Image via Tyler, The Creator/Instagram
Son Raw is a fuckin walking paradox.
If you weren’t trawling around the deep rap internet circa early 2010, it’s hard to remember or imagine just how much of an outsider Tyler was. When he first caught a buzz off the release of his debut mixtape Bastard, East Coast rap was in a profound generational slump. ’90s holdovers dropped 3 mic mixtapes on Koch while Jay-Z wore a scarf and showed up at Grizzly Bear shows in Williamsburg. LA was doing slightly better thanks to street level dance movements like jerkin’, but really, all of rap’s momentum was coming from the South – whether from mixtape weirdos turned stars like Wayne and Gucci or straight down the middle trappers like Ross, T.I, and Jeezy.
The trap movement was significant, but for a significant number of rap fans, the vibe was that we’d missed the boat. Rap felt diminished. There were plenty of bangers, but it seemed to lack the depth that defined its late ’80s and mid-’90s peaks. To put it mildly, no one expected a random skate kid’s self-released download, dropped on Christmas day 09’, to move the needle.
Hell, when I first saw Tyler’s name, my first reaction was a profound eye roll at what I assumed was an edgelord Fight Club reference. I didn’t even bother checking Bastard out until May, but when I did, I was shocked at how great it was – and downright astonished that Earl, the subsequent tape Tyler had produced for his now absent friend, was just as great. After a half-decade of diminishing returns, suddenly, the world was reminded that hip-hop could still shock listeners with something truly new.
There was no fitting Odd Future into existing formats: rap was so regionally and generationally segmented that teenaged skateboarding Pharell disciples trolling each other with Relapse-grade shock raps recorded in GarageBand didn’t just feel vital, they were living proof that rap needn’t settle for less than greatness. Tyler may have meant to mock NY mixtape purism when he dropped “Yonkers” a few months later, but the single and video really did feel more exciting, dangerous and countercultural than anything since DMX’s “Get At Me Dog.”
You know the rest of the story, though it’s worth examining just how winding a path Tyler took to mainstream success. Goblin was In Utero had Nirvana skipped Nevermind – a howl of pain with thrilling highs that also showed the considerable growing pains a Black kid from Hawthorne lives through when going from anonymity to moral panic. Wolf was far better, a day-glo summer camp fantasia that ditched the bedroom production values and began to move away from shock rap in favor of Stereolab and Erykah Badu guest spots. Cherry Bomb didn’t quite land but its experiments proved necessary to reach Flower Boy, a millennial rap Pet Sounds that won mass acceptance by revealing that rap’s angry homophobic teenage rebel was also a queer composer of tender-hearted ballads. (It will forever be funny, that GLAAD’s most hated rap group of 2010 turned out to be a safe space for a bunch of Queer Black kids. Sometimes you gotta let people grow.)
Ever since, Tyler’s settled into a sound, alternately pivoting towards singing (Igor) or rapping (Call Me If You Get Lost) while maintaining the vibe. Some decry this as careerism, and I see their point: Chromokopia, Tyler’s latest, sounds pretty much like what you’d expect: jazz chords as refracted through Neptunes fandom, deep cut references to “106 & Park”-era bangers and G-Unit castoffs. Nakedly emotional song writing collides with the flyest rap shit talk, all parsed through an auteurist prism that sees no reason to choose between DatPiff, late 00s Tumblr and Wes Anderson aesthetics.
But as far as careerism goes, you could do much much worse. And we have.
Yes, fellow Angeleno Kendrick has the culture on lockdown: Tyler’s always been too interested in being singularly different to serve as the kind of Black cultural avatar that Kenny embodies. But we’re as far removed from Bastard as Bastard was from Illmatic and the vast majority of Tyler’s peers seemingly aren’t even trying to compete. Drake? Done. A$AP Mob? Over. Kanye? Let’s not go there. J Cole? Confirmed coward. Atlanta? In thrall of a rage rap sound that swiped Odd Future’s teenage punk attitude without any of its depth. A couple of years ago, DJ Khaled called Tyler a weirdo who couldn’t get played in a barbershop if his life depended on it. The now rapper of the moment Ken Carson scans as what Tyler’s early haters thought his music sounded like.
Somehow, Tyler is rap’s best role model, a student of Black music’s history connecting the dots from ’70s soul to ’00s BET programming via street rap and social media brain rot. In an era where hip-hop once again feels divided between street level artists and an artier underground, he’s proof that we don’t have to choose. That makes him the closest thing contemporary rap has to the Native Tongues, as long as you remember the “Native Tongues” as early De La and Black Sheep’s impish sarcasm rather than the crew’s more self-serious later years. He’s taken his biggest weakness in the eyes of mainstream hip-hop – his dogged alternativeness – and turned it into a strength, swerving past the pitfalls that have taken down so many great rappers of his generation.
That’s not to say, like all great artists, that he wasn’t lucky. If I’m a queer, Black alt rapper, I’d much rather come up in LA than say, Detroit or Milwaukee. But don’t discount Tyler’s agency: through good albums and bad, he kept pushing his vision, and if his current sound is a plateau, it’s one that sits high above most rappers’ peaks. It’s been a hell of a journey to get there, and in a genre where far too many great artists see their careers stunted by violence, substance abuse and legal issues, we should take a moment to root for the rare underdog who made it.
We rely on your support to keep POW alive. Please take a second to donate on Patreon!
