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khoistop100 · 7 years

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#43 I Don’t Like Shit I Don’t Go Outside

This is a paper I wrote for a poetry class I took last year. I don’t have the chance to write anything else tonight as I will be in a car headed home from Austin and when I get home I’ll be going straight to work. If you have time to read seven pages worth of my thoughts on one of my favorite albums, then enjoy.

Rap never seemed to be built for talking about depression. From as far back as The Sugar Hill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight” or even “Scenario” by A Tribe Called Quest, rap seems to maintain a robust braggadocios, sometimes playful, tone. Of course, this lack of emotionality is understandable when considering the hyper-masculinity that the music began to become centered on with the emergence gangster rap in the early to mid-80’a. From there, rap seemed to be engulfed with an obsession to be the biggest, toughest guy.

However, since Kanye West’s release of “808s and Heartbreak”, the world of hip hop has been inundated with all kinds of emotional and “soft” rap. Gone was the rule that rappers had to be tough to be commercially successful. Rappers such as Drake and Childish Gambino appeared, focusing on more personal and introspective topics, in the vein of older rappers such as Biggie and Andre 3000. Along with these themes of emotion and insecurity came the topic of depression, an important motif in “808s” and was also the focus of rappers such as Kid Cudi. “808s” opened the door for rappers to express themselves and how they felt while still being legitimate rappers in a way that was not possible before. Depression was still relevant before, you could find it in works such as DMX’s “It’s Dark and Hell is Hot” or even Notorious B.I.G’s “Ready to Die”, especially in the final track of that album “Suicidal Thoughts”. Yet, depression was not the main focus or even the appeal of those works. “It’s Dark and Hell is Hot” is remembered for its blood-pumping, anger fueled beats and the myriad of dog barks DMX enjoyed scattering into his songs while “Ready to Die” is mostly praised for Biggie’s unparalleled flow and storytelling. It was not until after “808s” that the rap world could find an album as warped and engulfed by depression as “I Don’t Like Shit, I Don’t Go Outside: An Album by Earl Sweatshirt.”

To understand the themes and ideas in “I Don’t Like Shit”, it is important to have a short history of Earl’s life. Earl Sweatshirt was born on February 24, 1994 as Thebe Neruda Kgositsile in in Los Angeles, California to Cheryl Harris, a law professor who was forced to raise Earl alone, without the help of Earl’s father Keorapestse Kgositsile, a South African poet. In 2009, Earl was contacted by Tyler, the Creator through MySpace and would go on to join Tyler’s rap group Odd Future. A year later he released his first mixtape “Earl” on the group’s website.

The mixtape’s reception was fantastic, yet Earl was forced to stop making music with the group. Earl’s mother began to become concerned with her son’s behavior and sent him to a “retreat school” on Samoa. Earl returned to the states two years later and released his debut album, “Doris”. This release was not under the Odd Future label but still featured many of Odd Future’s members. Earl’s next and most recent album, “I Don’t Like Shit”, was released two years after “Doris”, in 2015, and was also not under the Odd Future brand.

In his early work, Earl’s main focus seemed to be having fun and rapping well. While Odd Future was infamous for their variety or horror filled themes, Earl seemed intent on writing as intricate raps as he could without as much focus on the content of his songs. Here’s and excerpt from his song “Hive”, the fifth song off of “Doris”:

“So here I sit, eye in the pyramid/ God spit it like it’s truth serum in that beer and then/ (Poof) Disappear again, reappear bearded on/ top of a lear steering it into the kid’s ear again.”

Note his emphasis on layered, multisyllabic rhymes. This style should come as no surprise considering two of his major influences were M.F Doom and Eminem, two of the most prolific rhyme writers in all of rap. Yet, if you look through the song as a whole, the songs seems to be missing an overarching theme or through line. Earl was described by a friend and colleague, Vince Staples, as “someone who can just rap about rapping.” It is true that Earl had songs that captured some of his darker moments; “Sunday” seems to be filled with a sense of longing for a past love while “Chum” is frustrated and angry with his life as it was, but these were outliers. Which is why the narrative he creates within “I Don’t Like Shit” is so tantalizing and dark.

