Two of hip hop’s brightest minds go toke-to-toke on their undeniable similarities, their problem with ‘drumless rap’, and why you can never tire of your passion
“I mean the elephant in the room is that me and MIKE are pretty similar,” Earl Sweatshirt tells Dazed over video call. MIKE, who is sitting next to him, immediately bursts into a fit of laughter familiar to any fan of his work, throwing his head back and holding his stomach as Earl takes a slow toke of his joint, smiling.
It’s good to get it out in the open. Since their fateful encounter back in 2016, Earl and MIKE have become figureheads of a particularly cerebral brand of hip hop, delivering laid-back, THC-encrusted aphorisms over experimental, sample-based production. Together, the brothers-in-bars have helped revolutionise the medium, but, speaking to Dazed last month, Earl describes his first time hearing MIKE in much more personal terms: “It was like, ‘I’m not the only n***a who feels like this’.”
The feeling was mutual. Even before meeting him, MIKE branded Earl his favourite rapper, later recounting how the critically acclaimed artist became somewhat of a mentor to him, both in music and beyond. Despite being born on opposite coasts and separated by four years in age, the pair have gone on to work on multiple releases together and, as their call with Dazed wound to a close, MIKE and Earl headed off to Joshua Tree, California, to shoot a music video for an upcoming collaboration.
Earl, meanwhile, has only further settled into his new rap mentor mantle on his latest project, Live Laugh Love, released last August. Both sonically and thematically a far cry from his early horrorcore raps as a teenager rolling with Odd Future, the new project features meditations on Earl’s newfound fatherhood and his meandering journey to becoming one of this generation’s most respected voices. “Vestibule lesson, prerequisite to getting in the door is never letting them be selling you short, let's get it, I’ve been in here before,” the 31-year-old raps on standout single “Tourmaline”, dropping wisdom accrued across his seven full-length releases.
“Nowadays, [my wife] sends me to the studio,” jokes Earl during a particularly poignant discussion on how his relationship with rap has evolved over the years. “When shit was fresh, she didn’t want me to go nowhere. Now, she looking at me in the house at 11am like, ‘Go be with men and rap, you need it!’ It’s a lifestyle.”
Suffice to say, the conversation below straddles a university lecture and a comedy set. Joints are lit and relit as two of hip hop’s brightest minds chase tangents on the “promise of rap”, and why you can never tire of your passion.
How did you guys meet?
Earl Sweatshirt: It was through journalist Matt Trammell. I moved to New York and asked him, ‘What are you listening to?’ and he sent me MIKE’s ‘40 Stops’ video. A month or two later, I was [working with Wiki] out of the basement at XL – we were under that motherfucker like Harry Potter before Hogwarts. Anyways, that’s when I bought MIKE’s debut 2016 album longest day, shortest night. I always trip out when I think about you getting that email…
MIKE: That shit is actually funny as fuck, bro! I got the email [that Earl Sweatshirt had bought the album on Bandcamp] and I was like, ‘I don’t think it’s really this n***a’.
Earl Sweatshirt: My shit was burnt out, too! My email at the time was damn near YoWhatsUpMyNameIsEarlSweatshirt@gmail.com.
What led you to cop the project on Bandcamp, Earl?
Earl Sweatshirt: Man… I feel like the elephant in the room is that we are pretty similar to each other. It was immediately recognisable when I saw “40 Stops”. It could have almost been so much of an obligation to tap in that it could have been a hassle, you know what I mean? I always think about it in the terms of when Madlib and Dilla spoke about hearing each other’s music in some interview, but it was admittedly even more dramatic and spooky than that. It was like, ‘This n***a’s talking to me!’ We speak a similar language. I feel like a lot of people do, but they might get thrown off by contextualising it as n***’s stealing their drip.
MIKE: Yeah, there’s that ‘n***a’s stealing the drip’ shit, but I’ve also been recently trying to make sense of it as being a part of a lineage of musicians and people that tell stories in a similar way. Like if I think about what made me want to write raps… It’s like that Doom lyric, “Sinister, don’t know what he’s saying but the words be funny”. A lot of people may give you a whole bunch of things, but there’s something very powerful in just saying what you need to say.
Earl Sweatshirt: It’s you needing to say something and not saying it for the sake of it. It’s you trying not to be alone in your essence or some shit. I think that’s what you do in your music, it’s self-soothing.
Rap is like the world’s longest conversation, and every generation the conversation gets a little bit smarter
Speaking of you two sounding similar, was that a product of your interactions together, or simply two routes to the same destination?
Earl Sweatshirt: I think the elephant in the room is Africa, and being born at a similar time. I’m recently realising how much that influenced the music I like. I feel like music is the one chance you have to be like, ‘I’m not the only n***a who feels like this’. It’s a cliche, but that’s sometimes literally all you need to help you speak and have a voice.
