March 2010 April 2010 May 2010 June 2010 July 2010
August 2010
September 2010 October 2010
November 2010
December 2010 January 2011 February 2011 March 2011 April 2011 May 2011 June 2011 July 2011 August 2011 September 2011 October 2011 November 2011 December 2011 January 2012 February 2012 March 2012 April 2012 May 2012 June 2012 July 2012 August 2012 September 2012 October 2012 November 2012 December 2012 January 2013 February 2013 March 2013 April 2013 May 2013 June 2013 July 2013 August 2013 September 2013 October 2013 November 2013 December 2013 January 2014 February 2014 March 2014 April 2014 May 2014 June 2014 July 2014 August 2014 September 2014 October 2014 November 2014 December 2014 January 2015 February 2015 March 2015 April 2015 May 2015 June 2015 July 2015 August 2015 September 2015 October 2015 November 2015 December 2015 January 2016 February 2016 March 2016 April 2016 May 2016 June 2016 July 2016 August 2016 September 2016 October 2016 November 2016 December 2016 January 2017 February 2017 March 2017 April 2017 May 2017 June 2017 July 2017 August 2017 September 2017 October 2017 November 2017 December 2017 January 2018 February 2018 March 2018 April 2018 May 2018 June 2018 July 2018 August 2018 September 2018 October 2018 November 2018 December 2018 January 2019 February 2019 March 2019 April 2019 May 2019 June 2019 July 2019 August 2019 September 2019 October 2019 November 2019 December 2019 January 2020 February 2020 March 2020 April 2020 May 2020 June 2020 July 2020 August 2020 September 2020 October 2020 November 2020 December 2020 January 2021 February 2021 March 2021 April 2021 May 2021 June 2021 July 2021 August 2021 September 2021 October 2021 November 2021 December 2021 January 2022 February 2022 March 2022 April 2022 May 2022 June 2022 July 2022 August 2022 September 2022 October 2022 November 2022 December 2022 January 2023 February 2023 March 2023 April 2023 May 2023 June 2023 July 2023 August 2023 September 2023 October 2023 November 2023 December 2023 January 2024 February 2024 March 2024 April 2024 May 2024 June 2024 July 2024 August 2024 September 2024 October 2024
News Every Day |

Tyler, the Creator Confronts an Odd Future

Photo: Tyler, The Creator via YouTube

The West Coast hip-hop luminaries who appeared at Kendrick Lamar’s the Pop Out in June reinforced a reality apparent to even the casual observer: The defiant spirit of California rap endures, having molted and adapted over three generations, from the gruff gangsta-rap tenets of Dr. Dre and N.W.A to the haunted sociopolitical assessments of late-aughts acts like Lamar and his Black Hippy crew to the feisty younger artists building careers in their wake, like Cuzzos and Kalan.frfr. But few guests at the Pop Out saw a noisier crowd response than Tyler, the Creator. Leading the audience at Los Angeles’s Kia Forum through electric renditions of “Wusyaname” and “EARFQUAKE,” the 33-year-old rapper, producer, and designer framed his catalogue as a link between worlds, a fiery blend of L.A.’s more introspective and soulful musical traditions and their coarser counterparts. Gracing the nearby Intuit Dome four months later, at the listening party for his seventh album Chromakopia, he spoke about the honor of being able to perform at hometown arenas. He’d spent a portion of his youth living “down the street” in Inglewood in spite of the prevailing perception of Odd Future as a suburban latchkey skate-teen phenomenon. “I don’t mirror what people expect, so …” he said. Chromakopia ponders the contradictions in the life of the “biggest out the city since Kenny,” debating the merits of his signature flair for the macabre and owning the hang-ups that inspire him to lash out when he does. The end result is a kind of inverse Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers, a psychological deep dive into not wanting to be a family man.

Tyler was singing a different tune on the last album. 2021’s Call Me If You Get Lost flexed on passport stamps and DJ Drama drops, delivering the closest thing to a blustering traditional event rap album in a catalogue full of scrappy, sometimes deliberately unpleasant works. Just as 2019’s IGOR and 2017’s Flower Boy course-corrected for the giddily profane nihilism of his earlier music, with sweeter hooks and lyrics more rooted in romantic yearning than misanthropic urges, Call Me tossed a bone to fans who itched for the old brusque raps. The new album sees the artist occupying a more worried, insular mind-set: It’s dangerous outside for rappers. You can be at a Roscoe’s, like PnB Rock, gunned down in broad daylight; you can be at a music festival, like Drakeo the Ruler, fatally stabbed backstage; you can be in an Airbnb rental, like Pop Smoke, killed in a Hollywood Hills home invasion. Chromakopia touches on these chilling scenarios in the lead single “Noid”: “Loop around the block, eyes glued to the rearview / Rather double back than regret hearing, ‘Pew, pew.’”

