Live Laugh Love – Earl Sweatshirt
Music fatigue gives my arse a headache. It’s DEFCON 1 for imbalance in my life. The only saving grace is that it thaws out my writing hand. The pace of life has buried me alive Kill Bill style and I’ve become apathetic to the present. I know this because it manifests itself in my listening habits. I become indecisive. I get a futile urge to reassess my entire music library as if this is in some way a significant or fruitful task. I once spent 5 months doing this until I lost confidence in the music I’d already assessed. Then came the self-loathing. It’s a peculiar failsafe, but that’s how instinct tries to level my spirit bubble. What I should do is hibernate so I can coax some vitality out of the crawl hole inside me and set some life beneath the skylight. But home has become a memory. Every mattress has unfamiliar springs. My childhood house has become a fly tipping zone for my carry-on contents. If life is what we experience in real time, then I’m living a half-life. I’m failing to find reasons to appreciate the moment. But strangely enough, there was an allure to Earl Sweatshirt’s ‘Live Laugh Love’ that forced me to stop the world and get off. Earl’s style promises deeper meaning for the dedicated. It was the perfect slap in the face to get me through the self-pity of my first world problems.
To say Earl sketches songs is accurate in terms of brevity. On first listen, ‘Live Laugh Love’ is an art gallery for the impatient. But that neglects the density of Earl’s lyrics. There’s more between the lines than in them. Courtesy of drowsy delivery, you’ll find yourself working on a daydream when you get tapped with a red-hot teaspoon in the form of a brilliantly layered metaphor to snap you out your stupor. He handpicks phrases that balance vagueness with objective raw power and generates an illusory but no less potent meaning. Like grouping up stars to create constellations. The author’s pick is on the track ‘FORGE’ – “Silver hearts, a spliff for your scars// Jog my memory, what isn’t ours?// Slivers of God ad infinitum”. He is the snobs’ Kendrick Lamar. But in a time where hip hop is in the hospice with terminal wankitis, it’s nice that someone is acting as a carer. Ironically, I’ve spent more time with the album because of its brevity. I’ve blistered my thumb on the replay button digging up new meaning with each listen like a prime Tony Robinson.
There’s a collection of words local to hip hop that I detest because they get lazily thrown around in hip hop media like its football punditry. In another reality I can hear Alan Shearer saying ‘the BARS Gary, the FLOW, the BEAT, the CADENCE’ to a blank faced Lineker as if that offers any insight. But I will reluctantly admit that in this specific instance Shearer’s analysis is more than the result of scoring too many headers. For the most part, Earl has forsaken hooks in favour of showcase verses. The minute long tracks aren’t rushed; they funnel all focus towards the verses. The premier verse, and maybe my favourite this year, is on ‘CRISCO’. Everything after “grazing oxen…”, in the words of Hova, packs more heat than the oven door. Earl also persists with his bizarre beat selection. I watched a sample breakdown video the other morning to avoid getting out of bed. Even when pointed out, the samples are so warped and transformed that I didn’t recognise them. ‘TOURMALINE’ brings a tear to my arid little eye, but Earl raps over a guitar strum and a bloke sneezing. It would be a richer world if rappers took more risks with their beats. The off-beat rapping is an Earl Sweatshirt staple. For some this will sound like a cockup that couldn’t spit shine the boots of Joe Pesci’s magnum opus ‘Wise Guy’. But it’s so rare to be excited by a 40ish year-old genre. If you have 60 seconds spare and want to try to catch smoke with your hands, listen to ‘Static’. If I haven’t sold it to you yet then I’ll add that off the back of ‘Live Laugh Love’, Earl has elbowed his way into my loose top 5. Sorry Q-Tip.
‘Live Laugh Love’ wasn’t a slow burn so much as waiting for third degrees at room temperature. I thought if I worked my ears I could weasel those nuggets of substance I’m yearning for. But I was a pan sieving hypocrite with the music just washing through. I rushed my listening and started selecting tracks to gain some form of control. ‘FORGE’ frustrated me as the beat doesn’t flirt with dub so much as eye fuck it from across the room before losing its bottle. But being a complete donkey, I failed to appreciate Earl’s venom laid over menace in the form of cascading drums and gothic piano. The second leg of ‘Live’ annoyingly combined mumbling with tinnitus. The more I tried to listen to the words, the more my ears rang. But if you can tolerate that, Earl is rapping like he’s responding to the ‘Control’ verse. I was pre-empting any enjoyment by trying to categorically define good and bad. I read a positive Pitchfork review which is worrying for my backbone because that instantly swayed me. But there is renewed excitement, perhaps due to placebo, in trying to appreciate what that person enjoyed. And it can’t be a bad thing to find new ways to enjoy something. Isn’t that what my opening rant was about, stopping to appreciate the moment, not just rushing from one shiny to the next.
From the framing of the album, the music clearly exists in the moment. It lets the water roll off its back. Earl sounds content and at peace, which is a first for him. ‘Live Laugh Love’ is a slightly disingenuous title but a healthy sneer. Earl amusingly acknowledges the preachiness whilst making some effort to embody it – “Like the boy Roy Ayers say// Can’t throw away my whole life standing in the shade”. He raps through a grin on the sun kissed opener ‘gsw vs sac’ and even tracks that deal with difficult issues such as familial trauma on ‘CRISCO’ are cut with an air of acceptance. Earl possesses this newfound emotional maturity without neglecting his humour and scepticism. And whilst the album is formed of tracks of varying immediacy, that’s just what I needed. Something to bolt me to the present and remind me to accept and patiently engage the moment.
