Earl Sweatshirt and MIKE come from different generations of New York’s alternative hip-hop, but their paths have been crossing for a decade. Earl first emerged as the teenage prodigy of Odd Future before steadily moving away from that group’s notoriety towards increasingly dense, introspective and experimental records. MIKE came up a few years later through New York’s sLUms collective, initially as an Earl fan, before becoming one of the central figures in the city’s lo-fi underground. Earl was an early supporter, but the influence eventually began running both ways, with MIKE and his circle helping push Earl towards the fragmented sound of Some Rap Songs. Years of friendship, touring and appearances on each other’s records have now culminated in POMPEII // UTILITY, their 33-track double album produced by Surf Gang.
At the Élysée-Montmartre, what is most striking is how little any of these people seem to care where one influence sits on the cultural ladder. Earl and MIKE rap over some of the strangest, most cutting-edge backing tracks in contemporary hip-hop, then turn around and drop the cheesiest, most shamelessly mainstream sample imaginable. Soul fragments, warped electronics, familiar pop hooks, murky loops and beats that barely seem to have settled into their final shape are all treated as equally useful raw material. Surf Gang’s production on POMPEII // UTILITY formalises that approach, pushing both rappers into a synthetic, fractured sound without abandoning the sample-based vocabulary that runs through their work.
That refusal to establish a hierarchy between cool and uncool, sophisticated and disposable, feels particularly contemporary. Everything is available, everything can be sampled, and nobody needs to apologise for liking any of it. It may be one of the defining sounds of this generation: music made by people with access to the entire history of recorded culture and no particular obligation to respect the borders previous generations drew around it.
The result is both heady and remarkably physical. These are dense rappers working over frequently strange music, but the packed floor responds with tremendous energy. People dance, shout verses back and move to beats that, on paper, should probably be more suited to headphones than a large Paris theatre.
Earl and MIKE embody the same contradiction. Both have enormous presence without behaving much like conventional stars. They can look like two guys hanging around on a street corner one moment and command the entire Élysée-Montmartre the next. Rock stars and street hustlers, avant-garde artists making party music, serious rappers with no apparent interest in taking the conventions surrounding serious rap too seriously.
It’s refreshing precisely because nobody seems concerned with resolving any of those contradictions. This generation inherited everything at once and Earl Sweatshirt and MIKE decided to use all of it.
SETLIST:
(work in progress)
