Of all the bad phrases that the new, student newspaper-related debate journalism of the youth network portals has placed on the black list of the unspeakable, for example “Hello ?! Is it still okay?” or “Can we please finally stop doing this or that?”, this is the scariest one: “We have to talk!” But now we need them, for once. Tyler, we need to talk. Have a seat, have a cookie. And tell me.
This refers to Tyler, The Creator, one of the most colorful, controversial and art-sovereign birds of contemporary rap music for a good ten years. Actually, Tyler Okonma, 30, who grew up a skater and troublemaker in one of the better areas around Los Angeles. When he was 18, he rapped that he definitely wanted a Grammy award, and then really won it at 28. And who has now published another very extraordinary piece. A track over eight minutes long called “Wilshire”, in which he seems to be telling a story from his life in such a chatty and emotional way that you only very, very rarely hear in hip-hop these days.
It has to be said that Tyler is otherwise a grandmaster of disguises and verbal storms. Also on the album on which the piece is included and which was number one on the US charts at the beginning of July. It is called “Call Me If You Get Lost” and, together with the accompanying videos, is a real stun grenade of fashionable and musical style images, format ideas, puns, criss-cross references. In the end, you always come back to the said song. And not just because it is actually at the end of the album.
The basis of “Wilshire” is a drum groove, as it was especially popular in the 1990s, on top of a warm-blooded pulsating electric piano that comes from a seventies recording by the Finnish jazz rocker Pekka Pohjola. And then Tyler, The Creator, known as Apocalypse Punch and Chainsaw Hankie, tells what happened to him with lowered, relaxed vocal cords. Reports on how he met his good friend’s partner. How they fell in love, got closer, but the conflict of interest did not allow fraud. Forbidden love, touched a thousand times, it’s a soap opera that Tyler unfolds here, empathetic, self-doubting. Almost like the Malcolm X-bearded storyteller from old New York, only purely in terms of private politics.
In 2015, Tyler was denied entry to the UK. For four years
Of course, it can still be the case that the story is drowned and made up. It’s not the eventual truth that makes this rap piece so fascinating. It’s the tone, the posture, the perspective commitment.
At a time when, due to various incidents, especially when it comes to hip-hop, the argument is hotter than ever how much work is in the author and vice versa (see here on the current debate in Germany), you inevitably perceive a Tyler album as a contribution to the discussion. Especially at the beginning of his career, as the leader of the wild collective Odd future, his raps were only so permeated with aggressive nihilism, gay ridicule and fantasies of violence against women. In 2015, Tyler was refused entry to Great Britain and was banned from the important hip-hop core market for four years. The then Interior Minister Theresa May justified this with lines from song lyrics. An amazing, one-time process.
The wolf has not turned into a lamb since then, but Tyler has long since emancipated himself from the dangerous bungling. Has hinted at his own bisexuality in a nebulous way and, above all, pulled through to the clap of thunder, which even the least talented rappers like to claim for themselves today as soon as you ask them to explain their pig stuff in more detail: Tyler, The Creator manages hip-hop to celebrate as a game and really high art. As a stable aesthetic framework in which the quality of the fictional in particular makes sincere statements possible and even authenticated.
He doesn’t do us the favor of at least occasionally positioning himself clearly
On “Call Me If You Get Lost” Tyler now takes on the role of the travel-loving fur hat dandy Tyler Baudelaire, a cross between a Wes Anderson film character and Pepe, the bully. In the videos he experiences brightly colored holiday adventures, repainting the hip-hop status symbols into the insignia of a European Lake Geneva jet set. In “Wusyaname” he politely asks the honored woman about a soul sample that turns like a cotton candy machine whether she would like to fly with him to Cannes and watch obscure indie films there. Enjoy a grim moment of mania in “Corso” while disharmonies from the darkest Wu-Tang chambers rumble under him: Yes, he hopes that the woman thinks of him during sex with her husband. Because he is perfect.
And so slowly puzzles together – certainly not the first time you listen to it – what actually makes this album so special. That Tyler, The Creator, first stages the story of the chaos of love, which he tells so dry and intimate in the “Wilshire” as a monological postscript, as a huge, crazy prism, with countless different style colors and voices, internal and external. And to a certain extent leaves it to the audience for themselves, depending on the form of the day, which version appears to be the more emotionally believable.
Tyler, The Creator can only resist a timely comment on “Call Me If You Get Lost”. In the spooky “Manifesto”, with a decidedly burst collar, he rejects all those who expect him to have to admit to the “Black Lives Matter” movement as a black artist. In the end, these are the same white listeners, cuddled up in self-righteous model anti-racism, he says, who recently crucified him for the violence in his texts.
Big boy Tyler still doesn’t do us the favor of at least occasionally positioning himself clearly. The core of sincerity that lies in his art is all the more stable.