Why Earl Sweatshirt considers himself a “surviving child star”
Earl Sweatshirt has been around for so long that it’s easy to forget how young he actually is. He’s still only 32, but, because his career started so early, it would be easy to presume he was older. He was just a kid when he first broke through.
Earl started rapping around the age of 13, initially under the alias of Sly Tendencies. He made a mixtape and posted it on MySpace in 2007, and, two years later, he linked up with Tyler, the Creator online. The teenager changed his stage name to Earl Sweatshirt and joined Tyler’s Odd Future collective.
Not long after his 16th birthday in 2010, Earl released a mixtape through Odd Future called Earl, and it was generally well-received. But, pretty soon after that, he dropped out of Odd Future’s activities.
It was unclear why at the time, but, as it turned out, he’d been sent by his mother to a retreat for at-risk boys in Samoa after he’d gotten into trouble. This, if nothing else, is a reminder of quite how young he was while he was building his rap career.
By 2012 Earl was back in the US and appearing on the track ‘Oldie’ on The OF Tape Vol 2, Odd Future’s one and only studio album. He also started work on his own debut album, Doris, which ended up being released in August 2013. He was 19 at the time.
His second album, I Don’t Like Shit, I Don’t Go Outside, followed in 2015, released not long after his 21st birthday. He was still a very young man, but, in terms of the rap game, he’d already become a seasoned pro by this stage.
When it came to promoting his next album, 2018’s Some Rap Songs, Earl characterised himself as “a surviving child star,” which was a phrase that was included in the press release pushing the record. Asked by NPR what this really meant, Earl highlighted the pressures that he’d been exposed to by becoming famous at as young an age as he had.
He considered himself to be a surviving child star because he was “here still updating.” Fame came with expectations, and he, as a former child star, felt obligated to update his fans on his life and career.
“That’s why over those three years, I was freaking out, because it’s on me as the child star to give you these updates,” he elaborated. “I’m this age now… Or else you can get trapped in people’s minds as 18 years old, as whatever age you are as a child star.”