It’s a bit of a pump fake, though. Chromakopia is more interested in observing and critiquing hypermasculinity than celebrating its own steely mettle. It feeds the hunger for a return to classic Odd Future aggression, approaching from a slightly more enlightened perspective. The album spends a good bit of its run time unpacking a stray line in the single that felt like one of old Tyler’s chauvinist quips — “Never trust a bitch, if you good, they could trap you” — revealing a man mulling over pathways to the future, whether he’ll die young or settle down or navigate the achy 40s Ye described in 2008’s “Welcome to Heartbreak”: “He said his daughter got a brand-new report card / And all I got was a brand-new sports car.”

Chromakopia is at war with itself, jostling through light, uplifting moments and self-defeating lows. The juxtaposition of the lovely and the terrifying has long been the main axis of intrigue in Tyler, the Creator’s oeuvre — recall that deep-but-still-pitched-down vocal cutting through the French jazz sample in Bastard’s “Odd Toddlers” in 2009. But the new album dips into a purposeful conversation about Black masculinity dating back centuries. Its monochrome military visual aesthetic — peep the martial, cartoonish gait in the “St. Chroma” video and the green Gaddafi getup at the Intuit party — and its Sam Cooke–in–Black Mirror artwork grasp at the historicity of the tussle with notions of manhood therein. Its lyrics dabble in and dart out of classic rap tropes; braggadocio has its situational benefits, but so does investigating and upending the inequities and insecurities that draw the behavior out.

Having graduated in ten years from the puckish commitment to facilitating a wild night that got him arrested for inciting a riot, Tyler seems more interested in patterning himself after the “Black men who were not at all interested in the patriarchal ideal” bell hooks honors from her “Reconstructing Black Masculinity” essay in 1992’s Black Looks: Race and Representation. He’s surveying the pitfalls of chest-beating. (“Every self-positioning or self-fixation maintains a relationship of dependency on the collapse of the other,” leftist thinker Frantz Fanon wrote of the lives of Black men in Martinique in 1952’s Black Skin, White Masks, echoing the present. “It’s on the ruins of my entourage that I build my virility.”) But he still itches to be the dominator and free spirit his peers embody in their records.

In a knotty midsection, which rapidly progresses from a celebration of polygamy in “Darling, I” to fallout from a pregnancy scare in “Hey Jane,” Tyler stresses wants and needs while their real-world consequences throw pebbles at the windows of his mansion to get his attention. A feel for ramifications is what this kind of conversation too often lacks in mainstream rap; we love to hear about Future’s bedroom antics but do not give much thought to the ripples. “Jane” argues a fleeting sexual connection isn’t the ideal foundation for a family, but it gets more compelling as it jumps into the shoes of the pregnant woman anxious about her body changing, her friends and family losing respect, and a man running off: “I’m 35 and my ovaries might not reset / I don’t wanna live my whole life feeling regret.” The value of fighting against a more traditional path plagues Tyler as he stares down the barrel of maturity. Listening to the advice that peppers Chromakopia from his mother, Bonita Smith, you sense that he regrets ignoring certain bits but does so in service to following his own compass.

Late in the album, Tyler explains where that instinct comes from and reveals the absent father he’s cursed in records since Bastard actually wanted to be present in his son’s life. It’s a revelation as jarringly personal as the matter-of-fact bisexuality of Flower Boy. The obvious antecedent for Smith’s maternal counterpoint in songs like “Tomorrow” — “We need a little Ty-Ty walking around here, okay? / We need a little dookie booty” — is the rip-roaring phone message from Frank Ocean’s family friend Rosie Watson in Blonde’s “Be Yourself,” containing a warning not to smoke weed and end up “sluggish, lazy, stupid, and unconcerned.” But as Smith’s interjections come to unpack her own problems, the exchange resembles the weary motivation offered in Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes’s 1922 “Mother to Son”:

Well, son, I’ll tell you:

Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.

It’s had tacks in it,

And splinters,

And boards torn up,

And places with no carpet on the floor —

Bare.

But all the time

I’se been a-climbin’ on,

And reachin’ landin’s,

And turnin’ corners,

And sometimes goin’ in the dark

Where there ain’t been no light.

So boy, don’t you turn back.

Chromakopia’s amorphousness feels instructive. One minute, “Sticky” is mining HBCU marching-band aesthetics; the next, the Jungian “Take Your Mask Off” is serving the same sort of conscious, cautionary tale as Common’s “Between Me, You & Liberation” and TLC’s “Waterfalls”; “Balloon” is bursting traditional gender roles open in a joyful Doechii duet. The closing moments of “I Hope You Find Your Way Home” spell out a thesis — “The light comes from within” — that was there all along. “St. Chroma” lifts a name from Norton Juster’s 1961 children’s novel The Phantom Tollbooth. Chroma the Great is a bastion of reason and “maestro of pigment” in a tale of strange philosophical absolutists. He commands the realm’s colors like musical instruments, coaxing out a sunset as a conductor leads an orchestra. But one day, he’s late to rise, and Milo, Tollbooth’s listless protagonist, attempts to manage the morning in his stead, rocketing time a week forward in a string of seven failed sunrises that luckily go unnoticed. He trips while stepping into the shoes of a man who inspired him, a noble intention curdling when he neglects to ask for guidance. Invoking Chroma, Tyler offers a swatch book of shades of manhood, an update to Pharrell’s “You Can Do It Too” inspiring fans to escape oppressive masculine stereotypes and offering a word to the wise: Heed your elders sometimes.

