A bunch of escapist feel-good songs that make you forget the everyday life of the pandemic would actually have been nice again. But nothing will come of it. After all, “Sick!” be the sonic snapshot of a time. Or, as rapper Earl Sweatshirt puts it in a statement on his new record: “A wise man once said that art reflects life. People were sick. People were angry, isolated and restless.” So you feel understood in this work, even more so when you’re young, and Corona is not an exhausting episode, but a phase of life that has been more or less completely destroyed.
Earl Sweatshirt knows what he’s talking about – even before Covid, the development years could take a lot of wrong turns. So, a quick look back: As the son of a university professor and a South African poet and activist, Thebe Neruda Kgositsile, as his parents gave him his name, released his vulgar, adolescent mixtape “Earl” at the age of 16. Very direct piece that quickly earned him a reputation as the new rap prodigy. At that time he was part of Odd Future (full name: Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All), the provocative, extremely agile hip-hop collective around Tyler, The Creator, which became underground hype just as Earl Sweatshirt suddenly disappeared.
When he came back he sounded like someone coming to terms with the end of the world
His mother had sent him to Samoa at the time – to a school for vulnerable young people. “Life can change in the blink of an eye”, says the last song of the new album. “Came home in 2011”, he raps beforehand in the oppressive highlight “Titanic”, and shortly afterwards: “Ain’t know where none of this shit was headed”. The desolate mood of a broken youth works with and without a pandemic.
With a significantly deeper voice and introverted lyrics that finally seemed like they had sprung from the darkest corners of his psyche, the rapper came back as a seemingly broken artist. His always calm way of speaking was now even more monotonous and at the same time full of suffering – as spoken by someone who is about to come to terms with the end of the world. While his colleague Tyler, The Creator became more extravagant with each album, Earl Sweatshirt’s music developed in the opposite direction: each record was even shorter and more abstract than the ones before it.
Earl Sweatshirt: “Sick!”
(Photo: Warner Music)
And “Sick!” so is the jump out there now? Not quite. The 27-year-old still sounds like he smoked pot at half-staff – joint in the corner of his mouth, hoodie pulled low over his face. He still thinks refrains are overrated and the album isn’t much longer than his previous works (only four of the ten songs exceed the two-minute mark). But: You can at least listen to him again without falling straight into a deep hole full of gloomy thoughts. The beats are more robust, no longer threatening to break at any moment and his voice is also mixed more clearly – as if Earl Sweatshirt had finally realized what a gifted rapper he is.
Paradoxically, his second work from 2015 already bore the (at least original) name “I Don’t Like Shit, I Don’t Go Outside”. In the title track of the new record he raps: “Can’t go outside no more, ’cause n**as sick.” This can be a self-diagnosis – or the psychogram of a youth under Corona. The last sentence of the album is: “I’m seeing no one I want.” At the end a gloomy piano strums. It sounds like a comforting hand on the shoulder. Hopefully.