When I listen to Earl Sweatshirt’s music, I understand better the indistinct concept of the lyric mode. Friends balk at my devotion, complaining about obnoxious beats and incoherent raps. But for me, Earl’s short poems (sometimes, I’m willing to concede, laid over monotonous beats) are speculative and visionary. They map a modern mind, short in attention, fighting to be audible above our cyber industrial reality—its alienating information storm of iPhone notifications. They take us beyond the day’s meaning-emptied habitual speech.
It might read as unserious to refer to a rapper’s “poems.” As an alternative, Earl’s mother—race and law scholar Cheryl Harris, whom he samples on “Playing Possum”—calls him a “cultural worker.” On that same song, Earl samples Keorapetse Kgositsile reading a poem called “Anguish Longer Than Sorrow.” The South African poet laureate and activist, known by his pen name “Bra Willie,” is Earl’s late father. When I talk about Earl’s verse, I am sincere about placing him in the poetic tradition, but precisely the Black lyric tradition, a tradition that encapsulates both of his parent’s Black diasporic repertoires of sound—the fugitivity of Black American spirituals and jazz, the embodied surrealism of the Blues, the South African poet singing history through apartheid and offering resistance to the status quo and Western thought.
On his 15-minute project Feet of Clay, Earl chooses samples and co-conspirators that present him as a serious writer and maker. On “4N,” for example, the sample is Dr. C.J. Johnson’s fiery declaration, “And I began to write!” from his sermon entitled, “God is Not Dead.” The declaration comes after Mach-Hommy’s verse, right before Earl comes in. In a commitment to what the Martinican scholar and poet Édouard Glissant called “the right to opacity,” Mach-Hommy refuses to grant permission to publish his lyrics. “If we examine the process of ‘understanding’ people and ideas from the perspective of Western thought,” Glissant wrote in his 1989 essay “For Opacity,” “we discover that its basis is this requirement for transparency. In order to understand and thus accept you . . . I have to reduce” (190). Neither writer seems particularly interested in being understood by those who aren’t already part of their collective “we,” who aren’t already collaborating on their irreducible meanings. In this way, perhaps, the enigmatic Haitian rapper Mach-Hommy comes closest to Earl’s non-sequitur rhythms, his creative marronage, his Black lyric mode.
This Black lyric mode produces surreal logics: absurdity, subjects and objects out of place, elusive syntax. Earl does not conform to the order of information dictated by standard English, nor a commonsense sequence of events that result in a linear narrative. His verses are governed by aural association: Earl lets sounds lead him to the next image or thought. The effect is similar to that of a ghazal with its couplets, autonomous in subject and meaning, not connected at all but for a syllable or two identical in sound—the radif. What we experience then in an Earl Sweatshirt lyric poem are successive notions presented like a rolling timeline, connected by a sonic mirroring. Here, Earl departs from the traditional Western lyric—his speaker is not reducible to an individual subjectivity within a single moment in time. What we hear is a collage of voices, riffing.
On the song “Mtomb,” those voices range from spiritual worker to bird, soldier to aristocrat, child to introvert, and lover to griever. How do we get all these perspectives on one canvas? We get there via sound:
Pray for the people
I make up the easel first then paint what I see through
The maze, I’m an eagle, spend a day up at the creek
We got the same amount of heat too
But they not as regal
Crudités not gone cut it, cut it slight. . .
This verse is dominated by the dactyl, a metrical foot consisting of one stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables. Every stressed syllable that Earl lands on rhymes with a previously stressed syllable. Here are the lines again, rendered in dactylic dimeter (two dactyls per line):
Pray for the people, I
Make up the easel first then
Paint what I see through, the
Maze, I’m an eagle, spend a
Day up at the creek, we got the
Same amount of heat too, but
They not as regal, crudi-
Tes not gone cut it, cut it
Slight—
Beginning with a stress on pray, Earl establishes a second stress with people in the first line. In each successive bar, a rhyme resounds in the same metrical place. This dactylic dimeter stress-rhyme schema is a complex symphony that guides the surreal logic of the verse. It’s how we get from praying for the people, to painting on an easel, to being an eagle undeterred by a maze thanks to a bird’s eye view, and from packing weapons to being regal. The first volta or turn in the sonic logic comes when Earl makes a connection in meaning rather than sound. He uses regal to get to crudités—a French word for finger foods associated with fancy gatherings—then crudités—which literally translates to “raw things,” like carrots and celery sticks—to arrive at cut it and slight, at which point a new rhyme scheme begins with the -ight sound. In short, when Earl starts making sense, he stops rhyming. In his rhymes, he creates new meaning by listening for sounds.
Similarly, on “Fire in the Hole,” from his 2022 album SICK!, several complexly interwoven sounds determine what image comes next. Sometimes, he deploys one of these sounds and doesn’t return to it with a rhyme for ten bars. Take for instance the -ink sounds across the verse:
I couldn’t toast a drink to demise
I heard the clink, life could change in the blink of an eye
I’m wrinkling time
I’m a leave it to y’all to get hoodwinked and surprised
These four lines come ten bars after “the shield took a couple chinks but it never broke” and twenty bars after “I read it and don’t respond / she see it and salt sprinkle.” Each instance of this sound speaks to the speaker’s elusiveness. By sustaining the rhyme scheme, as noted above for instance, we’re surprised with “I’m wrinkling time”—the speaker eluding Western reality’s time-space continuum.
At times, the absurdity in Earl’s raps comes off as pure stream of consciousness. Not even the best conspiracy lyric solvers in the unreviewed annotations on Rap Genius could make sense of the things Earl says. And the point is to not even try. I read Earl as less interested in making sense, than in making new meaning and ejecting us from the habitual. Sometimes the something-new comes through a strange image—take for instance these two lines in the aforementioned “4N”:
The old chest said “it’s ‘bout time”
Slow breath, cold flesh made her mouth cry
In both, a disembodied part performs an uncharacteristic action: a chest (whether torso or treasure box) speaks, and a mouth cries. The images we are left with are surreal, and yet these surreal figurations still communicate something: perhaps it’s time for someone to finally get what’s coming to them and a woman is drooling; or perhaps someone’s heart gives out and a woman cries out upon touching their lifeless body. In the effect of a great poem, what I think the lines mean here are less important than how they make me feel.
Perhaps my favorite lyric poem by Earl is “Mtomb.” The title is a nod to Mtume, the funk group it samples (most known for the song “Juicy,” popularized by the Notorious B.I.G. in the nineties). To my ear, the title also makes several sonic suggestions. I hear “entomb,” which is to place or preserve something in an underground chamber, like treasure or a father’s body, to bury covert meaning in the soil of opacity. I also hear the echo of “in tune”—idiomatically speaking: to be in agreement or understanding with the collective. Perhaps the song is an ode to the recent relatives that Earl has had to grieve—his grandmother, his father—and an acknowledgment of the burden he feels called to carry forward as cultural worker. Earl plays in absurd stream-of-consciousness freestyles, busy polyvocal collages, and sense-eluding soundscapes, but he speaks—in tune with many voices, embodied or in spirit—to a collective experience of the Black first-person plural—the surreal out-of-place existence we experience within Western reality, and the music we make from it.