Hip-hop, for all its flashy and sometimes cartoonish presentation, is a serious business. Just how serious was thrown into relief just weeks ago with the brutal murder of Los Angeles’s biggest rising star Drakeo The Ruler at the Once Upon a Time in LA concert. The tangle of police corruption, gang politics and financial interests around this was revealed in an extraordinary and very personal piece by hip-hop writer and friend of Drakeo, Jeff Weiss. It paints a picture of the city every bit as dark and chilling as the “LA noir” of James Ellroy’s novels, and makes vivid the tragedy of Drakeo’s inability to extract himself from the violence and fear he grew up surrounded by despite investment from the entertainment industry to the tune of tens of millions of dollars.

Meanwhile, hip-hop is so integral to America’s self-image, but so ideologically complex in itself, that senior politicians from right across the spectrum – from Trump to Biden to Sanders – will parade top flight rappers’ endorsements. And it provides all kinds of powerful archetypes. The celebrity stratosphere antics of Kanye West, the garish sex talk of Nicki Minaj and Cardi B, or the rise of drug-addled, face-tattooed teenage “mumble rappers” might very well seem preposterous to a casual observer. But through them play out untold national and global conversations about identity, power, mental health, generational schisms and far more besides. And that’s before we get to the culture wars around the Black Lives Matter movement – which hip-hop culture is inextricably woven into.

In the middle of all of this – involved, yet somehow slightly apart – has come the extra chaotic element of the Odd Future collective. Just over a decade ago they crashed into the public consciousness with a mischievous, brattish, artsy, alternative approach. Blurring Eminem-style, parent-baiting shock tactics, a crew mentality and aesthetic that came from skateboard culture as much as hip-hop tradition, as well as immense marketing savvy, they broke out globally, making megastars of head provocateur Tyler The Creator, thoughtful soulman Frank Ocean and the youthful but incandescent talent of Earl Sweatshirt.

Born Thebe Neruda Kgositsile and raised in Chicago, ES was only 14 when Tyler first heard his tracks on MySpace, and 16 when he first got major public recognition. His career had a hiccup when his mother sent him to a school in Samoa for “at risk” youngsters but he only came back sharper and more lyrically astute from the experience, rising to become one of America’s finest rap intellects. While hip-hop has always tussled with troubled mental states, he was one of the vanguard in making it a key issue – his 2015 album I Don't Like Shit, I Don't Go Outside bluntly wears its depressive heart on its sleeve. He has grown up in public, weathering the gradual dissolution of Odd Future well and coming very much into his own.

Which brings us to SICK! It’s a condensed statement at less than half an hour long, which is itself pretty radical in a time when most rappers will deliver four 75-minute mixtapes a year and consider “workrate” one of the key scores they should be marked on. But it is also, well... perfect. Musically it’s so dense and expertly produced that you could spend hour upon hour with it and not pick out even a fraction of its detail, yet immediate enough that it bounces straight into your subconscious the minute you hear it. Seriously, listen to it twice in a row (and you naturally do hit repeat because of the length), and you’ll find yourself straight away knowing details of each track like old friends. Sonically it’ll have you leaning closer into the speakers, seeking out each minute bit of texture and harmony.

Lyrically, it likewise melds the instant and the deep. Instantly you’ll get aggression, addiction, intoxication, concerns about hierarchies – all the standard subject matter of rap, delivered with language as strong as you’d expect for the genre – but these are examined with forensic literary skill. Though he’s based in LA, thanks to the Odd Future crew, ES’s life is a world away from Drakeo The Ruler; yet because he is a successful Black rapper, many of the same realities of institutional and cultural bias weigh heavy on him. Paranoias and concerns about self-preservation, for all the sophistication of his lyricism, are present as brutally hard and weighty realities. 

All of this is tied together with a desire to be hopeful, a desire to be constructive. Hopes of escape from the politics of success and the structures of US white supremacy are scattered throughout as hints, and sometimes made explicit. But what makes this short, bittersweet album so potent, is that everything is blended together: the anger and the hope, the intoxication and the bitter reality are all part of one coherent musical and literary personality. Musically and lyrically, it’s magic. In purely aesthetic terms it keeps offering up new pleasures on each listen, and it’ll keep you coming back for more. But content-wise it’s something else: it gives you a window into one young man’s world – and Earl Sweatshirt is still only 27. With each listen, the album asks you more and more difficult questions about what you make of it. It’s fun, it’s brilliant, but really: it’s a serious business.

Cover Credit: Ryosuke Tanzawa

Writer | Joe Muggs

Joe Muggs is a writer, DJ and curator of many years standing, covering both mainstream and underground. His book 'Bass, Mids, Tops', covering decades of UK bass music, is out now via Strange Attractor / MIT Press, and you can subscribe to his newsletter at tinyletter.com/joemuggs.