Earl Sweatshirt Interviews Mike Tyson for Humanity Magazine

Now here’s an odd pairing that we would’ve never saw coming. For Citizens of Humanity’s recently launched magazine, Odd Future’s Earl Sweatshirt was enlisted to interview boxing icon Mike Tyson. And this particular piece is just as interesting and memorable as you could imagine from such an unexpected feature.

It’s no question that when you think back on the most polarizing sports figures of all-time, the legendary Mike Tyson easily tops the list. And we’re not talking about the pigeon-loving side, we’re talking about Holyfield’s ear-in-mouth Tyson – before the face tattoo and Hangover cameos. But of course those days are long gone, and the once brutalizing boxer is now a changed man and is always brutally honest and open about his past and the obstacles he had to overcome to get to this point.

On this latest Humanity Magazine feature, the two touch on a variety of interesting topics such as Odd Future, Mike’s family, fighting, The Notebook, astrology, and much more. Below is just an excerpt from their conversation on Odd Future, but you can read the interview in its entirety here.

On Odd Future:

Mike: Tell me about you man, who you are, what’s your shtick, man.

Earl: I do music. So I came -

Mike: Like songs and stuff, records and radio and stuff?

Earl: Not so much radio. I was fortunate enough to – we like developed our own, like self-sustaining like fan base that was separate. So when I was like 14, I was getting better at rapping, like running around L.A., trying to find like people to do music with. And I linked up with this dude Tyler. And he had this whole thing going on already. We started making music, and it was like, it was idiot music, but it was really, I think, what we had in hindsight, what attracted so many people to it was potential. Like we weren’t necessarily talking about anything, but the way that the music was, it was like sophisticated in a sense for our age. So anyways, we’re doing that.

Mike: What’s the name of your music?

Earl: The group that I was in was called Odd Future. So we was doing that. Fast forward, 2010, so I want to say that was like 2008 to 2010. Mid 2010, I got sent away. And we blew up. Like at that moment, it was like hand in hand. I got sent away, and -

Mike: Tell me what you mean by “blow up”. I know what blowing up means but how did you experience—define “blowing up”. You got signed? They played your music?

Earl: Yeah, they started… but it wasn’t even so much, that they played our music on the radio, it was –

Mike: Clubs?

Earl: It was like – it was almost punk rock in the way that it took off. It was just kids became, like, obsessed with it, because they -

Mike: You a crunk dancer?

Earl: Nah…We didn’t dance too much, but it was – they got attached, because in the same way that that punk expressed, like, the angst of being a teenager so well, a lot of our music and early energy had a lot of those elements. You know, that teens, really attach to, you know what I mean – just illogical… passionate unaimed anger, you know. Like, I don’t even know, but I’m just swinging.