Vibes: Earl Sweatshirt in Conversation with Cheryl Harris
Jim: I really enjoyed this very tender conversation on art, music and life between rapper Earl Sweatshirt and his mum, civil rights professor Cheryl Harris. Their relationship was quite turbulent back in 2011 when Odd Future were blowing up, and she decided to pull him out of the group, and sent him to a boarding school in Samoa. They’ve since figured things out, and Earl is an adult now haha, so the conversation is very mushy, and it’s lovely to watch them talk about the issues that come up in the relationship between parents and their children with creative careers.
That’s not a conversation we get to have here in Kenya, you know? At least, not for us millennials who were raised by a cautious generation who needed to survive the 80s and 90s. Millennial Africans had a hard time explaining to their parents that this music, this writing, this drawing was more than a hobby. And to this day, even our most successful peers still have parents who will say, “So, this is your job now?” :)