![]() Harris said, was part of a larger suite of concerns that led to her decision to send him away. The relationship between Earl’s mother, Cheryl Harris, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Odd Future, which kept Earl Sweatshirt’s name alive while he was gone, was minimal at best. ![]() Often doing one of these things meant ignoring another. The eight weeks since he’d been back had required constant calibration: spending time with his mother easing himself into the rhythm of Odd Future, which has become a successful touring outfit patching up his friendships with Tyler and others. ![]() Mellow and thoughtful, he isn’t an introvert so much as slyly shy. “ For me, for my mom, for Tyler, for everyone I care about.” “There’s so much in the balance,” he said one afternoon at Ohana, a Korean restaurant in Studio City. IN EARLY APRIL Earl Sweatshirt was in California, spending his days finishing his final semester of high school at New Roads School, in Santa Monica, and spending the rest of the time regaining his footing. Earl Sweatshirt, by largely staying off the Internet, found himself benefiting from all that had happened and with a bully pulpit in front of him. In his absence Odd Future had used the Internet to trump old ways of doing things. He returned to Los Angeles in February maybe more popular than he would have been if he’d never left. In a time of Internet-speed information flood, Earl Sweatshirt’s absence - he was sent to Samoa by his mother - a striking rarity. By the time Odd Future began performing and doing interviews, he was nowhere to be seen. He was a savvy, schooled rapper: gross, entrancing and thrilling.Īnd also one of the only pop mysteries left. A provocateur with a dry wit and an outrageously dexterous gift for wordplay, he was a clear inheritor of Eminem’s macabre humor and Lil Wayne’s dyspeptic logorrhea. Much of the early Odd Future buzz centered around Earl Sweatshirt, whose video for “Earl” was a teen-rebel fantasia of drug use and other misbehavior. ![]() Before leaving his native Los Angeles he’d made a name for himself as Earl Sweatshirt, the most intense and talented rapper in Odd Future, the crew that in the last two years has helped upend hip-hop business models, remade ideas about the meaning of the rap underground and stoked the hip-hop culture wars as no act in recent memory has, thanks to its rowdy, outlandish and sometimes offensive content and its motormouth frontman Tyler, the Creator. Mostly he would get into trouble for sneaking onto the Internet, trying to check in on his other life, 5,000 miles away. Get in trouble, as Thebe Kgositsile did from time to time, and you end up spending your time in a separate house - the bus barn - more or less alone, waiting to be allowed to rejoin the group. Around the island the bus goes, until eventually it lands at the airport, at which point you’re finally free. ![]() AT Coral Reef Academy, a therapeutic retreat for at-risk boys in Vaitele, outside of the Samoan capital of Apia, your progress is tracked on a map with a bus. ![]()
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