MIKE, you’ve also said that Earl was a bit of a mentor to you. What did he teach you?
Earl Sweatshirt: It was both ways!
MIKE: Bro, I was literally 17 when I met Thebe [Earl] and the homie Sage [Elsesser]. I was just getting out of my auntie’s crib, trying to stay by myself and learning certain things. I always think of it like we were kids taking care of other kids – I realised that when I became the age that Thebe was when he met me and I was like, ‘Bro, I feel young as fuck!’ But yeah I learned so much, and it goes back to that lineage thing. I learned that I’m part of something bigger…
Earl Sweatshirt: Bro, bigger than rap! And not in the sense that rap is negative, but bigger than rap so that you can honour rap wholly for what it is and push it higher.
MIKE: Not to get too off topic, but rap taught me so much about life in the sense of things that I needed to be progressive about that I wasn’t progressive about before, and learn about the ways in which different people I don't know rap, too. I realised, without art and music, a lot of people wouldn’t have access to these intangibles. I have one bar where I’m like, “Rap saved my life today”, but it’s literally true. There’s a life I get to live now that my parents didn’t get to have because they didn’t have access to…
Earl Sweatshirt: ...To bars! And how many of the emotions that that generation did have were prompted by n***s who did have bars?
MIKE: For sure, how many people have been galvanised by music?
That’s interesting because, on one side, you’re positioning rap as something that’s radical and shocking to everything that came before it, but, on the other, it’s tied to this intergenerational wisdom.
MIKE: It’s like the world’s longest conversation, and every generation the conversation gets a little bit smarter.
Earl Sweatshirt: That’s what rap did, it came as the first genre that said, ‘We got room for everything’, by way of what was initially dealt with as theft and piracy. Rap is the number zero, you can multiply it, throw anything in it and it’s just zero. It can be folk, it can be gospel, it can be anything. It’s forever.
So, even as you reach this more mature stage in your career, you’re not going to lose touch with the kids?
Earl Sweatshirt: [Laughs] Nah, bro, I’m with Surf Gang! I’m too locked in! I’m surrounded by multiple skateboard magazines right now.
And you guys have both played a huge role in pushing the format forward, with the avant-garde and drumless…
[MIKE and Earl Sweatshirt exchange a knowing glance]
MIKE: I feel like this is actually a good thing to cover for everybody. With drumless rap as a category, it’s dangerous. I feel like people associate drumless rap with the idea of rapping over a sample, and those two things don’t match up. There aren’t many samples that I have rapped over that don’t have drums in them – there’s usually drums in the sample. It’s a beat that just doesn’t have programmed drums in it, which never constituted rap – programmed drums were only a part of it.
Earl Sweatshirt: And it’s all fucking rap music, that’s why I said the goal is to be one thing. The promise of rap music is that it doesn't have to be splintered and tupperware’d off into these different things. When they sort it into these subgenres, it’s just easier for people to be like, ‘Make more of that drumless shit’, or ‘Which playlist can I fit it into?’
MIKE: For so long we’ve been rapping over beats that got all the drum sounds, and then motherfuckers say, ‘Oh your shit is vapor wave coded’, or, ‘This is drumless rap’, I’m like I have no intention of being that. Anyway, more time the people who call your shit drumless are the ones who don’t fuck with you and use it in a derogatory way…
Earl Sweatshirt: ...And they’re not listening! It’s like water-cooler talk to sound smart.
Did you have any questions you’d like to ask each other?
Earl: What do you do when you get tired? Because you’re like me, you’ve got this thing where you can keep going forever.
MIKE: I think this goes back to the question of whether you can separate the art from the artist. In my theory, you can’t, because part of your art – especially with rap music – is the life that you live. So, one of the funniest things recently was that I went on a real vacation for the first time and I was having fun, but I also realised that so many hours in the day became available because I wasn’t able to work on music. I was like, ‘Yo, this is how motherfuckers get into trouble!’ because you don’t have shit to do with yourself.
Earl: Yo! I realised that when I went super fitness man last year – the way I had begun to do it wasn’t normal. I was doing it to restrain myself.
MIKE: I feel like, once you create that healthy relationship with something, then you don’t have to get burnt out. Like, we just did this run of shows, and I was tired, but I wasn’t burnt out…
Earl: Because you’re doing what you want to do. Like, you take on this amount of work, but it’s not like your body is communicating to you that you don’t want to do it – it fortifies you. So, basically, you just took a big-brain, long-winded way of saying…
[Both burst out laughing]
MIKE: I don’t get tired!
Earl Sweatshirt’s Live Laugh Love is out now