Listening in Between Earl Sweatshirt’s Words
Revealing its meaning in fragments, the album <em>Some Rap Songs</em> asks when to speak and when to be silent.
“Closed lips make the mouth breathers frown,” goes one of the rare lines that are immediately understandable on Earl Sweatshirt’s strange new album Some Rap Songs. It’s a quintessential lyric for the 24-year-old Thebe Neruda Kgositsile, partly because its wordplay is less about punch lines than about associative thinking, and partly because it’s explaining his entire approach of late. In a culture of talk, Earl’s trying to say less, better.
The notion that our society is too cluttered with has been one of the great drivers of aesthetic innovation—see , , or —and the need for creators to.
