Live music review: Earl Sweatshirt

Academy, Dublin

The rapper otherwise known as Thebe Neruda Kgositsile is not your everyday hip-hop sensation. Earl Sweatshirt’s mother is a Los Angeles law professor, his father, Keorapetse Kgositsile, one of South Africa’s best-known poets. He grew up in southern California, but Kgositsile’s formative experiences were a distance from the gang violence and poverty of West Coast rap.

Just 19, Earl Sweatshirt was introduced to us as a member of the LA ‘collective’, Odd Future. However, his part in the outfit’s notorious rise was reduced to a cameo when his mother, aghast at his unruly circle of acquaintances, packed him off to a boarding school in Samoa.

He resumed his rapping career in 2012 and, last year, released a well-regarded debut, Doris. Moving away from the juvenile lyrics of his Odd Future days, the album found Kgositsile ruminating about his relationship with his family, his love life, the things he wanted from the world.

With its subtle beats, the LP felt like a repudiation of the carefully marshalled chaos with which Odd Future are synonymous.

Live, Earl Sweatshirt is a mixture of teenage exuberance and surprising maturity. With a huge, inflatable replica of his head looming in the background, Sweatshirt, wearing baseball hat and cargo pants, spins and swivels through rapid-fire raps such as ‘Molasses’, ‘Sunday’ and ‘Centurion’. Skinny and a little goofball, he cannot be described as a commanding presence. But he has lots of charisma and appears affected by the ‘bro-love’ coming his way from the overwhelmingly male — and surprisingly mosh-happy — room.

The future of Odd Future is up in the air, with sometime member, Frank Ocean, now a real star and the collective’s de facto leader, Tyler The Creator, recently accused of provoking a riot at the South by South West music festival in Texas (and reportedly facing up to a year behind bars). If the group is on the way out, what odds on Sweatshirt being the one around for the long haul?