some rap songs

Late 2018 I was sad.

My first semester of university was wrapping up and I hadn't had a great time. Exam season was starting, I was worried about my grades, and I was spending a lot of my time alone--mostly wallowing in my room or wandering in the nighttime. I remember listening to Lil Peep for the first time on one of those walks, just after the 1 year anniversary of his passing. I was walking by a lake in near-complete darkness. My headphones got too cold and the music stopped. I took them off to let my ears get cold. I didn't want to go home.

Earl Sweatshirt released Some Rap Songs (SRS) on the last day of November. It was Friday and I was about to take a long, dark bus ride home for the weekend. I listened to the album front to back 2 or 3 times (it's only about 25 minutes long) and remember smiling to myself with my head against the window, entranced. Then I forgot my bag on the bus (I picked it up a couple days later it was a chill trip).

SRS is my favourite album. I consider it responsible for a lot of my taste in music today and even my general attitude towards art and creation. It's an incredibly deep and complex album with lots of context to explore and intracacies to discuss, but I just wanna talk about some things I love about it.

I love the way things start. I've noticed rappers occasionally like to set expectations with the start of songs/verses, and SRS as a whole begins with a sample simply saying imprecise words (imprecisely). To me it sets the stage for an album that is real, authentic, flawed, and meant to be looked at with a broad view. The songs themselves start and end fairly abruptly, which gives the album an uncomfortable contrast through Earl's paradoxically laid-back but incessant delivery. I like the lack of downtime.
Speaking of the intro sample, it's apparently an excerpt from a lecture by writer and public figure James Baldwin. Again, SRS is filled with little rabbit holes to go down (starting with literally its first two seconds) but I'll try to refrain from doing so here.
The album cover, album name and song names are about as simple as they can possibly be. You're meant to focus on the music and nothing else. No complications.
It's ugly. SRS was the first album I listened to that was intentionally low quality but I absolutely adored it. The cracks and pops emulating the playback of a record make it warm. Earl's muffled vocals draw you in, forcing you to listen intently (among other things--I could write a whole page on the effect of purposefully unclear vocal performances). The stream-of-consciousness style of lyrics at times feel unfocused or aloof, creating an illusion of the album being casual or unimportant. The straightforward beats with looped samples are grating but quickly become familiar. It really opened the doors for me to accept experimental music and inspired me to consider making music myself. I plan on writing more about ugliness in music and my appreciation for it soon.
This is pretty simple but took me a while to notice, and was really thought-provoking once I did: On Veins, Earl says It's been a minute since I heard applause multiple times. On an album this dense, any repetition gives cause for consideration. The next track, Playing Possum, features his mother giving a speech in acceptance of a reward and his father reciting one of his poems, played concurrently. It ends with applause. Good example of the added value that comes from listening to the album in order and of how there's new things to find with every listen.
There's something about the way mental health is discussed on the album that I really appreciated. I'm struggling with how to explain how or why, and hesitate to attempt to at the risk of being cringe, but I will say I find it blunt, responsible, and hopeful.
Always interesting when songs are in unusual time signatures, and there are a few on here. I know The Mint is 3/4, and Peanut is so abstract it doesn't really even have one. I've heard there's a couple other weird ones but they've never really stuck out to me.
The capacity for analysis on SRS is really remarkable. Sometimes I listen to it and try to take things at face value, and other times I'll spend a day just listening to one song on loop thinking about the intent behind every syllable. Either way, I always come out feeling like I've learned something about myself or with new things I want to learn about. Even just with the variety of interludes, from the aforementioned James Baldwin speech to a 2014 TMZ video of Chief Keef learning of his eviction, there's plenty of food for thought and topics to dive into.
This is similar to the last point, but I want to highlight that the focal point of the album is the lyricism and I feel like I have not and cannot praise it enough. Earl's writing reminds me of Hemingway's. Not sure if there's actually anything to that or if I just like both a lot. Anyways, I considered giving examples of some of my favourite lines, but they're not usually that special on their own: they feel better in context, with emotion behind and around them.

Below is a playlist with SRS in its entirety followed by some music I like that I probably wouldn't have found without it.

Posted: 2022-12-11