey”. “I’m toastin’ myself, and a toast to all my n****s / ain’t no time limit, I’m toasted as hell / And I gotta jot it quick ’cause I can’t focus so well.”
If I Don’t Like Shit . . . sounds like a woozy blur then that’s because it was written in one. There is no better title for the record. If it wasn’t called that, that’s how I’d caption it in my brain. “When I run, don’t chase me” he raps on “Faucet”. “I don’t know whose house to call home lately / I hope my phone break, let it ring.” Even the way his voice sounds on the album was the result of enforced quiet. “In the apartment I live in, the room that I do music in is right above where little girls sleep, so I can’t be like, slamming that shit,” he told CRACK. “That’s the true test of something that’s good to me. If you’re doing something that’s not very loud, but it’s fire as fuck.” Indeed, the beat for tracks like “Grief” trudge rather than knock, ominous samples lingering like a waking thought, and Thebe feels trapped among the density. Given its brevity, I Don’t Like Shit… is striking for the black stain listening to it tends to leave upon your day. The music feels heavy, literally heavy, like you’re being trawled backwards through a mental fog.
As they would throughout his career, rap legends like Yasiin Bey began to call him the young rapper they were watching the most. In 2015, Kendrick Lamar, one month after being showered in a lifetime’s worth of accolades for To Pimp a Butterfly, said publicly that Earl was his favourite MC. But while Kendrick’s missives to Black America were winning great plaudits, Thebe expressed reticence in return.
“I just don’t do it in the same way as Kendrick,” he told Grantland in 2015. “Kendrick is so explicit in the way that [he] writes. He’s the opposite of mystery. Everything is fully spelled out. It’s sophisticated but it doesn’t take a lot to understand what he’s talking about.” At the end of 2015, instead of To Pimp a Butterfly, Thebe took to Twitter to name Days with Dr. Yen Lo – the then-latest album from the late Brownsville rapper and New York firefighter Ka – his favourite record of the year.
At the time, Ka was part of a wave of older, underground rappers like Uncommon Nasa, Billy Woods and Roc Marciano who felt somewhat without a lane of their own. Albums like The Night’s Gambit were lyrical masterworks: cryptic, patience- testing and defined by existential themes. Amid the young, show-stopping rosters of Top Dawg Entertainment or A$AP Mob, their mysterious and imagistic rhymes felt like total anomalies. In 2015, for a 21-year-old rapper like Thebe to praise an album like Dr. Yen Lo so proudly felt very left-field indeed. It wouldn’t for long. A new wave was coming, and Earl Sweatshirt was about to get very mysterious too.
