Image via Tyler, The Creator/Instagram
Son Raw is a fuckin walking paradox.
If you werenât trawling around the deep rap internet circa early 2010, itâs 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. â90s 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 jerkinâ, but really, all of rapâs momentum was coming from the South â 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 weâd missed the boat. Rap felt diminished. There were plenty of bangers, but it seemed to lack the depth that defined its late â80s and mid-â90s peaks. To put it mildly, no one expected a random skate kidâs self-released download, dropped on Christmas day 09â, to move the needle.
Hell, when I first saw Tylerâs name, my first reaction was a profound eye roll at what I assumed was an edgelord Fight Club reference. I didnât even bother checking Bastard out until May, but when I did, I was shocked at how great it was â 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 didnât just feel vital, they were living proof that rap neednât settle for less than greatness. Tyler may have meant to mock NY mixtape purism when he dropped âYonkersâ a few months later, but the single and video really did feel more exciting, dangerous and countercultural than anything since DMXâs âGet At Me Dog.â
You know the rest of the story, though itâs worth examining just how winding a path Tyler took to mainstream success. Goblin was In Utero had Nirvana skipped Nevermind â 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 didnât quite land but its experiments proved necessary to reach Flower Boy, a millennial rap Pet Sounds that won mass acceptance by revealing that rapâs angry homophobic teenage rebel was also a queer composer of tender-hearted ballads. (It will forever be funny, that GLAADâs 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, Tylerâs 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, Tylerâs latest, sounds pretty much like what youâd expect: jazz chords as refracted through Neptunes fandom, deep cut references to â106 & Parkâ-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: Tylerâs always been too interested in being singularly different to serve as the kind of Black cultural avatar that Kenny embodies. But weâre as far removed from Bastard as Bastard was from Illmatic and the vast majority of Tylerâs peers seemingly arenât even trying to compete. Drake? Done. A$AP Mob? Over. Kanye? Letâs not go there. J Cole? Confirmed coward. Atlanta? In thrall of a rage rap sound that swiped Odd Futureâs teenage punk attitude without any of its depth. A couple of years ago, DJ Khaled called Tyler a weirdo who couldnât get played in a barbershop if his life depended on it. The now rapper of the moment Ken Carson scans as what Tylerâs early haters thought his music sounded like.
Somehow, Tyler is rapâs best role model, a student of Black musicâs history connecting the dots from â70s soul to â00s 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, heâs proof that we donât have to choose. That makes him the closest thing contemporary rap has to the Native Tongues, as long as you remember the âNative Tonguesâ as early De La and Black Sheepâs impish sarcasm rather than the crewâs more self-serious later years. Heâs taken his biggest weakness in the eyes of mainstream hip-hop â his dogged alternativeness â and turned it into a strength, swerving past the pitfalls that have taken down so many great rappers of his generation.
Thatâs not to say, like all great artists, that he wasnât lucky. If Iâm a queer, Black alt rapper, Iâd much rather come up in LA than say, Detroit or Milwaukee. But donât discount Tylerâs agency: through good albums and bad, he kept pushing his vision, and if his current sound is a plateau, itâs one that sits high above most rappersâ peaks. Itâs 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.
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