Earl Sweatshirt’s newest album Live Laugh Love clocks in at just over 24 minutes. Some Uber Eats orders take longer than that. But, here, Earl’s meal serves up far more potency per serving than any Uber Eats order possibly could. Rarely does a track run over two minutes, yet each feels so dense and deliberate that changing even a single bar would completely alter its interpretation. So many rappers fail to understand that crafting a good song comes before forcing meaning, but not Earl. And this is Live Laugh Love’s greatest strength.
Earl’s matchless writing stays unified in concept, as that same concept transcends any single interpretation. His experienced and refined pen almost introduces a sense of objectivity to a medium usually defined by subjectivity. The reason is simple: malleability. It is not only about situational adaptations, but also about allowing your mind to reshape how you choose to perceive the world.
What makes the record extraordinary is that it never insists on one meaning, one mood, or one takeaway. The songs hit the listener like half-remembered dreams. They are fragmented and scattered, yet a sense of continuity always remains to bridge them. That continuity is a testament to Earl’s mastery of his sleepy spoken-word style of rap signature to his sound since Some Rap Songs. Within these initially confusing songs, a recurring motif emerges: happiness is not a fixed state but a shifting perception.
The cliche title Live Laugh Love jars audiences because it puzzles you until you uncover a new meaning within it. The phrase has been mocked into oblivion, reduced to a punchline for early 2010’s internet memes that I am arguably too young to truly understand. Yet, Earl Sweatshirt proves that these words only feel empty when you approach them passively. In the context of his life, his art, and his willingness to sit with contradiction, the phrase is reimagined. To live, to laugh, to love. These are not simple prescriptions, but unstable states that collapse and rebuild based on how you frame them.
The album thrives in its incompleteness. Beats loop without build up, cut off randomly, or sound sampled straight from a half broken cassette tape. The minimalistic production is stripped of the hard hitting drums that dominate most major hip hop records. Life is rocky, happiness is provisional, and yet meaning can still be found and built in the grey spaces. Other rappers polish their music to no end and beyond necessity as ‘proof’ of mastery. Earl inverts that standard. His mastery lies in restraint, in knowing what to trim, and in trusting the listener to hold contradictions without demanding resolutions. Sure, he could rap as fast as Eminem or as conceptually as Kendrick Lamar, but nobody can do it like Earl.
That is why the album lingers long after its brief runtime. Live Laugh Love is not simply a collection of fleeting songs, but rather a personalized playbook for enduring the fleetingness of life itself. It may sound corny, but its brilliance lies in the truth that happiness is not permanence but perspective. Earl has spent ten years rapping about depression, and although little has materially changed in his life, he has learned to recontextualize his circumstances to encode a psychological simulation that strengthens his mental health. As Earl says in the final line of the album: “At the end of the day it’s really just you whatever you think.”
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