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Earl Sweatshirt ‘I Don’t Like Shit, I Don’t Go Outside’: Anxiety, Melancholia, and Manliness

“Why you so… depressed and sad all the time, like a little bitch?” asks Vince Staples at the beginning of “Burgundy,” a track on Earl Sweatshirt’s 2013 LP, Doris. He continues, “Don’t nobody care about how you feel, we want raps!” Earl obliges, launching into an extended unloading of his anxieties surrounding his nascent fame and his grandmother’s poor health. Framed by Staples’ reaction to his angst, the track seems to prefigure the demeanor that dominates Sweatshirt’s his newest LP, I Don’t Like Shit, I Don’t Go Outside, released digitally on March 23rd.

The album’s biggest departure from his previous effort is in the fact that Sweatshirt self-produced nine out of ten songs under the moniker, “randomblackdude.” The beats on IDLSIDGO progress as if dragged through syrup — not sugary sweet, but rather like a chilled, over-proof whisky, similar to what Earl chugs at the beginning of “DNA (feat. Na’kel).” Music critics’ reception of the record, however, has focused mainly on the lyrics. The largely positive reviews center the record’s “moody,” “mordant,” and “worrisomely dark” tone. It’s a neat interpretation, one that reeks of a well-trodden cultural obsession with the tragic artist figure — melancholic, complex relationship to fame, and a close relationship to drugs.

At 30 minutes long, IDLSIDGO is designed for listeners to play on repeat. ‘WHEN YOU GET DONE LISTENING TO IT, LISTEN AGAIN, THATS [sic] WHY ITS [sic] 30 MINUTES, NUMBNUTS,’ Earl scream-tweeted recently. The built-to-loop album allows itself to become more of a life object than an autonomous music object. In other words, the record isn’t an escape from life — the record is life. Finish listening; start listening again. Go to sleep; wake up. Each day is different, as each listen is slightly different, but the mechanism of daily living and listening is one in which the boundaries between finish and re-start collapse into each other. Another cyclical turn is the very one that critics have been so obsessed with highlighting: the ups and downs of an emotional human being. Though perhaps not at 30-minute intervals, ebb and flow between a good and bad mood is a familiar tidal shift for many.

It does seem like Earl spends much of IDLSIDGO in a bad mood. And though he has since asserted that this melancholia is a mere snapshot amidst a range of emotions, his willingness to share that slice of sadness is compelling. In the context of a social structure that suggests that sad people should just medicate, or the legal structure that propagates the notion that black boys are more “demon” than emotional human, I find it honest, brave, and timely for Sweatshirt to spill his angst and wax vulnerable, so to speak.

His borderline hysterics (“lately I’ve been panicking a lot/ feeling like I’m stranded in a mob/ scrambling for Xanax out the canister to pop” on “Grief“) portray a nervous anxiety that is also, unjustly, often coded as feminine. Might critics be so indelibly struck by his nervous angst because he’s not female? It would be inaccurate, however, to suggest that Sweatshirt doesn’t perform masculinity, too. Most songs on the album are sprinkled with a healthy amount of the classic “I’m great, you’re not” rap bravado that is often coded masculine (“ask who the best and I doubt that they picking you/ back like how I need to style, I invented you, yup” on “Mantra”). And although contemporary cultural attention seems to highlight cracks in the dominant gender binary as a new development, let me abruptly thwart any suggestion that Earl Sweatshirt (along with other “confessional” rappers like Drake, Logic, and J. Cole) represent a “new” brand of masculinity. 50 years ago saw James Dean and Marlon Brando, but also saw Robert Lowell. Male hysterics are not new.

Instead, I prefer to think of Logic, lovelorn Drake, and Earl Sweatshirt’s confessional styles not as refusals of manliness, and especially not as new manliness, but rather as assertions of alternate possibilities of masculinity. Sweatshirt’s particular alternate possibility includes the admission that a “face drinking smoker … [ducks] when emotion jabs” (“Inside”). Still, by no means does this suggest that the so-called Alpha Male never expresses emotion. Even Brando’s Stanley Kowalski bubbled over in desperate self-pity at the end of A Streetcar Named Desire (1951). What is of interest with IDLSIDGO, however, is that Sweatshirt incorporates anxiety, doubt, alienation, and sadness as part of the normal ebb and flow within his own version of manliness. As if with complete transparency, Sweatshirt seems to simply say, “This is happening in my life. It is unbearable. This is my reaction to it.”

Those three “I feel” statements point to another overlooked quality of the album. The whole record is about him. Alt-masculine, and self-involved? To call it self-involved is not meant as a criticism — far from it. Ultimately, I think the album sounds best when listened to as one might imagine Earl recorded it — alone, a bit sad, slightly (to very) stoned. In addition to being a looping, continuous, cyclical proposition, IDLSIDGO is not an album that is very generous to its audience. One has to mimic his frame of mind to have the best chance at understanding the record. At the very least, the rapper asks that the listener do the work to “get” him. “GET THE FUCK UP OFF RAP GENIUS THAT SHIT MELTS BRAIN CELLS I CANT BELIEVE YOU EVER THOUGHT THAT WAS A CHILL OPTION WHY ARE YOU SO LAZY,” he chided in another great scream-tweet. I’m beginning to think that the rapper’s self-involvement is a coping mechanism, a world built in defense against anxiety. It is as if Earl says: Build your own world — inside, alone, with your own beats, and your own 30-minute clock. Cope with the things that piss you off and kill a good mood — friends, police, parents, exes, and lazy expectations of masculinity.

I Don’t Like Shit, I Don’t Go Outside is out now via Columbia.

Review by Taylor Le Melle. Find her online @melrose_tay



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