Earl Sweatshirt, a brilliant seventeen-year-old rapper from Los Angeles, remains one of the most talked-about hip-hop stars in the country, and one of the most mysterious. His crew, Odd Future, began its Internet-powered rise about a year ago, which was around the same time that Earl went missing. Earlier this year, the hip-hop magazine and Web site Complex published an article entitled “We Found Earl Sweatshirt,” which traced the rapper, through photographs and Facebook posts, to Coral Reef Academy, a school for troubled boys in Samoa.
“Where’s Earl,” published in the May 23rd issue of The New Yorker, profiled the members of Odd Future, and it included interviews with the parents of Earl Sweatshirt, whose real name is Thebe Kgositsile: his father, Keorapetse Kgositsile, is a celebrated South African poet; his mother, an educator, asked to remain anonymous, out of fear for her security. (Many Odd Future fans have cast her as a villain, castigating her for unjustly exiling her son.) Earl’s mother agreed to transmit some written questions to her son, and to convey his answers. As the article noted, “the circumstances of this exchange surely influenced the tone or content of his replies.” On the question of his confinement, he wrote, “Please listen: I’m not being held against my will.” He described his time away from Los Angeles in terms of therapy, not punishment, and asked fans and group members alike for “space.”
Since the publication of that article, the saga of Earl Sweatshirt has only grown more complicated. Heathcliff Berru, a publicist who represents the other members of Odd Future, told the hip-hop Web site XXL that he wondered whether Earl’s quotes actually came from “his mother speaking on his behalf.” It was clear, though, that the answers did indeed come from Earl, and not just because they included a brief but credible list of rappers who had influenced him. (If you’re curious: “DOOM, The Cool Kids, and that one [Pharoahe Monch] album Desire… [a]nd Pre ‘let’s-hold-hands-and-cry-a-whole-lot’ Shady.”)
Tyler Okonma, known as Tyler, the Creator, is the leader of Odd Future, and he was, by all accounts, one of Earl’s closest friends. Though he was evidently angry about the article, he was more circumspect in his response. On May 16th, the day the article was published in The New Yorker, Tyler tweeted, “He’ll Be Back In Due Time, Just Wait. Thats My Nigga, He Now Has A Home To Come Too. No Fucking Pressure. Hopefully Fans Respect That.” A few minutes later, he added, “And Respect His, His Moms And Familys Privacy. This Goes For Writers Too. Miss You Nigga, FREE THE EARLY MAN. The World Will Be Ours! OF.”
Last weekend, Complex published another Earl scoop, under a headline that said, “Earl Sweatshirt’s Coral Reef Academy Friend Says ‘New Yorker’ Story Is False.” In fact, the new information, like everything else about this story, wasn’t so simple. The writers talked to Tyler Craven, a young man who says he attended Coral Reef Academy with Earl; Craven had been posting on Facebook about his experience. In one post, Craven wrote, of Earl, “He hates his life right now and his mom for sending him there.” Reached by phone, Craven said that he didn’t doubt that the words in the New Yorker story were Earl’s, but he did doubt that they were sincere; he believes, as Complex put it, that Earl’s replies were “heavily influenced by therapists at the academy who need to see positive behavior if he wants to graduate.” Certainly that seems possible—there’s no way to know for sure until Earl returns, and even then some questions will doubtless remain. Not surprisingly, Craven’s analysis wasn’t warmly received by Tyler, the Creator, who is (understandably) sensitive about fans’ (equally understandable) curiosity about Earl’s state of mind. On Twitter, Tyler wrote, “Leave Thebe Alone, Shits Annoying. i Cant Do Anything About It Tho.”
Even as he waits for Earl’s return, Tyler—who is not just a rapper and ringleader but also a producer, a video director, a T-shirt designer, and an all-around auteur—has been inching further into the hip-hop mainstream. His first proper retail album, “Goblin,” was released in May, and it landed at No. 5 on Billboard’s album chart, on first-week sales of forty-five thousand. (He has also toured the world and broken his foot.) Syd the Kyd, the group’s engineer and d.j., is booked to appear at a P.S. 1 party next month. And Frank Ocean, the group’s R. & B. singer, seems ever more like a crossover pop star; he has recently feuded with Chris Brown and blogged about working with Kanye West and Jay-Z. (Listeners curious about the Odd Future phenomenon might start by downloading Earl Sweatshirt’s luminous and profane début album, “EARL”; Odd Future’s rambunctious collaborative mixtape, “Radical”; and Frank Ocean’s ethereal R. & B. collection, “nostalgia, ULTRA.” There’s a reason, after all, why so many of us are so fixated on this group.)
Odd Future’s rise might also have a non-musical side effect: increased scrutiny on Coral Reef Academy, the Samoan school. Overseas schools for troubled American teens have been in and out of the news for decades. In the late nineties, “48 Hours” broadcast a segment on alleged abuse at Paradise Cove, a different Samoan institution for troubled teens; in 2006, the journalist Maia Szalavitz published a harrowing exposé, “Help At Any Cost: How the Troubled-Teen Industry Cons Parents and Hurts Kids.” Paradise Cove, like many of the institutions in Szalavitz’s book, is now closed. On its Web site, Coral Reef Academy says that “Fa’asamoa, or the Samoan way, is what makes Samoa a true paradise and sets Coral Reef Academy apart from other programs…. Fa’samoa contrasts with western culture in ways that are intrinsically therapeutic for young men who have lost their way in the maze of western culture.” Does its most famous attendee agree? That’s one more question that Earl might or might not be able to help answer, whenever he returns. Until then, those of us who love his music will continue finding it hard to obey Tyler’s directive to leave him alone.
