-Or- Someday I Won’t Find Odd Future Entirely Fascinating (If A Little Tiring To Keep Writing About) -Or- How I Learned To Finally Stop Worrying And Love The Split Infinitive (Working Title?)

Earl released one of the most divisive mixtapes in the Odd Future oeuvre. On the one hand, EARL showed the young rapper to be the group’s most talented on the mic, but his work also sets the ceiling for Odd Future’s much-hyped hyper-violence and misogyny. But a few days before Complex published its Earl story, the group released an early track of Earl’s on their website. Accompanying a download link is a block of text (in Tyler’s All Caps Twitter Style) saying, “Our Soldier, Wolf, Bother And Friend Is Currently Not With Us. Stop Asking Where He Is, We Like To Keep This Private Because It’s Very Personal For Us. And No, He is Not As Some Boarding School And Blah Blah Blah, None Of You People Know Because NONE of You Know Him Personally. Free Earl. ” The song, “Dat Ass,” is thought to have been recorded for a pre-Odd Future mixtape when Earl was probably 15. He’s precocious, with an impressive flow.

Perhaps surprisingly, “Dat Ass” is largely bereft of the violence and misogyny weighing down his “later” work. The track is a sunny excursion into rap self-aggrandizement: “Hypebeasts highly likely to bite me, / And try to high five me, / But I just give ‘em high threes, / Coz y’all don’t get to touch me.” The song displays all of Earl’s strengths—great flow and tricky internal rhymes.

While the two events are clearly not related, they do serve to show Odd Future’s more vulnerable side. The group is often painted as rape-happy nihilists or horrorcore disciples of Eminem, but it seems more true that they’re just a tightknit group of teens and young adults. Like everyone else, some members get the full support of their parent(s), and others get sent away to boot camp. Either way, they’re not exactly a well-coordinated group of professionals but rather young people trying still trying to figure it out.

Earl’s brief career arc can teach us a few things about fame: You can garner a ton of love from your friends and fans without any of them knowing where you are; and you when you do rap, it’s better to be good than to be parent-pleasing. Well, as long as the parents you offend don’t happen to be your own.