Tyler, the Creator Is As Insufferable As He is Talented

Don't Tap the Glass is a propulsive album. But, why is Tyler so annoying about his artistry, as if he is the only artist doing everything the right way?

I wasn’t going to blog today, because I fear that it is possible to blog entirely too much, to overwrite , to write unnecessarily when you need to show more mystery. To be a star is to hold mystique, to save a piercing story down the road so your fans can wonder how they missed that aspect of you. So, I apologize for this here, oversharing; the egocentrism of typing intuitions on a page has a peculiar hold over me.

I saw a video of Los Angeles rapper Tyler, the Creator on Hot97 today, and as usual, he used it as an important time to talk about what is most bothering him in hip-hop. Every time he drops an album, he uses it as an important time to become the unc that he used to rebel against. Tyler says: “To all you niggas out there that are making music or art, you could just put this out. You don’t always have to do this big rollout, blood sweat and tears, I spent 30 years on this shit. What happens is niggas will design their own handcuffs, and lock themselves up, throw a key away, then it turns into fear after a while. That’s why we never got Detox…”

Tyler is riding high because Don’t Tap the Glass was released to acclaim. Pitchfork rated it 7.7, with an excellent Stephen Kearse review to match. The whole quote is fine, although I would contend that the reason that we didn’t get Detox is because Dr. Dre became uber rich, the kind you get where it doesn’t make sense to drop an album unless you’re dropping it to sell another product. In fact, that is what he did with 2015’s Compton. Tyler talks about how much he attempted to have fun with this album release, instead of his previous issues with being precious about the page. I respect Tyler, the Creator because he’s worked hard, mixed different styles — some of which doesn’t always work for me, but are attempts at fresh takes on genre work nevertheless — to stay culturally relevant while still maintaining a healthy respect for the adoration that the fans give him. Unlike someone like Drake, he has avoided saturation by showing mystery, not getting involved with street antics, and playfully suggesting that his sexuality is fluid while also never outright being seen with a partner, or a lover. To see Tyler is to see a man who made the right moves. He’s done his job properly.

So, I don’t mean to be the guy spoiling everyone’s fun; I just find him insufferable to the point where if I was forced to hang out with him — if I may compare the two men — I would opt to hang with Earl Sweatshirt instead. I guess it is because I remember who Tyler was when he first bolted onto the scene with Bastard, a mixtape that was as brilliantly produced as it was disruptive. “AssMilk” is a riot by some bad kids out entirely too late at night; “Inglorious” is about a boy trying to tell his father that he should have been the first teacher in his life. Tyler as an underdog was annoying — prone to a bunch of inarticulate rage about Black people, basketball, Jordan’s, and “real hip-hop” that screamed “I am a different kind of negro than y’all” — but he was startlingly hungry. In fairness to him, traditionalism can be isolating and the old heads sometimes don’t even know it, but to be a young man in hip-hop culture is to understand that the old head, while old, does know their stuff. You must challenge the old head and absorb the wisdom of the old head, mixing what you learn and the dogmas you deny into a cultural alchemy that can make you the coolest kid on the block.

At times, he showed a cool distance towards what was expected of him in rap. I reject this notion since the only thing people expect in hip-hop are dope emcees, but in Tyler's eyes, rap was boring him, preventing from making the Neptunes imitation that is all over Cherry Bomb, or the pansexual, treehouse soul that is on IGOR. After he won the Grammy for Best Rap Album with IGOR, Tyler commented that he felt that he was being lumped into urban music. “They always put it in a rap or urban category”, the rapper said after winning his first Grammy. “I don’t like that word, urban. That’s just a politically correct way of using the “n” word.”

This reminded me of Stringer Bell from The Wire. Remember when he would complain about “project talk” in his photo copy store, which was a front for his drug empire? Or, he would try to teach macroeconomics, that he learned at community college, to his henchmen. Stringer would walk through life thinking he was different from everyone, from the soldiers who worked for him, from his much smarter and more respected partner, Avon Barksdale. “The game’s beyond the fucking game”, Stringer explained to Avon. Stringer wanted more than just being known as a drug kingpin. Well, too bad negro: you’re a project drug dealer.

I felt the same way when Tyler talked about IGOR. Sure, the album is not a traditional rap record, it doesn’t even sound like a Neptunes record, but it is a record that is undoubtedly urban. To the Grammy’s, you are a Black man. That’s fine: we know that Blackness is not a monolith since Blackness has created entire cultures from scratch, infusing this white supremacist nation with our slang, our twang. Just because some white gays listened to it and liked it, doesn’t mean you aren’t a rapper.

There was a conversation that I was having with a friend about the movie American Fiction, a movie that I do not think will age well. It reminds me of some of my past issues with Tyler. (One could even argue it was bad from the start). My friend explained that at one point, perhaps in the 2000’s, you could argue that the view of Blackness was one-note and flat, regulating us as ghetto children who either need to rap or go play basketball to be successful, or mostly happy families like the Huxtables. Perhaps at one point, but the Obama era rendered those portrayals of Black people as moot. Everyone seems to know that Blackness can feature people more in tune with more suburban sensibilities; in fact, that’s what most of Blackness is in the media right now. The pendulum swung enough for these so called “new blacks” to be satisfied about the different sensibilities of Blackness. So, why do they still complain about the way Blackness is depicted in the media? It feels more narcissistic than it does sincere. There is nothing blacker than simply being cool.

At some point — right around the time he tapped DJ Drama to narrate Call Me If You Get Lost — Tyler started virtue signaling more, letting Black listeners know that his music was also for them. LeBron James and Maverick Carter in the video for “Stop Playing With Me”, which led me to wonder if King James has seen the tweets about Tyler complaining about Black people only caring about basketball. On Glass, he has a line in the first song, “Big Poe”, that says “I don’t trust white people with dreadlocks”, and although if a rapper did know a white person with dreads it would be Tyler, it feels impossible for the line to age gracefully. Virtue signaling is timely; it is not timeless. Call Me If You Get Lost is hip-hop nostalgia, but still irreverent enough to have songs about bisexual love triangles, passports, and cars that he only buys when he feels bad about not having romantic longing. That album is probably his best overall album, even if I don’t quite believe that East Coast drums, DJ Drama narrations are actually what Tyler envisions his albums being. “MASSA” is some of his best overall rapping (“I purchase more wheels when I feel like I’m third wheeling”), and the old man Lil Wayne verse on “Hot Wind Blows” was springy and inspired. Still, the album feels like bisexual Griselda, as opposed to the music he made on Cherry Bomb and IGOR, which is more personal to him even if it isn’t my taste.

Don’t Tap the Glass has humid, slick, up-tempo songs on it that might not be disruptive but off bubbly, paying homage to a type in hip-hop that was more dance than it was propulsive. A friend of mine said he thought this was Tyler’s attempt to fill the Kanye-shaped hole in hip-hop’s heart, but Yeezus was exploding with sexual psyche and street identity, poaching Chief Keef and King Louie from the South Side of Chicago and inserting them in small architecture stores around Paris. Tyler will never quite have that scope, but his live shows are similarly astonishing, special events that envision hip-hop as something bigger than intimate street shows.

Look, he’s talented, and he should do what makes him most content. Remembering the days when he would misanthropically admonish Earl Sweatshirt’s mom in magazine interviews won’t stop people from dancing. Nor should it; insufferableness notwithstanding, I applaud him for figuring out his existence as the number one weird rapper. At least he’s better than Kid Cudi was at it.