Never skip a hopecore video

On Earl Sweatshirt's new album

Shucking but not quite, jiving but not quite, thriving but not by universal standards, by industry standards, stranded in the nether realms between the mainstream and the captured underground, Earl Sweatshirt, wearing an old man’s name and charm and a brittle embryo’s spirit, raps in the sluggish cadences of work songs, the lyrics that might arrive in a real field negro’s most cryptic nightmare. He adjusts his depressive alter-ego into a glamor magic we can all practice with him, seducing one another with exertion so subtle it appears low-effort, like a rigorously trained ballerina pirouetting in slow motion, only sweating through her tulle in the wings. I understand him so well I’m tempted to run in the opposite direction, close my ears, and disregard his partially confessional mode and my own as we share this impulsive linguistic agility and simultaneous urge to surpass it or recoil in the middle as a matter of pacing, range, distraction, or backlash against one’s own bursts of intensity. You worry the exuberance might be induced more by the will than the heart; you make certain the heart breaks even before giving into it, a shadow launches off the seesaw. If you don’t waver on the tip of that ecstatic needle between your nerve and your humility, the camel passing through is you, lacerated and trapped, the scripture riddles, mocks, you’re rich here but you won’t get to heaven, too greedy, too smug about your private hunches, too preachy about a false doctrine. Purgatory. That’s where Earl’s Live, Laugh, Love is trapped, between opposing states of matter and conflicting identities, between losing and gaining religion, though leaning toward the redemptive good father persona to make up for his own kinda janky, dad called out as such on the track “Crisco,” adjacent a ‘replacement’ who ‘beat the failure out of him,’ as if that’s the happier ending between absentee and severe. It’s clear he wants to be his own savior, to follow neither patriarch, and the album is his exercise in convincing mostly himself, that he’s settled down, at least for these twenty-four minutes.

We witness a petit sonic shrine to his version of wholesome idealism, his post-wake-up-call, mid true-love triumphalism, a formerly morbid rapper in his dad rock, bedrock, lover’s rock era, turning “Tourmaline” into part sweet nothing, part mineral protection on the woozy, nostalgia-laden ballad that follows “Crisco.” But we’re also privy to a quotient of the over-simplification that comes with circumstantial breakthroughs which lean on the spiritual for completion and validation, the sudden egoism of the man who has just come-of-age and feels as though he’s transcended his demons with a wife and kid as his shield and fortress. I’m rooting for him. It’s not that I don’t trust it, or the sound meant to announce it like a faux-disheveled Instagram photo dump with memes in the between baby pictures, it’s that I fear that virtue signaling too soon while undergoing personal evolution invites detractors and the backstage recoil that is ritualized in his field.

I wonder if he’d be safer pretending that he still despises everything and finds it ridiculous outside, if he isn’t luring sirens and handlers with his newly-suburban temperament. And I wonder why, when we mature and ascribe newfound meaning to our private and mundane lives, we tend to do so in the style of normative bourgeois symbolism, as if shrinking into formation. Can we be effective at running households without disavowing our past selves in the name of thin-willed domesticity, or are we trapped in the house/field binary and pledging to abide it in exchange for what’s left of the idea of dignity within the surveillance state. This album feels like a man calling a truce with his own existential dread, and in that way it’s very brave, and also unfinished. It’s obvious the past hasn’t quite let go of him— my will in a vice grip/I paid every time I wasn’t righteous, he vents, on the margins of insights into an awakening that are too trite to anchor it. There’s the first song’s exhortation to not wait, to chase dreams, the penultimate track’s insistent chant I released it, I released it, an affirmation that sounds more tentative each time he repeats it, or more like a prayer, a middle class blues disguised as “Heavy Metal.” I think of MF DOOM’s metal mask, of the welding together of play and sorrow, the earnest and the evasive, that makes this craft so beautiful, so fatal. It seems Earl was passed that mask metaphysically and is letting it go, along with all traditions that rely on his demise to sustain their thrill. I wonder if there’s a way to be whole without solipsistic, me and you against the world repentance, aware that sentiment, that delayed atonement, is only less than half of the story.

With legacies of dysfunction behind and within us, we’ve come to exoticize some aspects of the normative, to brag at our bare minimum acts of showing up and inflate them until they gasp and collapse into a new round of transgressions so we can loop it all again. The light is ejected from the seesaw too. Who is gonna be the duality of all wholeness if we only accept one side, either the shadow or the light, at a time? I think what I yearn for is the integration of I don’t like shit, I don’t go outside, and Live, Laugh, Love, not a diametrical refusal of one by the other but a sonic consciousness that embraces and exudes both, an attitude toward life that feels the way dusk does in the summer, like day and night could exchange violet glances forever, that sun won’t set just because you need to believe in other stars. Settling into twilight too early when we just got outside, is the feeling I get listening to the album; like I’m not supposed to listen too closely or I’ll awaken a sleeping child.

I remember that Earl offstage, Thebe, is the son of a UCLA professor, that the triple-conscious sons of teachers and professors are always finding and losing God. Ye, a professor’s son, Dave Chappelle, a professor’s son, Fred Moten, a teacher’s son, Kiese Laymon, a professor’s son, Arthur Jafa, a professor’s son. I’m sure there are others. And I’m a teacher’s daughter, which is different in that I’m supposed to want to follow her into the service with effete glee. I am not Jasmine, I’m Aladdin, I echo in protest. This album is the inverse protest, refusing to theorize contentment, for fear it might flee under closer observation like a delirious patient waiting for any excuse to claim he’s rehabilitated, Earl leans away from academic, afro-pessimistic reasoning and into folk wisdom like a man escaping a cult he started. It’s the kind of going off the deep end that frightens us most, now he’ll be expected to really embody enjoyment, satisfaction, and other anti-rap pleasantries. He could even end up so sensitive and reverent he becomes a literary poet too, like his father.

I love you all, peace, the ODB declaration from when he interrupted the 1998 Grammys to remind us that Wu-Tang is for the children, lurks in the background of a track on this album like its thesis. He relapsed a few years later, in the flesh but not in spirit. The Internet has a weird habit of emphasizing the “accidental” in some celebrity deaths and ODB’s by overdose doesn’t escape this eerie redundancy. Survival could be a happy accident too, is what Earl hopes, which is his version of being a motivational speaker. I love when optimism feels deranged but we do it anyways.