Tyler, the Creator tends to use graphic images and crude language to convey his messages on Wolf, but his collaborations with big names such as Frank Ocean and Pharrell lend authority to his raw music.
Tyler, the Creator doesn’t give a crap about anything — and he wants everyone to know it, too.
He doesn’t care if people like him or not. He doesn’t care if his songs get played on radio stations across the country. He wants to be rich and famous, only without the “famous” part.
For many artists, this can be a commendable trait. No fan wants to see his or her favorite musician writing songs or playing shows for the wrong reasons. We want artists to care about the music they’re making, and we don’t want to see them sell out just for a few extra bucks.
But Tyler’s lack of caring isn’t commendable. In fact, it borders on annoying. In his third album, Wolf, the mercurial rapper isn’t shoving mainstream popularity aside because of any sort of beliefs or morals — he seems to be doing it just because he feels like it.
On the album’s opening track, “Wolf,” Tyler’s first word is “F—.” This is followed by the word “you,” and he repeats the phrase, “F— you” two more times before proceeding to say “F— him/ F— everything else I can see.” He doesn’t stop there, either. During the next 30 seconds, he repeats himself a few times, tells us he hates us and calls the listener a name too offensive to write.
Of course, it fits right in with everything we’ve ever seen from Tyler. From his breakout single and music video “Yonkers” — in which he rapped with a cockroach crawling all over his body — to his nationally televised jackassery on Adult Swim’s Loiter Squad, Tyler has shown his personality takes on the attributes of two starkly different characters.
On TV, Tyler is nothing short of insane. He’ll sit perched on a stool like a bird during an interview, and he has no qualms about attempting to chug a gallon of milk with his buddies from hip-hop collective Odd Future. In the recording studio, though, Tyler sounds more manically depressed than anything else, delivering crude lyrics and dark messages.
You can hear it throughout the album. In “Jamba,” Tyler describes a scene with a woman that sounds too graphic for pornography. In “Tamale,” the rapper criticizes those who have said he’s calmed down since his previous album, telling them to suck his you-know-what and kiss him you know where.
It’s difficult to listen to sometimes. But while the lyrics are vulgar and the message is gross, the lines are delivered beautifully. For all of Tyler’s problems, flow isn’t one of them. His rhymes roll off the tongue, and the production quality of his tracks is surprisingly excellent.
And despite some of the songs’ flaws, there are plenty of bright spots on Wolf. “Domo23” features some spectacularly rapped verses. “Slater” succeeds purely because of vocals from Frank Ocean, an old Odd Future friend. Tyler and Pharrell play off one another beautifully in “IFHY,” and Erykah Badu might be the highlight of the album with her vocals in the pleasantly jazzy “Treehome95.”
But in the end, it’s too easy to get stuck on the lyrics. No matter how good his composition is and no matter how clever his rhymes are, Tyler comes across like he simply doesn’t care about the album he leaked to the public four days before it was supposed to be released by the record label.
And that’s not just an opinion. He tells us as much in the album’s final track, “Lone/Jornada:” “Ya boy seem happy as f— but truthfully ya boy lonely/ N—– a target for marketing, he’s an artist/ Can’t even walk into Target without bothering customers bothering/ Asking me for a picture, then I talk to their sister/ Naw n—–, get lost, you’re f—ing smothering/ God, I wanna quit, but I can’t, cause mother and sister can’t pay the rent/ Four stories with storage, I’m 21 with a mortgage.”
It’s clear Tyler is a gifted rapper. If you’ve listened to him through his progression from Bastard to Goblin to Wolf, you can hear how much he’s grown as a lyricist and a producer.
No matter how much better he’s gotten, it’s hard to get past the idea that Wolf might be more enjoyable to listen to if it seemed like Tyler, the Creator cared about what people thought about it. Even just a little bit.
