LOS ANGELES


AT Coral Reef Academy, a therapeutic retreat for at-risk boys in Vaitele, outside of the Samoan capital of Apia, your progress is tracked on a map with a bus. Around the island the bus goes, until eventually it lands at the airport, at which point you’re finally free.


Get in trouble, as Thebe Kgositsile did from time to time, and you end up spending your time in a separate house — the bus barn — more or less alone, waiting to be allowed to rejoin the group. Mostly he would get into trouble for sneaking onto the Internet, trying to check in on his other life, 5,000 miles away. Before leaving his native Los Angeles he’d made a name for himself as Earl Sweatshirt, the most intense and talented rapper in Odd Future, the crew that in the last two years has helped upend hip-hop business models, remade ideas about the meaning of the rap underground and stoked the hip-hop culture wars as no act in recent memory has, thanks to its rowdy, outlandish and sometimes offensive content and its motormouth frontman Tyler, the Creator.


Much of the early Odd Future buzz centered around Earl Sweatshirt, whose video for “Earl” was a teen-rebel fantasia of drug use and other misbehavior. A provocateur with a dry wit and an outrageously dexterous gift for wordplay, he was a clear inheritor of Eminem’s macabre humor and Lil Wayne’s dyspeptic logorrhea. He was a savvy, schooled rapper: gross, entrancing and thrilling.


And also one of the only pop mysteries left. By the time Odd Future began performing and doing interviews, he was nowhere to be seen. In a time of Internet-speed information flood, Earl Sweatshirt’s absence — he was sent to Samoa by his mother — a striking rarity.


He returned to Los Angeles in February maybe more popular than he would have been if he’d never left. In his absence Odd Future had used the Internet to trump old ways of doing things. Earl Sweatshirt, by largely staying off the Internet, found himself benefiting from all that had happened and with a bully pulpit in front of him. What would he say?


IN EARLY APRIL Earl Sweatshirt was in California, spending his days finishing his final semester of high school at New Roads School, in Santa Monica, and spending the rest of the time regaining his footing.


“There’s so much in the balance,” he said one afternoon at Ohana, a Korean restaurant in Studio City. “ For me, for my mom, for Tyler, for everyone I care about.”


Mellow and thoughtful, he isn’t an introvert so much as slyly shy. The eight weeks since he’d been back had required constant calibration: spending time with his mother; easing himself into the rhythm of Odd Future, which has become a successful touring outfit; patching up his friendships with Tyler and others. Often doing one of these things meant ignoring another. Just as often they were at odds.


The relationship between Earl’s mother, Cheryl Harris, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Odd Future, which kept Earl Sweatshirt’s name alive while he was gone, was minimal at best. His music, Ms. Harris said, was part of a larger suite of concerns that led to her decision to send him away. “He was really very clearly going through a rough patch emotionally,” she said in an interview in the Beverly Hills office of her son’s manager, adding that it was “very evident that he was struggling.” That meant smoking marijuana to excess, having a serious falling-out with the Hwa Rang Do teacher with whom he’d studied for years, and getting caught cheating on an English assignment. Instead of memorizing a Shakespeare recitation, he relied on a hidden iPod.


“I’m my mom’s everything, so there was nothing else to distract her” from his troubles, he said. (Ms. Harris and her son’s father, the South African poet and activist Keorapetse Kgositsile, split up about a decade ago.)


The “Earl” video was posted online on May 26, 2010, and within days, Earl Sweatshirt was gone. First he went to Second Nature, a several-week-long wilderness program. But when it was clear he needed further time and attention, he was sent to Samoa.


As Odd Future became more popular, though, his absence was harder to ignore. While Ms. Harris remained largely silent, “Free Earl” became a slogan, a hashtag, a mantra. Odd Future fans began to see her as an antagonist. At one point a threatening note was left on her door.


“I could have never imagined in my wildest dreams that this decision to send him away to a school that had the kind of support for his emotional well-being that he needed would turn into a story about locking him away,” she said. To explain her son’s absence, she added, “I would’ve had to have talked about his personal life in a way that I think would’ve been really unfair.”


Still, she couldn’t ignore that Earl Sweatshirt had fans, and a future in music. David Bryan, the head of New Roads, put Ms. Harris in touch with Larry Brezner, a Hollywood producer and manager whose company represents Robin Williams, Billy Crystal and other entertainment giants. Mr. Brezner brought in Leila Steinberg, an activist with Alternative Intervention Models, a youth-oriented arts program, and a longtime friend. Ms. Steinberg had another advantage: she’d managed a teenage Tupac Shakur. Together Mr. Brezner and Ms. Steinberg took on the management of Earl Sweatshirt.


In Samoa he was taking courses and speaking with therapists. He swam with whales and earned a scuba diving license, watched every episode of “The Mentalist” on DVD, put his classmates onto Lil B, began learning how to play piano. He read Manning Marable’s Malcolm X biography and Richard Fariña’s counterculture fiction. He wrote rhymes. Most of his verse on “Oldie,” his one contribution to “The OF Tape Vol. 2” (Odd Future), released in March, was written while he was in Samoa, before he knew if he’d ever have a song to put it on.


Earl Sweatshirt arrived in Samoa resentful. “That’s why I was gone for so long,” he said, discussing the stages of acceptance most of the participants in the program go through: resistance, false commitment, then finally, actual growth. “When the kids that got there at the same time as me were all leaving, it was like, damn,” he said. “There’s such a clear difference between someone who’s faking it and someone who’s like, ‘O.K., maybe I don’t hate my mom.’ ”


He’d let his friends know where he was when he got to Samoa but was only able to communicate sporadically. Eventually his mother began sending him articles about the group’s success, and also a birthday card Tyler had dropped at his house in Los Angeles. He was soon communicating with Ms. Steinberg, who gave him writing exercises and perspective on what had been happening at home.


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.)