If IDLSIDGO became known as the Earl is sad album, there might be a tendency to label Live Laugh Love the Earl is happy now album, but it’s more complex than that. His excitement for marriage and fatherhood has the all too real fear of What if I fuck it all up? and yet, with the comic timing of a long-winded standup, he gets out of his own head with jokes. On “exhaust,” that comes in the form of taking a break from all of the personal meditations with a play on an old 2 Chainz hook: “Ya love stank bitches that’s your fuckin’ problem.” While on “Crisco,” Earl digs into the childhood anger that’s still affecting him to this day, but just before that, he declares, “Get these white girls out my home like Babyfather.” Dr. Umar would be proud.
The way his flow has become a lot more loose and unpredictable helps him draw out certain emotions, too. In the final few moments of “Static,” the disgusted pause he takes before he says “It didn’t shock me” turns some seemingly ordinary shit talk into a devastatingly funny lecture, in a DOOM kind of way. Speaking of DOOM, Earl still has a splash of the masked villain in his cadence, but mixed in with so many contemporary references done with his own flavor. When he spouts out, “Affogato cream and coffee, wally walker out the bottle drinkin’, I never got on LinkedIn” on “Heavy Metal aka ejecto seato!,” the sensible gibberish reminds me of California street rap, specifically the first few bars of WhoHeem’s “Dum Hands.” Also, “Live,” where over a Black Noi$e beat that is like haunted Backwoodz vibes meets sputtering StepTeam drums, Earl slurs his words almost as hard as Veeze. And not for no reason, that flow makes the song sound so deeply insular.
It’s a lot. Live Laugh Love is equal parts heart and style, and is as much about Earl the grown man as Earl the hip-hop head. Earl shouts out friends, blots the album with relationship details that maybe only a few other people in the world would fully comprehend, and brings up his emotional bond with his son. These are his touchpoints, so it makes sense that everything else—the word-association marathons, the flowery punchlines—seems like an inconsequential blur. There are a few moments that ground it all even further: the dream he mentions on “Heavy Metal aka ejecto seato!” that he had years before his son was born, in which the baby was walking on the ceiling; on “Tourmaline,” the best song on the album, when in a romantically woozy rap-sing he goes, “She found me on the streets, she vowin’ to keep my feet grounded for my sweet child” so earnestly. There’s so much musical and personal inspiration colliding at once, you can feel the passion even when you can’t quite crack it all.
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