I’ve never been exceptionally compelled by the provocateurism of hip-hop group Odd Future, particularly given the collective’s penchant for disturbingly unempathetic talk about rape. But the New York Times’ Jon Caramanica has a profile of Earl Sweatshirt, a member of Odd Future whose mother sent him to school in Samoa just as the collective was taking off, and who has now returned to the United States. And there’s an interesting anecdote about both that rape talk, and Earl’s time away:

As part of the Coral Reef curriculum he also performed community service, spending time working at Samoa Victim Support Group, a center for survivors of sexual abuse, including children.

“That was a pivotal moment,” he said one afternoon at Bristol Farms, a supermarket near his manager’s office. One of the things Earl Sweatshirt had been prized for as a rapper was his extreme imagery, bordering on vile. “You can detach imagery from words,” he said, adding that he “never actually pictured” the things he rapped about. (“Lyrics About Rape, Coke, And Couches Will Be Blaring In Your Ears,” was how “Earl,” the album, was advertised on Odd Future’s Tumblr when it was released in March 2010.)

By the time he began working at the center, “I had already come to the conclusion that I was done talking about” that sort of subject matter, he said, but coming face to face with young people who had suffered in that way was overwhelming. “There’s nothing that you can — there’s no — you can’t evade the — there’s no defense for like — if you have any ounce of humanity,” he said, the feeling swallowing the words.

Sensitivity and sympathy aren’t just things we inherently have. We learn them, often most effectively by directly facing other people’s pain. And I’d be really interested not just in hearing what Earl talks about when he’s set that old attitude and subject material aside, but to see him make music about that process of growing into sympathy, and into greater experience of the world.

The bridge is yours.

-FX is restarting its efforts to make a Powers show from scratch, which hopefully will mean some better casting.

-The Dark Knight Rises is going to have “sensuality.”

-After they make Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day, someone should adapt Nothing Ever Happens on My Street.

-Is the Katniss Everdeen Barbie skinny enough for Manohla Dargis?

-This diss track doesn’t exactly elevate the conversation around Odd Future, though I do like the Hunger Games reference. Some other rapper should run with that:

The bridge is yours.

-Crowdsourcing special effects: not just for space Nazis.

-It would be great if we could have more shorter shows on network television.

-30 Rock has reached the stage when it’s just throwing famous people at us.

-Earl Sweatshirt is back.

-I’m deeply torn between wishing we could have a new concept and my love of Jeremy Renner:

In light of yesterday’s conversation about rappers’ personas, I was interested to read this profile of Odd Future in Spin. Two things stuck with me. First, there was Syd tha Kid’s decision to formally come out with her video for “Cocaine.” I think Julianne Escobedo Shepherd may be somewhat overstating the importance of that decision — Odd Future, for all their critical acclaim, aren’t exactly a mainstream hip-hop group. And more importantly, given the differences in the way gay men and lesbians are perceived, I sort of suspect that — Fat Joe’s protestations to the contrary — it will take a gay man who is a significant, established, mainstream star coming out to really change hip-hop’s attitudes towards gay people.

The other thing that caught my eye was two paragraphs towards the end of the piece:

In a few days, though, Tyler will release a video for “Bitch Suck Dick,” Goblin’s most lunkheadedly brazen song. It’s an absurd, spoofy clip featuring, among other things, Jasper rolling around in a tracksuit and Lionel ripping apart his shirt. “It’s an ignorant-ass song,” says Tyler, anticipating backlash. “If I’m not listening to cheesy indie-jazzy rock shit, I’m listening to ignorant-ass rap shit like Waka Flocka and OJ Da Juiceman. And I made a song that sounds like that energy, but in my world. I think making a song about punching a bitch in the face is funny, because if you’re a regular person, just hearing that is fucking crazy, and 90 percent of the people know I’m just fucking around.”

But as Odd Future’s new projects are released — and as they become an ever bigger force in hip-hop — will his approach shift away from contrarianism and provocation? “Talking about rape and cutting bodies up, it just doesn’t interest me anymore,” he says, contemplative and sincere, looking directly into my eyes, now sitting cross-legged on the hotel bed. “What interests me is making weird hippie music for people to get high to. With Wolf, I’ll brag a little bit more, talk about money and buying shit. But not like any other rapper, I’ll be a smart-ass about it. Now it’s just girls throwing themselves at me and shit, but I got a girl back home. People who want the first album again, I can’t do that. I was 18, broke as fuck. On my third album, I have money and I’m hanging out with my idols. I can’t rap about the same shit.” The look on his face is uncompromising. The man knows where his power lies.

