Photo Credit: Katelyn Winski
It's hard to listen to Earl Sweatshirt's new album I Don't Like Shit, I Don't Go Outside without worrying about the guy. Since returning from a Samoan boarding school, the Odd Future rapper has frequently voiced his discomfort with the spotlight, and on his 2013 full-length debut Doris he hinted at some depressive tendencies. But I Don't Like Shit, those troubled sentiments no longer season his music; they define it. It's the work of a young man, still grieving the death of his grandmother, who has turned all his anger at the world inward. As the title spells out bluntly, he's not doing so well.
Or maybe it’s an act. Earl took the stage Saturday night at the Rave looking more or less like the spry, excitable rapper he's always been on stage. For all his mixed feelings about his career—“Been back a week and I already feel like calling it quits,” he grumbled on Doris—he certainly seemed to enjoy being on stage and working the crowd, and he's a natural at it. With his boyish eyes and gangly build, he still looks like the funny, mischievous kid sitting the back of home room, a class clown who can crack his audience up without really doing much of anything.
Unfortunately, presence alone wasn't enough to compensate for an often clumsy show hampered by bad pacing, DJ miscues and a young crowd that, though reverent, usually expressed its admiration with folded arms. The crowd showed signs of life during Earl’s rowdier early material, but didn't know what to during his dreary new songs, and Earl didn't do himself any favors by lumping most of I Don't Like Shit together into one long, mid-set stretch. The same qualities that make that album such a powerful statement—the insularity; the commitment to unbroken bleakness—make it truly terrible live material.
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For his final song of the night, Earl returned again to his back catalog, revisiting “Orange Juice,” his 2010 riff on Gucci Mane's “Lemonade” recorded with Tyler, The Creator. When it was first released, that track was a prime example of Odd Future's wild, skewed take on contemporary rap. But it was a thrill precisely because it was a lark, a quickie cover that some teenagers laid down before moving on to the next thing. It long ago stopped carrying any sense of impulse or mayhem. That Earl is still performing that cover five years and a full quarter of his life later sums up the challenge he’ll be facing on stage for the foreseeable future: His new shit doesn’t move crowds, and his songs that do aren’t getting any fresher.
