He compares them to gangsta rap and hard-core punk. Odd Future is the new Bad Brains, but I think the mainstream will embrace them even more. There will be ample opportunity. Even Poetry magazine chimed in last month with an essay on the collective. The wolf lair is in the back house of a s Spanish-style home in the Washington-Crenshaw district. Syd the Kid, but the graduate of the Hamilton High Music Academy started renting out her homemade studio several years ago. Word spread rapidly, and one day in a dozen Odd Futurists appeared outside her window.
She was headed to In-N-Out Burger but told them if they were still there when she returned they could work. The Times, in fact, ran a story on Media Arts that featured a year-old Tyler. In it, he described his interests as music, fashion design and skateboarding.
The charismatic leader possesses an enigmatic streak that includes refusing to divulge his last name Okonma and neglecting to tell his mom about Odd Future a cousin ratted him out. Initially obsessed with Dr. Reflexively creative, he started a clothing line as a freshman. Pasadena rapper Hodgy Beats joined shortly thereafter. Though the rappers owe an obvious creative debt to Eminem, they fit few previous rap archetypes. Tyler fired back a dyspeptic response, also on Twitter:. Tyler eventually met with Rifkind, but, instead of signing a big record contract, the members signed a series of small ones.
Earl Sweatshirt remains a free agent—and a question mark. I could fuck up. This next single could be a failure. A recent London concert ended when fans stormed the stage, and New Musical Express , the impulsive British rock tabloid, put Tyler on the cover, wearing a crown, to mock the royal wedding.
Burn shit! Fuck school! If Tyler is the cult leader, Earl Sweatshirt remains, even in absentia, the Odd Future member with the most flabbergasting lyrics. The contrast was instructive. Tyler is a clever but effortful rapper, working hard to squeeze jokes and ideas into his lyrics, and harder still to push his lyrics out with his inflamed bronchia. In one typically sturdy and obnoxious couplet, inspired by his disdain for the Los Angeles phenomenon known as jerking a briefly ascendant local dance craze , he seems to be repeating himself, though he is actually changing the meaning by tweaking the words:.
At his best, he pushes his lyrics to the brink of gibberish, delighting in the echoing syllables:. There was something mysterious, and therefore enticing, about this younger, quieter, nimbler rapper who seemed less eager to be known. By the third verse, the protagonist has revealed himself to be a kidnapper and a rapist. At the dining-room table, Tyler was trying to figure out a design for an Earl Sweatshirt sweatshirt.
He pulled up the T-shirt design on his laptop. Ocean, who joined the group around the same time Earl went missing, examined the image. Tyler frowned. He attended New Roads, a private school in Santa Monica, where one of his friends, and his first producer, was Solomon Allison, who produces hip-hop under the name Loofy.
He and Earl met during a ninth-grade field trip, when Loofy and some friends were beat-boxing and freestyling, and Earl started rapping. A few weeks later, he called Loofy at home, and Loofy held up his Sidekick Slide to the phone, broadcasting beats over the line so that Earl could rap along.
Often, he falls back on quaint expressions of his lyrical superiority:. Listeners could also find traces of Sly on his old blog, slytendencies. In the first entry, from March 6, , the future Earl Sweatshirt reviewed his own career so far:. I sucked ass until about seven months ago, when I hit an epiphany. I rap. Tracks by Sly attracted some attention on MySpace, and soon—sometime in the summer of —he was asked to join Odd Future, which was already building a reputation in Los Angeles and online.
In early April, an obsessive fan from Texas, posting on a Kanye West message board, unearthed a vital piece of information: Thebe used to study a Korean martial art called Hwa Rang Do. Another option was to explore the digital trail generated by the short-lived career of Sly, which leads, eventually, to a long-abandoned Twitter page that has somehow escaped the notice of the Odd Future horde.
Ima Swag It Out. In , he was named the poet laureate, and he is a frequent presence at South African literary conferences and festivals. There is a gruesome, hallucinatory catalogue of racially charged horrors and insults, most of them phrased as accusations:.
In the final stanza, the recrimination builds to a furious italicized expression of poetic abnegation:. Something about this image—the poet, awaiting the end of poetry and the start of revolution—captured the imagination of a group of like-minded oral poets in Harlem, who called themselves the Last Poets, in tribute to Kgositsile.
Starting in , the Last Poets released a string of fiery spoken-word albums that prefigured the rise of hip-hop. Of course, some people might say that hip-hop betrayed the promise of Kgositsile and the Last Poets, instead of fulfilling it.
During the apartheid years, Kgositsile lived in exile and travelled widely. While visiting Chicago in the nineteen-eighties, he spent time with a poet named Sterling Plumpp, who introduced him to an African-American woman who was active in political circles.
By the early nineteen-nineties, Kgositsile was dividing his time between Johannesburg, where his old African National Congress comrades were finally taking power, and Los Angeles, where he shared a house with his wife and had an adjunct teaching appointment in the English Department at U. He beholds a boy endowed with the fierce decency of Betty Carter, the jazz singer, who had died a few years earlier.
But near the end, unexpectedly, comes a ringing admonition—the celebrant has said too much:. Hip-hop has proved to be a less volatile form than liberation poetry, and its general disinclination to be useful—to do something—helps account for both its longevity and its lousy reputation among many of the people who might otherwise be expected to love it. On a Friday night, at the end of another long and intermittently productive week in Los Angeles, the other members of Odd Future crammed into a rental van to drive to Pomona, where they had booked a concert.
The venue, called the Glass House, has a capacity of eight hundred, and the tickets had all disappeared within an hour of the announcement. Aged 19, he is one of the oldest members of Odd Future. I am not bullshitting. I am taking a semester off to focus on this music shit. Like Quentin Tarantino , for instance. And Stanley Kubrick is swag, too. Man diapers, for you. We ask her how she hooked up with Odd Future. Tyler bursts back into the conversation. His music was whatever, but as a person he was so fucking gnarly.
He stabbed his girl… he stabbed that bitch. Then he died. We ask Taco, the court jester, to tell us a little about himself. Before he can, Matt Martians of the Super 3 — a rapper and talented visual artist — interjects. The energy and humour are infectious. How did they all come together? We just do what we do.
Tyler describes his role in Odd Future thus: he makes instrumentals and then he makes lyrics and then he records them to each other. He repeats that over and over until he has many tracks to choose from.
Then he picks one track out of the bunch, and shoots a video for it. Then he makes cover art, if he wants that song released. And repeat.
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