TYLER, THE CREATOR: WOLF

SPIN magazine, April 2005

 

It’s easy to understand why the Internet swooned so hard when Tyler, The Creator first floated along and pricked our bubble. In 2010, hip-hop was mostly a bunch of old, rich dudes resting hard on their old, rich-dude laurels; Odd Future were all manner of teenage lewdness, Fuck You heroes, too much talent and no dough. They were the punkest thing to happen to hip-hop since Jesus was a boy. At their molten center, Tyler emerged as a roach-swallowing emcee terrible, a seething-in-self-loathing, Eminem-weaned skate rat doling harsh tokes just for the delight of seeing olds squirm. He wasn’t interested in being hip-hop’s messiah as much as its smirking antichrist.

Last year, in these very pages, Tyler prepped us for the evolution we should expect on Wolf—now that he’s found success, he’s gotta rap about what he’s reaping; it would be disingenuous to front like he’s still sleeping on a couch. A quick inventory of what Goblin-success wrought: a four-story house, European model pussy, QT with Bieber. He fessed that he’d grown weary of that imma-rape-you steez, so there’s none of that here (it’s cool brah, Rick Ross got you covered). Tyler’s created tangible distance from the bratty rage of, say, Bastard’s “AssMilk,”—the girls on Wolf are all alive and willing.

The album loosely follows a discursive story involving Tyler’s alter-ego, Wolf, and his id, Sam, and a shared love interest, Salem. The story occupies maybe half the album—it’s sometimes hard to parse the characters, aside from that Sam is a bit of a Bastard throw-back, with his murderous bent and punctuating lines with “faggot.” The stories sparking point, “Awkward,” is one of Wolf’s highlights. An epigrammatic love story born of a mall date, Tyler’s voice pitch-shifted down to his Wolf-growl, he gets goofy on a girl whose eyes are the color of weed and makes entreaties for hand holding over analog synth ambience. “You’re my girl, whether you like it or not,” he pouts. Wolf, what have you done with our beloved brat, Tyler?

He soon reappears, unfortunately. As good as “Awkward” is, like much of the album, it feels like an audition; Tyler flaunts his range as a producer and MC, clearly vying to transcend the shock-and-awe rep that has preceded him. But for much of the rest of Wolf’s woefully uneven, wildly indulgent, 18-track slog, that rep drags him, and us, back down. All that is alive and compelling here (say, the RAMP-smooth soul-jazz posse cut “Rusty”) begins to dissolve as we pass the 60-minute mark. While a duet between Stereolab’s Laetitia Sadier and Frank Ocean sounds promising on paper, it comes at the end of the nearly eight-minute song suite “PartyIsntOver/Campfire/Bimmer,” which, by the time you’ve reached the Bieber-rejected closing third, feels like it’s about 16 BPM and slowing.

There is some dexterity within Wolf’s production—the antic “Tamale,” is the kind of M.I.A. song M.I.A. doesn’t make anymore, “Trashwang,” is a skittering, trap-parody posse cut featuring Trash Talk that approximates the anarchy of vintage Odd Future. But cuts like “48” sound like a tribute to diminishing-returns era N*E*R*D. It’s a weird look for a kid that is supposedly hip-hop’s vanguard, to be so caught up in work that sounds like it’s sole purpose is to impress Pharrell by approximating his style. The album crests early with “Awkward,” the single “Domo23,” and “Answer,” which all run back to back, and then runs another eight songs until we can discern a pulse again on the Earl verse of “Rusty.”

While it’s inarguable that Tyler’s become more sophisticated as a producer, he’s clearly trying to prove and disprove our understanding of his image, and at a loss for how to orient himself now that he’s cosseted by a rabid fanbase and an awed, fearful industry that he’s spent the last few years flipping off. Tyler’s whole story was how this skate-rat outsider made the Billboard Top 10 on a record he made in a garage with his friends. Now he’s ceded all of that to become the ultimate insider—making studio albums with marquee names (Pharrell, Erykah, his Grammy-nommed homie Frank Ocean), boasting of his money and copious tour strange, whining about the burdens of fame. “Colossus,” for example, uncharitably bristles at his Stans, who sound like regular, engaged, reasonable fans, but are nonetheless dismissed here as posers and, yes, “fags.”

Which brings us to Wolf’s most grievous misstep, and its one true spiritual connection to the superior Bastard and Goblin: Tyler’s defiant use of the word “faggot.” As usual, he spends a ton of time here bragging about how little he cares about how the world sees him, but his reliance on the other f-bomb to keep our attention suggests otherwise. In a recent LA Weekly interview, he dismissed concern about the slur: “I wasn’t using ‘fag’ to refer to gay people. If I call a piece of lettuce a faggot, am I homophobic? I might be anti-lettuce, but….” Now, on “Domo23,” he brushes off the almost-protest that marred his appearance at last year’s Pitchfork Festival, holding up his proximity to queerness (scoffing at those critics “claiming I hate gays even though Frank is on 10 of my songs”) as proof he’s not a homophobe.

He may not be—and that’s the rub. Tyler’s trying to have it both ways: going for cheap shots and playing ignorant, as if a straight boy can recontextualize a slur that has been used to humiliate and dehumanize gay people for decades, despite using the word just like the people who mean it do. On Wolf, he banks on the word’s awful power to show us what a bad boy he still is, which is tantamount to saying “faggot” and actually meaning it. We showed Tyler where it hurts and so that’s where he sticks the knife. He degrades the value of his own art for the sake of seeming raw, the same old unfiltered Tyler.

That Tyler brand identity depends on outrage and rejection by scandalized adults. Odd Future has always been about exclusion, about making sure that there is a dividing line between Them and Us, and if you don’t get it, the joke is on you. But in an era where the queering of hip-hop is the genre’s biggest story (ironically, one that Odd Future’s out members Syd the Kid and Frank Ocean helped foment), Tyler’s insistence on using “fag” just to show how transgressive he is leaves him in the dust, as the real punks (Le1f, Angel Haze, Mykki Blanco, Frank, et al.) truly advance the game. Tyler’s increasing fame has made him unremarkable; his desperation to be shocking has reduced him a joke.