Taco and Syd the Kyd live with their parents in the elegant house the garage belongs to. Over a selection of famous and obscure hip-hop beats borrowed—or, if you like, stolen—from established acts, the members introduce themselves.
Earl Sweatshirt begins one track by sneaking some autobiography into his wordplay:. Fans looking to defuse lyrics like these have sometimes pointed out that the group includes one lesbian, Syd the Kyd. Neither does the word nigger. I got over that long ago. Although all the members of Odd Future are African-American, their music, especially the raps of Tyler, the Creator and Earl Sweatshirt, sometimes recalls that of the Beastie Boys and Eminem, white rappers who used exaggerated truculence, early in their careers, to prove that they belonged.
They won acceptance from black listeners and adoration from white ones. Odd Future, too, seems to attract a largely white audience, which is by no means unusual or irremediable but which remains a sensitive subject.
Tyler once answered a question on this topic with a mixture of pride and resignation. Tyler is more than six feet tall, with a deep, resonant voice, but he moves with the sprightliness of a little kid, pausing for the occasional coughing fit brought on by asthma. He favors bright-colored Vans, slim-fitting shorts, and white tube socks, which he pulls up almost to his knees. He hates being bored, and he has developed two strategies for keeping boredom at bay: either he entertains the people around him, thereby alleviating his misery, or he torments them, thereby sharing it.
On a recent afternoon, he and the others were summoned to a local park to be photographed by the Los Angeles Times , and, once the shoot was over, Tyler found himself perilously underoccupied. Maybe I am! An older white man shuffled past with his family, dragging a bag on wheels.
The man stopped, turned, and stared. A friend arrived with a car and a video camera; the group was gathering material for a proposed show on Adult Swim, on the Cartoon Network. One idea was to have Tyler drive while Jasper, on his skateboard, held on to the passenger-side window and got pulled along.
Tyler started slowly, but then turned onto a side street and accelerated, and so did Jasper—who then swiftly decelerated in a pile of trash bags. Tyler pulled over and got out of the car. He spied a man in basketball shorts and a sweatshirt. The man looked down, realized this was a prank, and looked up at Tyler, registering the face and the famous tube socks. For a brief, rare moment, Tyler was speechless. As a boy, Tyler was distractible but precocious.
He got a copy of Reason, a music-production program, when he was twelve, and started teaching himself the piano when he was thirteen. Having established himself as a disruptive presence throughout the Los Angeles Unified School District, he eventually wound up at Media Arts Academy, in Hawthorne, which was also known as Hip-Hop High: it was a last-chance charter school that used music facilities to lure students from all over the city who might otherwise have dropped out, or already had.
One of his instructors was Jacques Slade, a hip-hop fan and a former rapper who quickly realized that Tyler was the most dedicated and creative young musician in the school. Tyler was also making a name for himself on a Web site called Hypebeast, which is devoted to the intersection of hip-hop and fashion; he used the message boards to post long screeds about his life and to solicit interest in his early musical projects.
Odd Future was coming together, too, around then: a loose confederation of like-minded young people from various high schools who hung out together on a stretch of Fairfax Street that was home to skateboard and street-fashion shops. Tyler had been working on an Odd Future magazine never published and an Odd Future T-shirt line since before the group existed, and he was unquestionably the leader; prospective members had to win him over.
And Mike G found out he was an official member only when he overheard Hodgy describing him that way to someone else. Dre, and 50 Cent; some observers viewed this as proof that Odd Future was about to join the mainstream record industry, or already had. Steve Rifkind, a veteran hip-hop executive, delivered his pitch in public, on Twitter:. Hey fucktyler and oddfuture have not been this excited since when I heard a group called wutangclan.
Tyler fired back a dyspeptic response, also on Twitter:. Tyler eventually met with Rifkind, but, instead of signing a big record contract, the members signed a series of small ones. Earl Sweatshirt remains a free agent—and a question mark. I could fuck up. This next single could be a failure.
A recent London concert ended when fans stormed the stage, and New Musical Express , the impulsive British rock tabloid, put Tyler on the cover, wearing a crown, to mock the royal wedding. Burn shit! Fuck school! If Tyler is the cult leader, Earl Sweatshirt remains, even in absentia, the Odd Future member with the most flabbergasting lyrics.
The contrast was instructive. Earl Sweatshirt, arguably the most talented member of the L. No one knew where Earl was; rumors swirled that he'd been sidelined by his mother, who maybe didn't want her year-old son catapulted to nationwide fame on the basis of surreally violent raps about rape and murder.
Chants of "Free Earl" became commonplace at Odd Future shows. Last month, Complex magazine announced it had found Earl at a therapeutic boarding school in Samoa. Complex wasn't able to confirm this, but all the evidence was certainly suggestive. Sanneh's piece isn't available for free online, but it's in this week's print edition, and it's got some great information.
You can see the resemblance between father and son. We learn that Thebe's middle name is Neruda--after the Chilean poet. Bryce sports oversized Vans, gigantic hipster glasses and purple skinny jeans tight enough to suffocate a rattlesnake. He looks like Woody Allen if he was a year-old hipster who thought wrestling was real. The world finally catches up with alternative artist Johnny Drille. He breaks down his journey for Audiomack World. When Odd Future exploded into the mainstream in , Earl Sweatshirt was in a therapeutic boarding school in Samoa, leaving us only with some great music and a hunger for more.
Rumors swirled around that Earl 17 at the time was there because his mother disapproved of his vulgar lyrics. Keep in mind that Odd Future was seen as controversial at the time for rape jokes and homophobic slurs.
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