The album starts with what sounds like a seatbelt buckle, what I assume to mean “strap in”. From there, the opening track, “Huey”, takes the listener on what sounds like an afternoon joyride. The synth tones are easy and free flowing, snare light. The song’s first words indicate movement, “Foot and hand on the gates/ We was jumping ‘em,” creates a momentum that goes on through the album’s first four tracks. From there, Earl goes on to talk about the state of his life. He talks about Los Angeles and growing up there, problems with his girlfriend, the state of music. A majority of the song sounds like the “rapping about rapping” that Staples was referencing. That easy going, braggadocios tone goes on until the lines “Critics pretend to get it and bitches just don’t fuck with him/ I spent the day drinking and missing my grandmother.” It is here we feel the song, and album, pivot and take a turn downhill. After two more lines, Earl ends the opening track with “And I gotta jot it quick cause I can’t focus so well.” When asked about the process of writing the album, Earl described his writing and production as capturing moments. He had to work quickly, as moments for these songs were fleeting. The line also goes on to create the kind of hurried and scattered tone that shapes a majority of songs on the album. The album as a whole is only half an hour, meaning that each of the ten tracks is about three minutes long on average. By presenting each of the ideas in short spurts, each track feels like an idea and the album would be a train of thought, fluid movement from one idea or image to the next. That fluidity is helped along by the album’s wonderful production, most of which Earl himself is responsible for. After his final line on “Huey”, Earl lets the beat ride on for a few seconds, before letting the synth notes drop and fall down the stairs. The beat decomposes, the bass becomes heavier and the feeling is one of being submerged. This heaviness is cut by a few sharp notes and a woman’s voice saying “And now, a formal introduction”.

Earl wastes no time to transition into his next track, “Mantra”. The song immediately starts with the hook,

“Get your lady, cop piff/ Inhale and cough, rip the label off this/ Picked the road that got twists/ I’m holding my dick and playing cautious.”

The hook is a good example of how Earl portrays himself. He talks about women and he talks about drugs. He shows that he’s indignant, proud of his ability to make it for himself, and he is also still a bit immature. To his credit, Earl was only 21 at the time of release and only 15 when he first met up with Odd Future and began his career. More on that later. This first hook is delivered concisely and clearly by Earl and is followed by an aggressive but hurt verse that talks about his experience as a rapper. He brags about his skill and his relationships with women at first but the verse seems to become focused on the negativity that rap has brought into his life. Lines such as, “The poster child, you posed to hate me” and “You know you famous when the n****s that’s around you switch, and if they hated in a passive tense, and now they hound ya dick, and you ain’t ask for this.” Earl sounds resentful, of fake friends and, later on, even fans, “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… And they the reason that the paper in your trousers’ thick” This frustration culminates in the line “You can tell the reaper Imma meet ‘em when he send for me/ with a cleaver and a .30 and some twisted weed” Earl is challenging, almost taunting, Death, as if all the troubles he is dealing with make Death a welcome challenge. After the first verse, the second hook is delivered by an Earl that sounds muted and farther away and tired. This exhaustion causes the second verse to sound desperate and exasperated. The verse is directed at his ex-girlfriend and details how his fame and touring caused a the ex to form a unfounded suspicion that would go on to destroy the couple.

“And tell all your little friends how that bitch stole me/ And despite all of the facts that you got phony/ You gon tell about the night that “exposed” me/ For the bastard I was…and the alst couple months that was the worst/ caused I small all the trust/ that I earned in the past couple months that we had as a couple”

The verse ends with the two parting ways. At the end of the verse, we can hear Earl crumple up paper and throw it away, then saying, “I shouldn’t even be-Fuck, man fuck this”, as the sound of a Earl inhaling, most likely smoking, transitions the song into the final hook, which sounds totally distant. The voice that reads the final hook of “Mantra” is not even recognizable as Earl’s. From there, all sounds blur and mix together. For a moment, nothing is recognizable, there is just sound. Then, a beat emerges, a beat that flows directly into the next track, “Faucet”.

Faucet is about remorse. Earl has become lost, transient. He doesn’t have many friends he trusts or a family he feels connected to. Earl is alone. “Ain’t step foot up in my mommas place for a minute/ my days numbered…I feel like I’m the only one pressin’ to grow upwards…Trying to see an M and some steadier hands” There’s plenty to dissect here. “Faucet” show’s Earl’s existential worries. He talks about his decrepit relationship with his mother ever since he came back to America and follows it up with observing his own mortality. He wants the most from his life but it feels empty. The line about growing up seems to be a call back to his Odd Future days. The group was always known for its outlandish playfulness, immaturity, and vulgarity, which is all quite appealing for a young man of 16. Yet, Earl was sent away for that kind of behavior, to go to school on a remote island. When he got back, his friends hadn’t really changed but he had, and it only causes him to feel more distant from the few friends he has. The reference to “steadier hands” could be about many things. It could be calling to Earl’s drug problem he often talks about. It could also be a desire for a steadier life, one not centered on touring or partying but one centered about a home. The hook starts off with the line “And I don’t know whose house to call home lately” and ends a few lines later with “When I run, don’t chase me”. Earl makes his transience clear as day, though his loneliness is more complex. Earl seems to resent the isolation his life has brought him, yet he wants to be left alone to “run”. He still desires to roam and be “homeless” and be alone but he also hates it. The second verse explores the dynamics of his family deeper,

