Earl Sweatshirt, Mike, and Sideshow Are Proving That Rap Doesn’t Need to Have a Chosen One
Recent albums from the indie rap heroes gracefully toe the line between humility and divinity
Listening to as much rap music as I do, I often wonder if there’s a difference between being braggadocious and believing that you’re above everyone else. Flexing is as foundational to the art as sampling, yet while some rappers transform into superheroes for the glitz and glamor, many do it because they know how it feels to not be special. I often think about how rappers like Raekwon and Ghostface elicit twinges of sadness from hardened tales like “Can It All Be So Simple,” or how Three 6 Mafia and Gangsta Boo recast themselves as necromancers as a way to process feelings of ostracization and whip the club into a frenzy. The personae these artists create are sometimes revealed to be a reminder that, outside of their songs, musicians are just as regular as the rest of us.
Then there are rappers who strive to place themselves on a higher plane of existence. Modern-day Jay-Z comes to mind: As a rapper-turned-mogul, he’s spent decades internalizing the capitalistic bootstrap mentality and mixing his roles as a Black man, an artist, and “a business, man” to the point where we—and potentially he—can’t tell the difference between the three. According to his recent GQ interview, he’s become a billionaire because he was made special solely through hard work and dedication, not because he played into the inherently predatory power structures that make billionaires possible.
All of these thoughts flooded into my head while reading independent DMV rapper Sideshow’s interview with Pitchfork last month. Near the beginning of it, journalist Paul Thompson asks Sideshow what he intends to communicate when he steps to the mic, and his answer quietly blew my mind:
“A lot of art is about how special the artist is, or how special the person viewing or listening to it is. But I think the main message I’m trying to push is there’s nobody special, nobody chosen,” Sideshow said. “A lot of the problems going on right now is because everybody thinks there’s a chosen people and we’re just all in disagreement about who it is. And everybody thinks they’re the one. We not special. Nobody’s special—but that’s why it’s special. It’s kind of nice to not be the chosen one. Because that’s so alienating. Everybody got something to offer, but nobody’s chosen. Let’s get past that. Once we get past that, we’ll start doing the thing.”
I had to let that one marinate for a second: Everybody got something to offer, but nobody’s chosen. Yes, being a skilled storyteller or effortlessly cool, or coming with cogent life advice, is important. But it’s also about realizing that, no matter how rich or famous you get, you’re grounded to the cement with the rest of us. And communicating those tethers—some wholesome, some painful, some numbingly mundane—can be the difference between a good rapper and a great one. A few recent albums—including Sideshow’s Tigray Funk, and Earl Sweatshirt and Mike’s double album Pompeii // Utility—navigate using otherworldly talent to grapple with the regularness of basic humanity.
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You don’t have to dig too far into a Sideshow record to find him wrestling with his own vacancy. His delivery is loose and occasionally slurred to the point where the average listener might consider him aloof, but that would discount his detail-rich writing style. Stories of drugs and violence switch from first to secondhand accounts on a dime, yet while other street rappers might spit like they’re actively clawing their way out of an abyss, Sideshow wades through life, openly dealing with drug addiction and the burnout of a violent past through dead-eyed reporting. Tigray Funk features some of his most harrowing and flex-worthy writing paired with beats both springy and promethazine-thick, as he stacks his good fortune as a successful indie rapper against the tolls of fame and PTSD.
As a rapper, Sideshow’s not doing lyrical backflips to convince you how clever he is. His curtness emphasizes both his skill on the mic and his status as an everyman who just so happens to be on the come up. On “I Am Da Captain,” his views on guns and love are distilled from pieces of advice from friends and siblings, and while he’s quick to assert that he’s that nigga (“Don’t call yourself Pac, lil nigga, I’ma ground you”), he draws strength from his collaborators and confidants, his “wolves that walk around in geese downers.” The song etches Sideshow as not just a product of his environment, but a product of the people who raised and nurtured him, the community who helped him recognize his worth.
Realizations like this make the highs and lows of his stories feel more human. When he raps about lean as the steadiest romance in his life over producer Takaj’s droning beat on “My Chemical Romance,” his delivery isn’t nearly as passionate as his words: He sounds narcotized, self-aware enough to know he’s trapped by past and present issues but too enthralled to care much about it. It’s hard to not want him to find a better way for himself. But he’s not drifting through life unconcerned, either. The third verse of “Martyr Most High” shines a light directly on where he comes from, showing empathy to the grip of street toughs the world’s left behind. He finds a kernel of dark humour at first (“How you judge lil’ cuz ’cause he a robber? At least he got ambition”) before digging to the core of this demented inversion of the bootstrap mentality.
