The rapper and elusive lyricist Earl Sweatshirt projects a certain underdog quality. His debut album, Earl, came out in 2010, when he was 16. It garnered him widespread attention, which only multiplied when word spread that his mother had packed him off to a boarding school for “at-risk children” in Samoa. Modern-day exile only served to bolster his reputation as an artist to be watched. In the clean version of the eerie track “Grief,” off his sophomore record, Earl channels Charlie Brown, perhaps the most famous underdog of all. He deadpans:
Good grief
I been reapin’ what I sow
I ain’t been outside in a minute
I been living what I wrote