“Out the toaster, I gotta focus, my family problems/ shrunk and widen with the bumps in my personal finance/ It hurt cause I can’t keep a date or put personal time in/ or reverse to the times when my face didn’t surprise you/ before I did that shit to earn me my term on that island/ can’t put a smile on your face through your purse or your pocket”

It’s clear that Earl is lost. He knows that money is important and is his focus but he also feels like it’s interfering with his relationships with friends and family. At the same time, he still feels hurt and betrayed by his mother for sending him to Samoa and pulling him out of a life he was beginning to feel comfortable in. And the focus on money he was brought up in is pointless in the context of family because it’s not money that his mother wants from him. The two are estranged, and Earl doesn’t know if he can trust her or how to make her happy anymore. The hook is repeated a final time as the beat fades out.

“Grief” is the heaviest and angriest of the first four tracks. The beat sounds sloppy, almost like synthetic gravel. The song is unapologetically sad. “Step into the shadows we can talk addiction/ when it’s harmful where you going and the part of you that know it/ Don’t give a fuck” The first four songs encapsulate the bigger idea of the album, it’s the movement from evening into night and all the darkness that comes with it. “Huey” is the evening, fun until the one though of darkness sends him flying into night. There, in “Mantra”, Earl stews in anger over fake friends, celebrity, girls, all the woes that are apparent day to day. As the night goes on, Earl finds a deeper source of his problems in “Faucet”. His loneliness, his decrepit relationships. “Grief” is the darkest moment before the dawn. Earl has lines such as “I’ve been alone in my shit, for the longest” and “Thinking bout my grandmamma, find a bottle/ Imma wallow when I lie in that/ I just want my time in tact/ When they both gone, you can’t buy em back”. It’s on that note that the “night” ends. Earl fully falls into his “Grief”, bemoaning the loss of his mind, which can be seen as coherence or ability to think straight, and his time, which can both mean his money or opportunity to right relationships. At the end the second verse of “Grief”, the Earl we see is lost and hopeless.

Which is why the ending of the song seems to strange. The song blares out a bright synth tone that shocks the listener, and plays a ditty that is reminiscent of Saturday morning cartoons. The moment feels like the “and we’ll be right back” that indicates that a broadcast is about to go to commercial break. It’s loud and blatant and is a strange break away from the dark atmosphere Earl was developing.I think that this moment serves as a palate cleanser. Artists can only go so far down into images of depression before they are forced to deal with vague descriptions of sadness and hopelessness. To put it sadness on a numerical scale, let’s say that you can convey your sadness on a scale from one to ten, ten being the saddest a person could possibly be. By the end of “Grief”, Earl could be seen as an eight or nine even, leaving the remaining six tracks not much room to grow into. By blaring his cartoon horn, Earl is able to hit reset in a way, and readjust himself before continuing on with the rest of the album.

From there, the album goes on to tread over familiar ground again. The fifth track “Off Top” feels empty and lacking in substance compared to the four songs prior. It does offer some good characterization about Earl in the lines “Little mad n***a missing dad, never praying much/ Right around the same time his grandmamma drank a bunch”. Here, Earl hints at more problems within his family that could explain why he is so confrontational or why he struggles with addiction. Other than that, just a few images of him dealing with the rap world and women are all “Off Top” has to offer. The next, “Grown Ups”, is also lacking. Here, the focus is primarily on Earl’s relationship with the father he never knew. The most outstanding lines appear in his first verse, “Grew up in a home that my papa wasn’t in/ Came up off of work that my conscious wasn’t in” What grabs me about these lines is the idea that rapping is an occupation that Earl came into before he really developed into a person in his eyes. As I mentioned before, Earl joined Odd Future when he was sixteen. Being catapulted to worldwide fame like that seems fun at first but that was before he was even old enough to vote, let alone think about how it would go on to distort and affect his relationships in the future. This resentment of rap as his profession for seemingly the rest of his life is interesting, a possible contributing factor in his depression.

