www.theguardian.com/music/2018/dec/07/earl-sweatshirt-some-rap-songs-review
Beats-wise, it’s a little like one of Madlib’s Medicine Show mixes, where grainy, sample-driven productions blurt like a haunted radio searching for a frequency in the past. Soul, funk and disco samples are cut up with blunt safety scissors, leaving bruised edges and loose threads. Some are seemingly heated towards melting point, resulting in beautifully drooping tones like the organ on Cold Summers; others are dried out, like the brittle, chalky piano on The Mint. The influence of J Dilla is clear, particularly the way the late producer seemed to wrap his bass in loft insulation, and pushed the beat slightly off its grid to unlock profound funk.
(Ben Beaumont-Thomas, “Earl Sweatshirt: Some Rap Songs review — powerful, emotional poetry,” The Guardian, 12-7-18)
(c) 2018 JMN.
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EthicalDative 
The Dry Heaves
I picked up a colored marker, a sketchpad, and sat down. I looked around the room for a shape, a blade of light, a shadow, an assonance, a blur, something to trigger a spasm in my drawing hand and stain the pristine paper. Nothing. Forget the seen, I thought; let it come from the unseen. I summoned (conjured?) a mark of any kind — straight from the head — a squiggle, a spiral, a splotch, a graphical blarp, symbolic, idiotic, with no pretense to “be” something — whatever ensued. After all, what’s the downside of touching this paper with an inky point in this privacy, this solitude? The trash can is as close as a spittoon. Still nothing. Literal paralysis. Bemused, nonplussed, verging on despondent, I simply started writing words in loopy, longhand script. “Es lo que hay,” they say here. It’s what is.
I once watched a big, long-legged bird take to the air from a swamp. It flapped wing and paddled those ungainly legs in what looked like laugh-inducing desperation for what seemed like a coon’s age, until the ostensible jury-rigged excuse for a bird finally caught flight. And then it soared tear-jerkingly. You would have thought it was built to fly. Which of course it was.
(c) 2018 JMN.