Lounge
Tyler, the Creator’s artful self-exploration
Summary
On his latest album, Tyler, the Creator tackles his quarter-life crisis head-onIt’s 2011, and I’m watching Late Night With Jimmy Fallon. The musical guest for the night is Odd Future, a little-known Los Angeles collective that had just a handful of self-released mixtapes to their name. A synth pulses with menace as the camera slowly focuses on two young men in balaclavas, one featuring an inverted cross scrawled on with a sharpie. There’s two garden gnomes on top of the stage monitors, and a girl in full The Ring get-up is hanging out near the drum kit. I’ve never heard of these guys before, but I’m already all in.
In low-pitched, sinister tones, the masked rap insurgents growl out lines about ashing blunts, music blog beefs and serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer on network television. They chant “wolf gang" as a war cry, jumping around the Late Night set in a two-man moshpit. At one point, Tyler, the Creator runs towards Fallon’s desk, and it feels like all hell is about to break loose. But he just tries to get Fallon and the guests to sing along—a surprised Felicia Day gamely shouts “wolf" into the mic—before bouncing his way back to the stage. Rebellious fury and sinister aura meets guileless, anarchic fun.
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Even then, all of 19-years-old, Tyler was the group’s charismatic talisman. More than any other Odd Future member—many of whom would go on to have successful, genre-defining solo careers—he combined the militant menace of early 1990s Wu-Tang Clan with the blog-era’s ironic cool and the chaotic-neutral energy of the early 2010s Internet. Troll-ish provocation, rakish charm, and bagfuls of raw talent, all in one incorrigible little package.
Goblin, his first studio album—released just three months after the Fallon gig—is rap music filtered through the punk nihilism of Sid Vicious. “Kill people, burn shit, fuck school," he yells over the industrial horrorcore beats of Radicals, while breakout single Yonkers is full of viciously violent disses at Hayley Williams, B.o.B and Bruno Mars. Like Eminem before him, he revelled in the idea of being hip-hop’s enfant terrible, sending middle America into a moral-panic tizzy. His lyrics—littered with violent fantasies and gratuitous use of homophobic slurs—scared the UK authorities so much that he was banned for visiting the country for three years.
Unlike Eminem, though, Tyler wouldn’t stick to the shock-jock routine forever. Starting with 2015’s Cherry Bomb, he pivoted away from horror-core, each record pushing into more expansive—but still experimental—sonic territory. On each of his last three albums—Flower Boy, Igor and Call Me If You Get Lost—he adopted different personae as a way to deconstruct and unpack different aspects of his personality, his early “burn-it-all-down" antagonism replaced—though not entirely—in favour of introspection, lyrical maturity, and an ear for the tuneful croon.
Chromakopia, his latest album, represents a culmination of that narrative arc. Now in his 30s, Tyler can no longer escape the realities of adulthood, or hide behind the fantasy of perpetual adolescence. So, guided by little snippets of advice and affirmation from his mother, he tackles this inevitable quarter-life crisis head-on, squaring up against the sort of existential questions that come when youthful immortality is firmly in the rear-view mirror.
He grapples with his inability to hold down a relationship, while his friends are getting married and embracing parenthood. He worries about turning into his father. He alternates between brash self-aggrandisement and crippling self-doubt, bars about his Ferrari juxtaposed with concerns about his growing waistline and greying hair. He holds a light to his own sense of paranoia—both the prosaic, uneasy fear that you’re doing things wrong, and the famous person’s terror of constantly being watched and judged by parasocial fans and scoop-hungry journalists.
Over the smooth, pop-R&B production of Hey Jane, he digs into the inner turmoil brought up by a pregnancy scare, writing with bracing honesty from the perspective of both him and the woman he might have knocked up. The mellow, acoustic-guitar-led track Tomorrow contrasts the cosy domesticity of his friends with his own solitary, materialistic existence—“all I got is a ‘Rari and some silly suits"—before deciding to push aside these worries for tomorrow.
Like Him sees him come to terms with his estranged father, whose abandonment of a young Tyler and his mother has been a key theme in his music and his life (his first mixtape was called Bastard, as just one example). Singing in a gentle falsetto, Tyler worries about whether he looks like his dad, whose absence still haunts him—“I’m chasing a ghost," he croons. Self-doubt resurfaces once again towards the end of the acerbic Take Your Mask Off. After taking other people to task for living inauthentic lives, he puts himself on blast (“You talk a lot of shit to not even be number one.") It’s one of the rawest, most honest self-disses in recent hip-hop history, all of Tyler’s contradictions and self-deluding fantasies laid bare with surgical precision.
It’s not all moody soul-gazing and self-flagellation though. This is still a Tyler record after all. But even the more freak-flag sex-romp tracks come with thoughtful twists and emotional complexity. Judge Judy, ostensibly a raunchy little anti-kink-shaming song, ends with a suicide-note sucker-punch. The cutesy bop of Darling, I—a paean to ethical polygamy—is undercut by a sense of sad self-awareness. Tyler is secure in the choices he’s made and the life he’s lived, but introspective enough to worry about whether he could have done things differently, made better decisions. He’s still a provocative horn-dog who raps about being “bonafide face-seat", but he’s also the guy interrogating his own motives and rationalisations in moments of post-nut clarity.
Chromakopia is also a triumph for Tyler, the producer. The music shifts and mutates in tune with Tyler’s emotional state, lurching from Beach Boys harmony and moody piano to heavy-metal guitar and machine-gun percussion, sometimes within the same song. It’s his most layered, sonically ambitious and technically polished production work yet.
But what really makes Chromakopia—as with so much of his recent output—so compelling is Tyler’s unapologetic candour and artful self-exploration. It’s a masterclass in confessional rap music from one of the genre’s most talented auteurs. Who would have thought, in 2011, that the teenage provocateur driven largely by spite would one day make such beautiful, joyously messy music about learning to accept and love oneself? But hey, if Tyler can do it, then maybe there’s still hope for the rest of us 30-somethings stuck in arrested development.
Bhanuj Kappal is a Mumbai-based writer.
