| Sharpen your style this weekend. |
We are excited to launch our new column, Real-Life Wardrobe, with the writer and photographer Christopher Fenimore, who shoots and interviews intriguing people here in New York City. —Eileen Cartter, style editor |
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The Real-Life Wardrobe of Earl Sweatshirt and MIKE, Whose Style Icons Are Jadakiss and MF Doom |
Disciples of Earl Sweatshirt and MIKE’s particular brands of cerebral, world-building rap know that the two poets pour everything into their releases. So when the longtime friends released their collaborative double album, POMPEII // UTILITY this month, the hype reached a new peak. Some hip-hop purists looked skeptically on the news that the bulk of the project was produced by Harrison, co-founder of the buzzy, rap-adjacent collective Surf Gang, which has become known for their dark, cold, booming, electronic production style—a sonic landscape not often attributed to the sounds Earl and MIKE are known to produce or rap over. Some beats hold the weight and spookiness of Angelo Badalamenti’s Twin Peaks soundtrack; others bounce with keys that sound like they were plucked from a Nintendo GameCube. Anyone else hear shades of Super Monkey Ball on “rectangle lens”?
And Earl and MIKE are embracing it all on this project—rapping, crooning, and occasionally mumbling with abandon. The two artists have been friends for years, too long to remember the full details of how they first met; MIKE tells me that it was a combination of journalist Matthew Trammell and rapper Patrick Morales, better known as Wiki, who orchestrated the introduction. “Wiki was bumping my music at the studio and Earl [was loving it],” says MIKE, haze emanating from his spliff, during our meeting at the record label 10k.global’s offices in New York City. “N-ggas had hit me up like, ‘Yo pull up to the studio.’” Both claim the seeds of POMPEII // UTILITY were planted since. “We knew each other for a really long time before we had a song that we were ready to put out that both of us were rapping on,” adds Earl, who is manually grinding up weed flower in his palm. “The patience we showed really paid off. By the time we were finally ready to make music, we didn’t have to break our friendship.”
Chatting with these guys—our conversation pinging between Margiela cargo pants, Andrew Callaghan’s Channel 5, and the best slices in the city—feels more like hanging out with my high-school friends than interviewing two of hip-hop’s Jedi torchbearers. The personas they present in their art are nearly indistinguishable from the personas I came to know over the course of our afternoon spent together—no surprise there, given their lyrical authenticity is what makes both so widely appealing. Here, Earl and MIKE discuss their new album, the life lessons they’ve gleaned through rapping, their favorite brands and places to shop, and the MCs they consider to be instrumental in influencing their own style
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MIKE (left) and Earl Sweatshirt (right) // Christopher Fenimore |
GQ: That day you guys released the singles, I saw people commenting on the Instagram post, “Yo, man, they can keep that trap shit.” What’s your message to people who have yet to embrace the diversity of your sounds?
Earl Sweatshirt: Actually, huge love to both sides of the critical fence, bro: motherfuckers that fuck with it, motherfuckers that don’t. I love you all. It’s crazy times out here. Take care of yourself. If the fact that there’s an 808 there makes you not listen to some of the things that me and bro are still talking about—big love.
Both of you have pretty heady, norm-challenging lyrics. Did the more electronic, trappier-leaning sounds of Surf Gang’s production style change how you guys wrote?
Earl Sweatshirt: Maybe rhythmically a little bit, but I think that’s even not even totally true. A BPM is a BPM. So it doesn’t matter what drums are there if it has a certain type of balance. We can go through each and every single project [of ours] and go to the ones that serve as certain stylistic reference points of shit that’s going on here. I’ve said it elsewhere; I don’t think we’re necessarily reinventing the wheel here.
MIKE: It’s the excitement that people have to categorize stuff. That’s why people be like, “Oh, I never knew MIKE did any dance or electronic stuff,” but the dance and electronic stuff will be on the album. I think that’s me, yeah. [Laughs]
Earl Sweatshirt: Forming an opinion that’s not well-informed can often leave the person on the receiving end of that opinion feeling confused, or scared, or even gaslit. If you don’t know what you’re talking about, but you’re… MIKE: Standing on business. [Laughs] That shit’s crazy.
Read the full interview, and see all of Earl and MIKE’s looks, here. |
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