On “AM//Radio”, Earl welcomes us to the first feature of “I Don’t Like Shit”. It doesn’t appear until the seventh song, a stark difference when compared to “Doris”. On “Doris”, the first verse on the entire album is done by a feature and it isn’t until track six that Earl has a song by himself. Out of the fifteen tracks, only four songs on “Doris” fail to have a guest appearance. The fact that “I Don’t Like Shit” makes it to song seven without a feature goes to show the affect that the isolation he talks about has affected his music and reminds us of the line in “Mantra”, “N****a is fake, I limit the features I give em.”

Of all of the tracks on “I Don’t Like Shit”, “AM//Radio” feels the most nostalgic. Both the feature, rapper Wiki, and Earl speak about the days when they hung out with the members of their respective crews and just chilled. Life was easier back then. This song also has Earl’s first reference to his time in Odd Future, in the line, “Bitch if yo n***a had Supreme, we was the reason he copped it” Odd Future as a group felt like they were primarily responsible for the popularity of the Supreme brand, as they often wore it. I also want to take a moment to point out that Earl’s production on the song is a work of magic. It creates a drowsy, dreamlike flow that I’ve never found in another song. After the two and a half minute mark, the song is lyric less and Earl’s production feels light and free and is some of my favorite music ever. For all his wordplay, Earl as a producer is one of my favorite things about him.

“Inside” is mainly about how Earl felt left out and distant from Odd Future due to their mainstream success happening while he was in Samoa. He missed out on that excitement and bonding that the group had worked so hard for together. The song carries on the smooth tones of the latter half of “AM//Radio” and ends with a reference to the album’s title, “And lately I don’t like shit I’ve been inside on the daily.daily” which leads directly to the album’s penultimate ninth track “DNA”.

The song starts with nothing but Earl’s haunting vocals and a few, scattered piano keys. Earl talks about his alcohol and drug abuse, about his fears of death and, mostly, about his confidence in his own abilities. Reoccurring themes pop up again, such as his struggles with finances and his love/hate relationship with rap in the lines, “just checking and balancing checks/ and checks and salaries testing my friend ship, Cause n****s get sour of this/ Rap shit got the best of me, I threw the rest off the balcony.” Yet it’s Earl’s feature on the song, Earl’s longtime friend Na’kel (often reffered to in Earl’s music as Nak), that fully captures the desperation of the album. His verse begins,

“Hundred blunts, n****s change/that’s my day to day/ n****s tryna ride my train/ like they fucking strays. My bro left today, fuck”

and that “fuck” goes on to echo in the listener’s head for the rest of the song and most likely for the rest of time. There’s something about Nak’s delivery, be it the timing of the pause he takes after today that leads us to conclude it as a complete thought before he shocks us with the “fuck” or maybe it’s the desperation and bitterness with which he says it. Either way, that “fuck” is still one of the most effective appearances in music due to the bubble of space it creates within the song, similar to the final “Sasha, thumpa” that ends Andre 3000’s verse on “Da Art of Storytellin’ pt. 1”. Nak goes on to list all the things he’s been able to accomplish that would make his brother proud in a voice sounds like it is just on the cusp of breaking into tears. I believe that this marks true end to the album “I Don’t Like Shit” in terms of theme. We traveled through nine songs in which Earl lead us through various faces of his depression and he ends on showing us someone else’s. It makes Earl sadness almost palatable, knowing that he isn’t alone and that we are all suffering in our own way.

The album’s final song, “Wolf”, feels like a large flag with the words “everything is ok! I’m still the Earl you know and love” written on it in big bold letters. The song features Vince Staples, a rapper Earl had known and been friends with since before Odd Future. In fact, it was on Earl’s song “Hive” that Vince Staples ever appeared. The song sounds reminiscent of “Doris” or even something that would show up on one of his mixtapes. It’s bright and bouncy and fun, a stark contrast and breath of fresh air after Nak’s performance on “DNA”. The song seems like a return to the norm for Earl, after branching into the deep dive into depression that the rest of the album was. It could also be seen as a mask, a performance that Earl puts up to hide the darker thoughts he tries to keep to himself. Either way, it’s the ending of “I Don’t Like Shit, I Don’t Go Outside: An album by Earl Sweatshirt.”

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