Alternately cagey and frank, he’ll seem lethargic one moment only to flash his boyishly devious smile the very next, before wading into a heady discussion of - well, anything. In conversation, he oscillates between silliness and earnest reflection on his life and art. Sweatshirt emerged fully formed from the internet like Athena from Zeus, if Athena were a teenager rapping about serial murder and cannibalism. His father, the famed South African poet laureate Keorapetse Kgositsile, who left the family when Sweatshirt was a young boy, was a key influence on African American poetry in the 1970s and, through the Last Poets, the Harlem-based Black-nationalist collective, hip-hop. His mother is the legal scholar and critical race theorist Cheryl Harris, who teaches at the University of California, Los Angeles. A baby-faced 16-year-old who emerged alongside Frank Ocean and Tyler, the Creator as a member of Odd Future - the Los Angeles-based hip-hop collective that borrowed as much from the antics of “Jackass” as it did from Gucci Mane or L.A.’s history of punk performance - Sweatshirt projected a nauseating, slyly funny nightmare of adolescent rebellion.īorn and raised in Los Angeles, Sweatshirt was probably destined to be an artist. I first encountered Sweatshirt’s music in 2010, when his debut mixtape, “Earl,” dropped and he was anointed as rap’s nascent enfant terrible. But here he was: a master of language who didn’t necessarily seem interested in explaining himself or his work. Sweatshirt’s music tends toward logorrhea, and I expected him to be loquacious in person. Slouched in an uncomfortable-looking leather armchair, with his hood halfway pulled up over his long dreads, he had scruffy facial hair that made him look uncannily like Bob Marley. He arrived the day before after shows in San Diego and Los Angeles. When I met Thebe Kgositsile, the rapper and producer who performs as Earl Sweatshirt, in the greenroom of the Warfield in San Francisco, he was on tour for his fourth studio album, “Sick!” which was released in January.
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