A Tribute to Micheal Larsen: Eyedea, the Existentialist

Everything has been figured out, except how to live. 

- Jean-Paul Sartre

During my sophomore year of high school, a friend handed me a burned copy of an album that changed my perspective not only on what hip-hop could be, but also what philosophy could do, and what kind of place the world was.

That album was The Many Faces of Oliver Hart. I knew little to nothing about its creator; but as I listened to that tireless and inquisitive voice over and over, I began to imagine a 6'6, 300 pound, 35 year-old man with a great big Marx beard and eyes as wild as Nietzsche.

Little did I know it was a skinny little 20 year-old white kid from Minnesota named Micheal Larsen; or, to his fans, Eyedea. And a year ago today, he tragically left his friends, his family, his music, and his search behind.

Eyedea first broke onto the burgeoning mid-west hip-hop scene in the mid-1990s with local Minnesotan legend Slug of Atmosphere. Rappers like Brother Ali and Sage Francis were hungry to make names for themselves freestyling and battling at hip-hop festivals; but Eyedea, perhaps the youngest among them, stole the show before he'd even released any songs, winning top prizes at Scribble Jam '99 and Blaze Battle New York 2000. He even completely outshined Slug during their appearance on Sway and Tech's show:

After proving himself to be a master of braggadocio, rumor has it that stars like P. Diddy were approaching Eyedea at battles regarding potential record deals. But with the release of the song "Even Shadows Have Shadows," it was clear that Eyedea had other plans:

Not human in this century
I'm kneeling to the entity
Who built this penitentiary
As filthy as a centipede
And guilt was in his sense cause he

Was willing to just let me bleed...

On that track, he sounded less like a battle rapper and more like a rhyming Albert Camus or Ivan Karamazov, an existentialist troubled by the apparent absurdity of human suffering.

With the first line on the first song of his first album, First Born - "this world is my cave" - Eyedea doubled down as a philosopher. Songs like the downbeat "Color My World Mine" ("This is a strange universe; is it all just a blueprint?") are filled with philosophical questions about reality, the self, and the existence and nature of God. Eyedea was seeking truth, and seeking hard, fast, and early, as if he sensed he wouldn't have much time on earth to figure things out.

Then came The Many Faces of Oliver Hart.

While First Born was, at times, a talky and directionless head trip, Oliver Hart was a complete vision, both musically and philosophically. Written, produced, and mixed entirely by Eyedea himself, there is a sense throughout the album of a man coming into his own - not only as a musician, but as a thinker.

In the strange and atmospheric introduction, Eyedea's voice comes in amid the thunderous sound of jackhammers: "I'm here to break my own ball and chain." This attitude of hammering out one's authentic purpose - a quest to "be that self which one truly is" - pervades the entire album. In songs like "On a Clear Day," "Soundtrack of a Romance," and "Infrared Roses" Eyedea methodically observes, recollects, and interprets his surroundings and self, a journey which inevitably results in some feelings of isolation, anguish, and sickness.

But Oliver Hart is also funnier and more self-effacing than it's predecessor; in songs like "Weird Side," "Coaches," and "Just a Reminder," we see an Eyedea not taking himself so seriously anymore. Paradoxically, his journey gets funnier as it gets more serious.

While Jean-Paul Sartre famously said "hell is other people," any hellishness in Oliver Hart is soaked in self-absorption; in contrast, it's only when Eyedea makes a Kierkegaardian leap into the arms of other people that he sounds relieved. In "Bottle Dreams," for example, he tells the story of a ten year-old girl, a violinist, who is sexually molested by her widower father, and makes daily trips to the river to send out bottled messages about the abuse she's suffering. The chorus is as tender, tragic, and beautiful as anything Eyedea ever wrote, and one can't help but feel like Eyedea saw something of himself in this little girl's unanswered pleas, some pain that he identified with.

In "Here for You," the leap finds literal expression in the beginning of the song, a sampled quote daring us to "jump in the river." As the song progresses, a sense of communion with the suffering of others is bolstered by an awareness of a meaningful and transcendent "whole." He sings:

The world is divided 
Between peasants and kings
But the truth is everybody's 
Looking for the same thing
Now I want you to know
The role you play is part of the whole
Without you it couldn't be

I'm here for you
Not for any self-centered reasons
Because existence is interdependent 
And all's related, connected 
As different manifestations of one single mind

Although Eyedea was notoriously leery of organized religion, here we see the existentialist, by his own brush strokes, spiritualized, even teetering on the awe and adoration of religiosity. There is a sense of connection not only to the sufferings and striving of others, but to the universe; a sense that each and every "part of the whole" is infused with a final purpose; a sense that all of it manifested by a "single mind," a logos, an intelligibility.

Following Oliver Hart, Eyedea created two more albums with DJ Abilities, and linked up with bands Carbon Carousel and Face Candy to experiment with other musical styles. He continued to oscillate between these modes of isolation and connectedness we saw at war in his first two albums. In "Paradise" is the former: "Heaven ain't something someone else can give," he sings. "It's all inside of me." But on his last hit, "Smile," he checks himself:

The city runs fast

No one has time to sit with themselves

No time to look into our pain

Or see the same despair in everyone else

It's here, it's there, it's everywhere 

Tears soak each card the dealers dealt

But time taught me 

How to see every second as heaven 

Even though they're perfectly disguised as hell

And I refuse to let past bruises cover the light

It ain't all good, but its all good enough,

So I know I'm alright

Those last two lines are a haunting throwback to one of the first songs Eyedea ever recorded, "It Ain't All Good," a move that calls to mind TS Eliot's lyric: "In my end is my beginning."

Walker Percy once noted that Sartre, who sat in a cafe writing about the absurdity of life in the twentieth century, was probably the happiest man in Paris at the time; that when Kafka read his bizarre stories about modern alienation to his friends, they all busted a gut with laughter.

I think the same can be said for Micheal Larsen. His music conjured up and exorcised secret anxieties and buried tears of twenty-first century life, not only in himself, but in his listeners; and in that process, he made himself and every single one of us lighter, breezier, and happier for it. He knew, with Kierkegaard, that "agony is truth"; that the person in true despair is the one too bored or busy to see it in themselves or in every other person.

If before we were bored and busy, he made us feel disoriented and alienated; if we were already disoriented and alienated, he made us "try to find a balance," made us fight for connectedness - or at the very least, he made us laugh. That was his great gift to us: always pushing us deeper into life, even if he himself fell to do it, and encouraging us to get to that place where we could seek, with a pure heart and an honest mind, the something that makes our lives truly meaningful before it's all over.