Related

Происшествия

В честь исполнителя роли Шурика из "Операции "Ы" назвали улицу в Екатеринбурге

Lindsay Hubbard's Baby Shower Details Revealed, Including Which 'Summer House' Co-Stars Attend

Revealed: SC Freedom Caucus leader had numerous electronics seized by federal officers

You need the eyes of a movie hero to spot the 5 horror villains lurking near the crime scene in under 90 secs

Inside the dark world of randy sex pest dolphins who terrorise swimmers & try to ROMP with humans

Ria.city






Read also

Jets' Aaron Rodgers credits 'fountain of youth' drink for helping him get through short week

Alleged N80.2bn misappropriation: EFCC seeks Bello’s arraignment in absentia

The Shetland Pony Grand National – sponsored by the Thelwell Estate

News, articles, comments, with a minute-by-minute update, now on Today24.pro

News Every Day

You need the eyes of a movie hero to spot the 5 horror villains lurking near the crime scene in under 90 secs

Today24.pro — latest news 24/7. You can add your news instantly now — here


News Every Day

Lindsay Hubbard's Baby Shower Details Revealed, Including Which 'Summer House' Co-Stars Attend



Sports today


Новости тенниса
Мария Шарапова

Познер о включении Шараповой в Зал славы: «Представители тенниса умнее и дальновиднее своих коллег по другим видам спорта»



Спорт в России и мире
Москва

«Зенит» разгромил «Самару» в матче Единой лиги ВТБ



All sports news today





Sports in Russia today

Москва

Наталья Бочкарева призвала россиян заняться спортом


Новости России

Game News

Рецензия на игра Metaphor: ReFantazio


Russian.city


Москва

В России предложили освободить от НДФЛ при продаже жилья семьи с ребенком


Губернаторы России
Алексей Сёмин

Благотворительный фонд «АиФ. Доброе сердце» просит поддержать срочный сбор в приложении Tooba


Передовые технологии из России: НАЛОГИ С ЗАРПЛАТ НАРОДА МОГУТ ОТМЕНИТЬ?! Россия, США, Европа могут улучшить отношения?!

В Мытищах состоялась отчетно-выборная конференция профсоюза жизнеобеспечения

Le Monde: эффективность санкций против России сильно снизилась

Президент Венесуэлы Мадуро: нужно увеличить частоту авиарейсов для россиян


Талантливый Музыкант и Исполнитель из Нижнего Тагила.

Токсиколог Кутушов объяснил, почему хочется спать после обеда

Спектакль «Волшебная лампа Аладдина»

В Москве завершился IX Всероссийский Конгресс онкопациентов


Рыбакина узнала первую сопернику на Итоговом турнире WTA-2024

Теннисистки Соболенко и Рыбакина сыграют в одной группе на Итоговом турнире

Познер о включении Шараповой в Зал славы: «Представители тенниса умнее и дальновиднее своих коллег по другим видам спорта»

Теннисист Медведев заявил, что поражение на "Мастерсе" ударило по уверенности



Заместитель управляющего Отделением Фонда пенсионного и социального страхования Российской Федерации по г. Москве и Московской области Алексей Путин: «Клиентоцентричность - наш приоритет»

Компания «Мария» рассказала о новых решениях для девелопмента на конференции Московского Бизнес-клуба

Отделение СФР предоставило 11 жителям региона с нарушениями зрения собак-поводырей

Компания «Мария» рассказала о новых решениях для девелопмента на конференции Московского Бизнес-клуба


Компания «Мария» рассказала о новых решениях для девелопмента на конференции Московского Бизнес-клуба

Дирижер Башмет добился выселения из квартиры прежних жильцов

Собянин поздравил команду Москвы с победой на чемпионате «Абилимпикс»

Якутский «Спартак» удачно выступил в Чите на турнире по футболу


ЦБ: средняя ставка по вкладам снизилась впервые за семь месяцев

Классные кухни: Образовательный центр имени М. М. Расковой в Энгельсе

Ваша тарелка – ключ к долголетию: доктор Юзуп перечислила продукты, продлевающие молодость

В Подмосковье наградили хоккеисток после победы на турнире в ОАЭ



Путин в России и мире






Персональные новости Russian.city
Тимати

Тимати Шаламе сорвал конкурс своих двойников: фанаты набросились на актера



News Every Day

Lindsay Hubbard's Baby Shower Details Revealed, Including Which 'Summer House' Co-Stars Attend




Friends of Today24

Музыкальные новости

Персональные новости