Tyler, The Creator and Finding Peace
Musicians often find themselves in a lose-lose situation: keep making music that sounds like what you’ve made before, please your fanbase, but don’t grow as an artist. Or, evolve your sound, be true to yourself artistically, but potentially alienate the portion of your fanbase looking for something familiar.
It seems like every band or artist comes to that point. You can find no better example of the latter than Tyler, The Creator.
This isn’t just a simple musical style change, though. Through the lens of Tyler’s music, you watch a young man finally realize who he is, and make better art because of it. It’s powerful stuff, when you think about it.
Tyler’s years-long transition from spitting homophobic lyrics and offending British dignitaries to writing an album about coming out as gay and headlining the UK’s Parklife is one of the music world’s greatest shifts in personality.
The shift also came in his music, as he mellowed out and wrote two of the best albums I’ve ever heard, “Flower Boy” and “IGOR”. I could talk for hours about both of those records, but especially “Flower Boy”.
In my opinion, he’s definitely changed for the better over the years, but you have to give credit to where he started. His original artistic vision in starting Odd Future and turning it into one of the most popular rap collectives in the world in the early 2010s was incredible.
Now, 14 years after the start of Odd Future, Tyler just announced his newest album, “Call Me If You Get Lost.” It comes out in like a week, and I’m counting down the seconds. Aside from being incredibly excited for this album to see the light of day, I’m also excited to see what direction Tyler takes his career next.
After a massive change between 2015’s “Cherry Bomb” and 2017’s “Flower Boy”, I can’t WAIT to see how Tyler has shifted artistically between 2019 and 2021. (A lot has happened in those two years, if you weren’t aware!)
CMIYGL’s first single, Lumberjack, seems very rap heavy, which would be a departure from his last album, IGOR, where he hardly does much rapping at all.
It comes off as more of a harkening back to 2013’s “Wolf”, with a lo-fi instrumental and aggressive tone. Has the pandemic made Tyler mad at the world again? I guess we’ll find out. (Also, “I hit Drizzy and told him I had a milli' for him” is a great bar. Very old school Tyler.)
This album also comes with another change, which kind of struck me as odd. Tyler’s last two albums have been about being a member of the LGBTQ+ community. “Flower Boy” is more about coming out, while “IGOR” is about being in love with a guy who loves a girl.
One of the first visual elements for his upcoming album is…. him making out with a girl in his car.
Seems like yet another departure for Tyler. There’s just so much to talk about with him, and I could go off on a million tangents, but I’m not going to, because I value your time. Let’s briefly talk about how Tyler found peace, and how that benefitted his music.
In the early Odd Future days, and on albums like “Goblin,” it was a point of pride for Tyler to say anything that would upset others. It got him banned from the United Kingdom, and he became the ire of a lot of concerned parents who don’t understand how outrage culture works.
His tone was angry and unapologetic, and a lot of his lyrics were focused on just how messed up he was. You can tell he really did feel that way, too. His early work is a genuine look inside the soul of a depressed and angry teenager (who was also trying to process his own repressed sexuality, as we now know in hindsight).
Take a song like “Yonkers”, for instance. If you’ve never seen this music video, it’s disgusting, but it’s also one of the most influential music videos ever, so maybe watch it, if you want.
“Jesus called, he said he's sick of the disses, I told him to quit bitchin', this isn't a fuckin' hotline. For a fuckin' shrink, sheesh, I already got mine, and he's not fuckin' workin', I think I'm wastin' my damn time.”
Now, compare that to “GONE GONE / THANK YOU,” off of “IGOR”.
“You started building a bridge and turned it into a fence, then my building got torn down all because of your new tenant. I'll just buy up some new shit, never down with a lease, you never lived in your truth, I'm just happy I lived in it. But I finally found peace, so peace.”
That’s a bit different, I think. There’s definitely a lot behind the scenes we don’t see, but Tyler being true to himself and his sexuality seems to have really changed him for the better.
Yonkers is a great song to listen to when you’re mad, because you can just tell how mad Tyler is. The music is good (haha, like the newsletter), but the man behind it isn’t.
As much as we want artists to make great music, if it comes at the expense of their mental health (hi, Kanye), then we should probably let them heal.
We’ve gotten lucky with Tyler, because the music he makes in a better mental state turns out to be even better than the music he made before his healing process. That’s not always the case. (I want to be clear here, being mentally healthy is more important than making good music, that should be obvious.)
His more positive outlook changed his music for the better. His early work was a lot more scattered. It’s hard to describe, but a lot of his songs don’t really feel anchored to anything. There’s musical personifications of the voices in Tyler’s head, mixed with internet culture references and celebrity disses, all underscored by some really interesting but eclectic beats.
Part of the genius of “Flower Boy” and “IGOR” is how cohesive both records are. They’re both about one thing, and they may go off on the occasional tangent, but you can tell what Tyler wanted to get out of making the records. They’re also much more musical, which plays to Tyler’s benefit. His instrumentals on both of these records are just fantastic.
I wanna go back to “Yonkers” and “GONE GONE / THANK YOU” really quickly, before we get to the end here. I know the words “I finally found peace, so peace” are about moving on from the person he wants to be with, but they’re so much more powerful in the grand scheme of Tyler’s career. It’s easy to see that he HAS found some semblance of peace in the last 5 years.
He went from lamenting about how his therapy isn’t working, to maturely accepting the end of a relationship and using that end to find peace within himself, within the span of eight years. That’s a lot of personal growth.
Whether his newfound peace comes through on the new album is yet to be seen. The pandemic rocked a lot of people’s foundations, and changed a lot of things. It would be easy for Tyler to use his new record to channel some of the anger he’s felt during the pandemic, rock the boat, and upset the world.
I, for one, hope he doesn’t feel like he needs to. Thanks for reading.
Here, yet again, is a playlist. It’s got all the songs and albums referenced in the newsletter. I decided to include some songs that bring me peace, because if you should take one thing from today’s newsletter, it’s that finding peace can help you write Grammy-winning albums.