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In 2010, when Earl Sweatshirt first came to public attention in the video for the title track of his eponymous mixtape, he and his friends were concocting, drinking and then promptly vomiting a disgusting drug smoothie made of weed, malt liquor and prescription meds.”What the video and I were pushing was a culture of being loud and wrong,” says the rapper. “There are idiots who took that shit serious.”
Earl Sweatshirt photographed on March 27, 2015 at Mill City Nights in Minneapolis, Minn. -
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The first steps in Earl’s bumpy road to ostensible enlightenment were taken in an unlikely place: Samoa, at the Coral Reef Academy, the reform school to which his UCLA law-professor mother sent Earl, born Thebe Kgositsile, in response to drug use, bad grades and what he calls “poor decision-making” in mid-2010, right as the video was blowing up. “I was plucked out my life and broken down to zero,” he says. “I didn’t have my phone. I didn’t have weed. I had palm trees and human interaction. I was the purest I had ever been in my life.”
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“People think being alone is a luxury, but it’s crucial: Whatever you’re not down with about yourself gets loud and in your face,” he says. The result is a dark, insular album that’s the “first honest representation of me,” adds Earl. “It’s about being OK with yourself, for better or worse. You can’t really start living until you can live with yourself.”
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Chance the Rapper, a close friend and former tourmate, lauds Earl’s self-awareness. “He has a hold on his own reality,” he says. “Earl knows what’s right and wrong with himself and speaks his mind on it.”
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Today, Earl drinks detoxifying green drinks, but claims he’s cutting back on other green things. “When you’re smoking weed, you get lost in your own head,” he says. “When you’re sober, you’re grounded.” Instead of a druggy fog, Earl says he can feel things again, both the ups and the downs. “The good is amazing now; the bad is just as bad,” he explains. “I got all those real emotions, and I’m hella excited to express them.”