So many Black and immigrant children in America are trapped by some combination of poverty and addiction, a situation compounded by society at large—specifically white people—not showing them proper regard. It’s no wonder this sense of desperation would fester into a morbid hustling for self. For his part, Sideshow hasn’t lost sight of the ways in which his upbringing scarred the way he deals with attention from rapping. He connects buried childhood trauma, the genocide and strife tearing through Palestine and his ancestral homeland of Tigray, Ethiopia, and anyone “not white with blue eyes” on “Look What Our Stomachs Made Us Do.” The nature vs. nurture of it all manifests in a Tigraian folk tale spread out across the album’s four discs. Even as he racks up accolades, it all serves as a reminder, explicitly told on opener “Signs+Symbols,” for those who know what to look for: I am you. As a Black man, I struggle, but I also celebrate. I persevere regardless.
Earl Sweatshirt and Mike can also relate to unlearning bad habits on the road to a victory lap. With this month’s Pompeii // Utility, the two underground heroes pull off their long-awaited fusion dance, expanding on the earnest experimental drive that’s pushed them from the start. If you’ve paid any attention to alternative-rap discourse over the last few years, and particularly the last few months, you’ll know fans have been split on Earl and Mike’s decision to lean toward the pingy plugg minimalism of Surf Gang, who produced the new project. Part of the fun of both Pompeii (Mike’s half of the record) and Utility (Earl’s half) is seeing them shrug off those concerns and lock into this dissonant approach with more intention.
Mike’s been tweaking his well-loved style—trenchant lyrics atop soulful loops—since 2015’s Winter New York, so while longtime fans might be surprised to see him sliding on creaky synth exercises like “Shutter Island” or “Back Home,” it’s less of a leap than what Earl’s gone through since 2009’s Kitchen Cutlery mixtape. A disciple of word-drunk polymaths like MF Doom and Eminem, Earl started out by showily stacking syllables and slant rhymes in ways rappers twice his age couldn’t muster. Then, post-Odd Future, he shirked the legendary status he gained while at Samoan boarding school and slowly stripped away the extraneous elements to make his writing more compact and punchier. By switching between heavy topics, galavanting with Gucci, and gifting trucks to strippers, there are no more degrees of separation between the “artful” rap the duo is known for and the vibey street culture they’re adjacent to.
Hearing Mike talk cash shit the way he does across Pompeii is still occasionally startling, like when he says, “I’m a rapper till I catch you on that backroad,” on “Back Road,” with an audible smile. Some of it can be attributed to osmosis from artists signed to his 10k label, like Sideshow and Niontay, but there’s enough of a checkered past gestured at across the album that paints an even humbler picture of Mike. There’s a brief passage on “Man of the Month” where Mike talks about attempting to hit a lick of some kind when he was 17, only for it to be heavily implied it didn’t work out the way he wanted. Compare that to his pithy request to “quit askin’ ’bout what happened in the deep end” on “Minty”; just because he’s cagey about what he wants to reveal, it doesn’t mean there isn’t something tough waiting behind the smile. What he’s willing to dig into more is how rap has brought him around the world. He proclaims himself “an innovator, the dream, my lucky ass” on “Afro” and attempts to instill advice from his late mother into his life on “Shutter Island,” making the ideas sound like two sides of the same perspective. It hasn’t mattered how much rap has brought him—in action and in practice, he’s still connected to what makes him him.
Earl’s also made a career of staking his claim as a man of the people, albeit an exceptionally gifted one, and his relaxed and intuitive performances across Utility make more of a case than ever before. “Leadbelly” is the clearest example. It’s one of two times Earl and Mike share space on the album; Earl pulls strings like the titular blues guitarist, Mike extolls the virtues of “using [my] hands and feet first,” and both take stock of the family they’ve built around themselves. On the chirpy “Chali 2na,” Earl’s pitched-up sing-song delivery is slippery and fun, using the titular Jurassic 5 rapper as his personal rap barometer and bragging about being able to gift his wife a coupe. Near the end of the song’s single verse, Earl draws a direct line between the excess of his early celebrity (“Bought a Bimmer, yeah, out of shape, I was drinkin’ too much) and his now-healthier relationship to being outside (“I’m around the way just coolin’, I’m not unavailable.”) That brand of confidence can only come after revelations like the one he has on “Earth.” “I don’t wanna be face of the league/Like Ant, it’s bigger than me,” he raps, flipping the words of the Minnesota Timberwolves’ shooting guard into a mantra for a rap sage who relishes being able to say more with less.
I don’t need to explain the appeal of verses about beating the ass of anybody who might test you, or flaunting Bottega sneakers and Mercedes-Benz C300s, but I can say that these kinds of gaudy trinkets haven’t clouded the vision of Earl, Mike, or Sideshow as they’ve attained alternative rap star status. Their humble but flossy way of thinking has trickled down to a newer generation of rappers navigating their own fraught paths to success. I hear it in Niontay’s reflective bully talk and Jay Cinema’s mellow anxiety; in kJADE’s poetic absolution and Lisha G’s whimsical bravado; in AJRadico’s romantic antiheroes and NAHreally’s amusing jaunts through streams of consciousness (and cheese). As different as all those artists might be, they all have an innate understanding of what Sideshow was talking about in his interview. The world is too vast and complex for a chosen one, but you can bet your ass these rappers will make sure their mundanities sound cool as hell anyway.
