Live Laugh Love resists a simple 'happy' label by combining Earl's excitement about marriage and fatherhood with a persistent fear of failure. He offsets personal meditations with humor, using jokes and callbacks; on "exhaust" he riffs on a 2 Chainz hook, and on "Crisco" he confronts lingering childhood anger. His flow has grown looser and more unpredictable, enabling emotional nuance; a disgusted pause on "Static" turns trash talk into a devastatingly funny lecture. DOOM-like cadence, contemporary references, and California street-rap sensibilities shape an inventive, deeply insular delivery. Earl shouts out friends.
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.
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.
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