Over the course of seven, strong solo albums, starting with 2009’s ‘Bastard’ and closing with 2021’s ‘Call Me If You Get Lost’, rapper and producer Tyler, The Creator has created a body of experimental hip hop work whose appeal – and contagion – runs as deep as most mainstream artists.
Distinctively lascivious, crude and insulting to all sexes and sexuality, Tyler can take those same lyrical slings and arrows – usually dipped in snarky arsenic and cynicism – and can make them into something elegant.
And sonically, though often raw and ragingly rhythmic, Tyler’s recordings – in particular his ‘Flower Boy’ (2017) and its Ram Grammy-winning ‘IGOR’ (2019) – also conspire toward an oddly cosmopolitan sophistication and ornate orchestration.
It’s like Tina Turner once said – sound is better when it’s nice and rough.
Talking about the diversity of his sound and his albums over 15 years in the hip-hop business, Tyler, The Creator told XXL Magazine that his success comes down to three things: “Cause I’m good. Cause I care. And I didn’t start off at the top.”
It’s only bragging if it isn’t true, and adding to such braggadocio on his 2021 album, ‘Call Me If You Get Lost’, Tyler also adopts a nom de plume, Sir Baudelaire, through whom the rapper acts through, upping his bizarre-o world quotient and rhapsodizing about conspicuous consumerism.
“Tyler’s always willing to try something just to see if it works or doesn’t work,” said Lionel Boyce – the rapper’s creative partner in their company, Bald Fade Productions – to XXL Magazine. “He’s always saying, ‘Why not? Just do it, just try it.”
All of that—the good, the bad, the ugly and the Golf Wang (one of his top selling, but silly clothing/branding lines)—will be on hard display during his first post-pandemic arena tour, stopping at South Philly’s Wells Fargo Center on Sunday, March 6, with Kali Uchis, Vince Staples and Teezo Touchdown as T’s openers.
Telling Interview Magazine that, “I don’t like being put in a box. I just make music, you know? When you’re put in a box, people have a set mind-state of what your music could sound like before they even look into it,” Tyler, The Creator always goes beyond all expectations.
The last time he played Philadelphia, in the summer of 2019, high atop The Mann on the lawns of The Sklyline Stage, Tyler appeared beneath the starry night’s clouds with a white-gold page boy wig atop his head, black sunglasses on his expressive face and an iridescent blue suit hugging his body. There, Tyler looked like a cross between Andy Warhol and Geoffrey Holder, and presented the rapt audience with the banging and the quiet, the soaring and the silent and all sides of love and heartbreak: hip hop at 360 degrees.
On his new album, ‘Call Me If You Get Lost’, and synth-heavy tracks such as ‘Lumberjack’ and the free jazzy ‘Hot Wind Blows,’ Tyler is aware of his past, and what we thought of him, and how nothing remains the same going into the future.
“I came a long way from my past…it’s obvious… My taste started changing from what it was when they met me.”
Going back to an interview that Tyler gave Zane Lowe for his Apple Music Beats 1 program, the rapper has always maintained that he would never ever stand still.
“Since day one, I’ve always wanted to make the prettiest s**t that’s borderline boring or the hardest f***ing s**t. I’ve been trying to mix those together since my first album.”
Expect all 365 degrees of Tyler, The Creator – and more – at the Wells Fargo Center on Sunday.