The thing that’s intriguing to me about this on a structure-of-humor-level is the assumption that people hear lyrics about, say, abusing women, and assume they’re funny or crazy because they’re implausible. I don’t believe Tyler or anyone else in Odd Future goes around assaulting people in their private lives. And I would really like to live in a world where the societal taboo against domestic violence or sexual assault was so high, and education and enforcement were so good that the prospect of a man abusing a woman was genuinely ridiculous. But we don’t actually live in that world. I don’t think that, say, rape jokes are an impossibility. But it’s hard to argue that you’re raising the bar, being “not like any other rapper,” if your edgy jokes mostly reinforce tired fallacies.

All that said, if Tyler and company are moving beyond “talking about rape and cutting bodies up,” I’m curious to see what he does next — and if the strong sense of identification fans have with the group will give Odd Future permission and space to do things that are genuinely daring. Turning Syd into an out lesbian hip-hop superstar beyond the group’s critical acclaim would be awesome. Ditto for speaking some actual truths about sex and gender.

The bridge is yours.

-I would have been fine with it if J.K. Rowling had killed Ron Weasley.

-Scarlett Johansson has the best reaction to a leaked nude photos scandal of all time.

-Ron Howard goes from the Dark Tower to NASCAR.

-Summer Glau has literally become Sarah Marshall.

-I may find Odd Future tiresome, but Syd the Kid’s video for her debut single “Cocaine” starts out undeniably adorable and then gets genuinely disconcerting:

The bridge is yours.

-Awesome women in fantasy.

-Lieutenant Uhura, space program champion.

-Odd Future gets an Adult Swim show.

-Who owns modern mythological figures?

-Say what you will about Mel Gibson, the man is persistent.

-Felicia Day, on when Hollywood misses how society is changing.

-Deepak Chopra is going to design a video game.

-Are you a woman? Do you want to be on the cover of Sports Illustrated? Here’s how!

-Repeating Chinese history on film.

-The emotional inverse of a “Lazy Saturday”:

I have really profoundly mixed feelings about the news that a coalition of groups is going to protest Odd Future’s performance at the Pitchfork Music Festival. Right now, Odd Future’s core brand is in being shocking, and so any opportunity for them to behave more shockingly, particularly by showing that they’re impervious to calls for decency by, for example, by telling two lesbians that “If Tegan and Sara need some hard dick, hit me up!” is an opportunity for them to reinforce the thing that’s been their most effective way of getting attention. And calling out people for listening to and supporting Odd Future might make some people embarrassed, but I think it’s more likely to reinforce the idea that liking Odd Future makes you edgy and transgressive, someone who can rise above moral and political objections to appreciate art, even when the artist is throwing temper tantrums at you.

There’s something to be said for standing up and saying that something is wrong, but I’m not sure that protesters are going to walk away from this with anything other than a sense that they’ve done the right thing. I just can’t work out the calculation in my head, the value of telling the truth versus that truth being swept away and dwarfed by the ridiculousness of whatever the response to it is.

If you want Odd Future to talk about things other than raping people, or to stop saying terrible things about gay people, the incentives for them need to shift. If Earl Sweatshirt came back, the focus could be on his technical skill, rather than on Tyler, the Creator being outrageous. If folks hire Syd and Tyler to produce songs and albums, the headlines about them could be about their role in revitalizing hip-hop’s sound—Frank Ocean’s already signed up to work on Kanye West and Jay-Z’s Watch the Throne. When Ocean’s nostalgia, ULTRA gets its re-release in July, if it goes huge, or even pretty big, then the story about Odd Future can be how the group helped a bunch of folks with different sounds collectively promote their work (I actually think there’s a good chance Odd Future doesn’t last very long as a coherent entity once the individual members are on their ways to the careers they want). And if you can’t resist the urge to pick apart Odd Future right now, maybe it’s worth mounting an aesthetic critique of them (which might be difficult, there are some talented folks in the crew). One of the reasons Eminem’s been such a persistent force in American culture is that his technical skills as a rapper are patently undeniable, even if you’re horrified by the ends to which he’s sometimes applied them. I bet the members of Odd Future would be a lot more freaked out by a detailed and authoritative takedown of their artistic abilities than the fact that they use those abilities to say shocking things.

Or, you know, buy Lil B’s album I’m Gay (I’m Happy), which dropped today on iTunes. However watered down his backing off the original title, which was just going to be I’m Gay, however transparent a publicity stunt it is, declaring yourself even metaphorically gay in hip-hop is a lot more genuinely audacious than rapping about raping nuns: