20 GOING ON 14 Tyler, the Creator
May 20, 2011
Is the Odd Future rapper an amoral asshole, or just a dumb kid? Based on his tedious, mediocre major label debut, probably a little of both.
BY STEPHEN M. DEUSNER
"Fuck Bill O'Reilly."
In their fairly short career, the members of L.A.'s hip-hop collective Odd Future Wolf Gang Kills Them All have been fairly prolific, releasing scores of free mixtapes, remixes, one-off tracks, and a solo album by de facto frontman Tyler, the Creator. Even with that prodigious output, odds are you've probably read more about them than you've actually heard them. Before even releasing an album on a label, the group has inspired hundreds of thousands of words in thinkpieces, essays, and reviews, many of which incorporate double-jointed critical contortions to explain and in some cases defend the group's violent, misogynist, often morally disgusting lyrics. Can their musings on murder and rape - often directed at pregnant women - be written off as adolescent confrontation and rebellion, or are they serious about such brutality? Will Odd Future grow up to regret their behavior (like the Beastie Boys), or will they double down on the darker elements of their personae (like Eminem)? Are they the saviors of hip-hop, or a cancer on the art form?
I've been living with Tyler, the Creator's major-label debut, Goblin (released, incidentally, on Eminem's label Interscope), for awhile now, and I admit I have absolutely no idea how to answer any of those questions. On one hand, Odd Future seem to capture a particular strain of adolescent abandon, apathy, and angst, which paints their unsavory lyrics as the postmillennial equivalent of kids telling grosser-than-gross jokes.
On the other, they're amoral assholes, calculating their offenses as a means of achieving popularity and prestige; Goblin debuted at number 5 on the Billboard album chart this week, for whatever that's worth. Perhaps the strongest handle we can get on them is this: Their provocations are more palatable when the production is inventive, when the wordplay is clever and surprising, when the ideas give critics and listeners something to think, write, and argue about. We can distance ourselves with analysis and commentary, which means they're only excusable - and then, only barely - when the music is not just good, but impossibly exciting. Judging from Tyler, the Creator's major label debut, Goblin, they're just not there yet.
"I'm a fucking unicorn / fuck anybody who say I'm not."
Goblin is actually the second album from Tyler (real name: Okonma), a hyperactive twenty-year-old with a penchant for tube socks, ski masks, and 666s. His first was 2009's Bastard, a self-released collection of tracks that stoked the hype around Odd Future and led to the deal with Interscope. By now, he's obsessed with his own fledgling celebrity, so rhymes about his critics and detractors now sit uneasily alongside his rape fantasies and self-loathing tantrums, creating a tedium of unwarranted defensiveness and meta confusions. "Hey, don't do anything that I say in this song," he declares at the beginning of "Radicals." "If anything happens, don't blame me, white America." From Tyler, the Creator, it's a ridiculous PSA: Is he being serious, or is that a jab at anyone who would attack him for his violent content? In the end, he can't make it mean both, so it means neither - nothing.
Throughout Goblin, he carries on an imagined conversation with his therapist (also played by Tyler through a distorting voicebox). For him, music is a form of counseling, an exploration of ego via id that dismisses psychiatry but leads to a particularly grim album finale. Tyler complains about his absent father, but it's always the same talking point, with no sustained self-exploration. He describes himself as suicidal, but it's more a shock-value fixation than a real mental state. Ultimately, Tyler wants it both ways: He craves your attention but not your judgment. He thrives on spectacle, but shuns accountability. He throws out unbelievably repulsive imagery, which he chalks up to his youth - as if that, or anything, could be a reasonable excuse. He's 20 going on 14, which is not so much empowering as it is pathetic.
As a rapper, Tyler is adequate but never revelatory, without the mind-bending flow of Eminem or the snarling aggression of other West Coast rappers to dilute his offensiveness. It's not always a pleasure to hear his voice, which may be the point. He even admits his shortcomings on the title track, telling his therapist, "I know I'm not a great rapper, but on the whole, I'm pretty cool, right?" But it just feels like another excuse, a deflection, a lowering of expectations so Tyler can exceed them.
But he can be canny and witty when he needs to be, even if he works almost exclusively in short, quotable couplets. Instead of hashtag rap, it's Twitter flow: no sustained thoughts, just punchy outbursts in 140 characters. Occasionally, Tyler gets a good line or two, as on "Tron Cat": "I'm awesome, and I fuck dolphins." The line is meaningless in itself, but it suggests some clever wordplay: not just the weirdness of man-dolphin sex, but the "and" that suggests that being awesome and fucking dolphins don't necessarily overlap. In a different life, he could have been an amazing surrealist rapper.
"What you think I record it for, to have a bunch of critics call my shit horrorcore?"
With its dank sound and subtle tweaks, Goblin suggests Tyler may be a better producer than emcee. His work with Odd Future - he has produced almost all of the group's output - has given him an intuitive grasp of how sounds and beats can bolster the impact of his delivery and even sell a line that might fall flat otherwise. On Goblin, the tense complaints of "Yonkers" sound all the more self-annihilating for the abrasive sample and tense beat, and on "Tron Cat," a thick synth swell conveys a fevered, unsteady emotional state. In the video, he hangs himself at the end of the song, but it's clear the music pushed him to it.
What Tyler lacks, however, is range. He sets almost every song here at the same midtempo and in the same claustrophobic tone, which is fine early in the album but grows tiresome with each track. The album never lets up, and especially since Tyler doesn't really bother with choruses or hooks, it quickly becomes repetitive and tedious in the most self-indulgent way possible. Even the infamous chorus of "Radicals" - "Kill people! Burn shit! Fuck school!" - sounds like a chore rather than a cry of freedom and defiance.
"I'm not a fucking role model / I'm a 19-year-old emotional coaster with pipe dreams"
And yet, it's hard to dismiss Tyler and the rest of Odd Future, not for their offensiveness and especially not for a dearth of talent. The Ramones used to sport swastikas onstage, yet quickly grew tired and embarrassed of such hollow provocations. These guys could do the same. Or not. Any attempt to think about Odd Future leads inevitably to overthinking Odd Future, and perhaps that is the secret to Tyler's power and appeal, especially to critics who love something meaty to write about: On Bastard and especially on Goblin, he makes you question every single aspect of the music, which is perhaps a way to usher hip-hop back to its earliest days, when it was at its freshest and most unpredictable, when its entire odd future seemed open to possibility. Tyler puts these songs over by sheer force of will, which may be at the root of all hip-hop, if not all music.
On the other hand, Goblin is so mired in hip-hop's imagined past-the comical boasts and nonchalant violence of gangsta rap, the claustrophobia of horrorcore, the rapt self-absorption of the underground - that it comes across as a heavily reactionary work: it's more about the common past than the odd future. But what's the point of so many contradictions, except for their own sake? Goblin is so mathematically calculated that it playacts the baring of Tyler's soul rather than actually baring his soul.
So perhaps the most intriguing and frustrating aspect of Odd Future is that after so much music and so many words, we don't even know who Tyler, the Creator is. Worse, he doesn't seem to know, either.
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