The unique production on it is the most striking development. On Some Rap Songs Earl sounds less angry and more comfortable in his sadness; one can even make out a bit of hope somewhere in the madness.
Contrary to the virulent rage present in IDLSIDGO , Earl seems to have resigned himself to the darkness of the world around him, and now comfortably cruises within the cacophony of chaos as if he were bored with it all. While it was a departure that caught a lot of fans and critics off guard, Some Rap Songs dropped to much critical acclaim. From a teenage prodigy into a reclusive rapper entering his mids, Earl Sweatshirt has remained one of the most interesting rap artists to follow in the last decade.
Effortlessly talented, genuine and incessantly critical of himself and the world around him, his music is an intellectual and emotional catharsis that resonates with some of the toughest hip hop critics and strictest purists.
The contrast between the new wave of talent and Earl Sweatshirt, once a figurehead of a youth rap movement, is stark. And, in retrospect, it makes the panic surrounding Odd Future feel nonsensical. The history books of the future, if such things still exist then, will surely portray as a moment of major change in popular music, particularly in rap.
Now, in desperation, some of these stars are turning to their renegade younger peers for salvation. In October, the esteemed Atlanta rapper Future released a mixtape with a lyrically melodramatic newcomer and chart-topper named Juice WRLD, surely in part to gain streams.
The power has dramatically shifted into the hands of untested artists with immense commercial potential and poor impulse control. They have little time for introspection or self-preservation, but their imperative to make art may be a saving grace.
Earl Sweatshirt and many of his Odd Future colleagues, including Tyler, Frank Ocean , and Syd, are somewhere in the murky generational in-between, aged beyond their years but forging onward. These artists, particularly Earl, have been able to cut a path of self-discovery. He has always seemed to view success as both a cause for celebration and a burden. In this sense, he is an artist, propelled by his own psyche rather than by the charts or the Internet.
For those thrust into the limelight today, there may not be much of a distinction between the two. They can feed the industry machine, or perish. By Kelefa Sanneh.
By Carrie Battan. Carrie Battan began contributing to The New Yorker in and became a staff writer in The underlying beat is played by the lower bass kick drum, while the triangle is playing the rhythms shown on the music. Every black circular note head with that greater than sign below it denotes a note that is landing on the beat.
Rhythms without the greater than sign are off the beat. First a bar of quarter notes are played, than a bar of 8th notes, than a bar of quadruplet 16th notes. For those 3 rhythmic categories, there are 4 downbeats in the bar: on beat 1, beat 2, beat 3, and beat 4, because there are 4 beats to a bar in rap music.
Compare to how that bar sounds compared to the normal quadruplet 16th notes that are repeated immediately after that bar. The on-the-beat notes in the video below also sound different, harder, from those that are off the beat. Below is another demonstration. That 32nd note rest lasts only. Take a listen to how similar but different the below video sounds to the noctuplets in the previous video:.
For instance, consider the opening part of the song played in the video below. Watch only the first 12 seconds or so:. You can see that none of his syllables fall on the 1st or 3rd beat, because each of those 9s over the note heads represent 2 beats. He moves the beat and, although his division of the beat is very, very irregular, he never varies from it, and so the rap actually does feel like it flows.
He does this again very shortly after that example, in bars of the transcription, which is also played in the video above:. Now, Earl uses a lot of different rhythmic durations in this rap. To metrically transfer something means that Earl has taken the same series of rhythmic durations, called a rhythmic profile, and moved them around relative to that repeating beat that we discussed before.
If you compare all of the rhythmic durations, they are the same. Check it out:. Now we see how Earl literally transform rhythm in his music. I think you're taking the wrong approach to this. To understand how the rhythms work, you have to look more into the concept of swing, which is based more on addition than division.
Jazz musicians will make micro-rhythmic adjustments to their note value and placement while approximating a very straight rhythm. However, this technique is better analyzed aurally rather through notation due to its additive character.
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