Popular Culture with Tyler, the Creator

Cryptic pop star Tyler, the Creator whips up his own unique universe of music, TV, fashion and whatnot. He’s a one-man creative corporation determined to do it exactly his way, as he shows in this interview experience like no other. Tyler lives and works in Los Angeles, goes shopping in Paris and can’t go to the UK because he’s banned.

From Fantastic Man n° 28 — 2018
Text by Paul PAUL FLYNN
Photography by MARK PECKMEZIAN
Styling by CARLOS NAZARIO

 

Towards the end of a fruitful afternoon shopping in Paris with Tyler, the Creator, the hip-hop polymath reaches for his phone and reads aloud from the dream diary he keeps occasionally. It had emerged, over a lunch of spaghetti carbonara with an egg yolk the colour and shape of the sun sitting on top, that Tyler is a light sleeper. Just a light tickle of his toe can wake him during a flight.

 

Tyler is unusually sensitive to the whole leg area. He once kept a photo-file on an old computer, dedicated to pictures of knees. When we eventually part company, in the lobby of his hotel as evening turns to night, I ask if there is anything he feels readers ought to know about him that he hasn’t talked about. It’s been a riveting afternoon’s meander through the mind and the eyes of one of the world’s great modern inventors. “That I have no legs,” he replies.

Tyler was the operative head of the Los Angeles hip-hop collective Odd Future. They earned early comparisons with Wu-Tang Clan, though Odd Future was an umbrella name for a group of loosely connected solo artists, not a group with splinter factions. Tyler’s first release was 2009’s ‘Bastard’, a bold opening gambit that ran the timeless values of hardcore punk through the machinery of hip hop and skronk jazz, filtered by the sensibilities of an ambitious 18-year-old with nothing but self-belief on his side. Tyler had engineered for himself a camera-ready persona, inspired in part by watching Joy Division frontman Ian Curtis dancing on YouTube.

He has since fashioned four albums of his own and guested on most other Odd Future affiliates. He owns two houses in his home city, one of which he recently acquired, mostly because of a backyard which looks out over the Pacific Ocean. Seeds from the garden’s flora danced in the wind when he first viewed it. “I knew it was for me,” he says. “It looked like a fairy tale.”

Last October he opened a store for his clothing line, Golf Wang, near the corner of North Fairfax and Oakwood Avenue in Los Angeles. He’s never drunk, smoked or done drugs. Life is his elixir, music its pulse. The rest is window dressing.

I wrongly assume his dream diary is updated on the instructions of a therapist. Tyler is quick to answer. He has never seen an analyst. “No. Not at all.” He is 27 years old. At occasional moments in his life he has been instructed to. “I’m fine, though. I’m good. I have songs for that.”

He reads aloud: “I was getting a massage in another country, in Korea, and a hitman was sent out on another rapper that happened to be in the city. I’m friends with the person. That same dude tried to kill me and Vil.” Vil has been Tyler’s security man since 2011. He is sitting in the front seat of the blacked-out Mercedes in which we’ve travelled the streets of Paris for the last five hours.

“Me and my friends ended up in Gardena,” he continues. “That’s a city next to Hawthorne.” Hawthorne is the neglected Los Angeles suburb where Tyler grew up. “We went to Raleigh’s – it’s a restaurant we like – and I saw two fights. My mom crashed into a pole, because she was driving us. I hit my head in the car. The people that were fighting were people that I used to go to school with, and they said, ‘Wassup?’ and we start talking. I was in some old slave house and looking at the interior of it, for some reason.” He looks up. “There was a lot of pink,” he adds. “It was weird. This was a week ago. I have a very active dream life.” He has three or four a night. “I just happened to write that one down when I woke up.”

Tyler places the phone back into the pocket of his trousers and smiles. His grills glisten. “All of these are dreams,” he says. He could be talking to the air, the car, Paris, Vil, his career, me.

MOISTURISER

Tyler, the Creator lifts up his flat-cap and scratches his head, revealing the fabulous cheetah-print hair he dyed for this year’s Grammys. “I always told people that if I was white I would definitely have a mullet and it would be royal blue. But I never did it. Then one day I was just, like, ‘Fuck it, I’m going to dye my hair cheetah-print.’” It is easy to maintain, he says, with just a touch of moisturiser after showering. His tells me his hair never grows.

His last record, ‘Scum Fuck Flower Boy’, was a nominee for a Grammy, marrying his former irascible musical petulance, the abrasive irresponsibility of his youth, to fresh, clean, strangely commercial, even adult angles. ‘See You Again’ sounds like it could have been written for the soundtrack of ‘La La Land’, had the film been scored by someone with balls. ‘November’ is like a chilling novel sprung to life. It is rich, rewarding listening.

From the outset, Tyler rejected authority. He rapped the un-rappable, the obscene. His imagination spewed into his music like controlled rage. Nothing was beyond humour. There were no red lines. On the opening song from ‘Goblin’, the record which first brought him to a wider audience, he asserts “I’m not homophobic,” before holding a beat to deliver his double-bluff punchline: “Faggot!” It frightened the establishment in the exact way that unfiltered teenage imaginations will for eternity.

DUMBASS

In August 2015, Tyler was turned away at the border from entering the UK for various festival dates by the then home secretary, later prime minister, Theresa May, for “posing a threat to public order.” On his Tumblr account, Tyler’s manager Christian Clancy wrote that they’d received a letter from the Home Office, citing lyrics he’d written for ‘Bastard’ and ‘Goblin’ five years previously.

“I’m dark-skinned, man,” sighs Tyler. “I get it.” He is still unsure when he can return. “Because I’m the first person that this happened to. So there’s nothing to look at and gauge. It sucked. It is what it is. But hopefully it will get figured out. It happened. Now we’re figuring out how to un-happen it. When it does un-happen, we need to make people aware to make sure that it doesn’t happen again, if people give a fuck enough.” The irony of Tyler becoming a news item is that he never watches the news. “I don’t want to watch it. The news used to scare me as a child. I didn’t like to watch it.”

He thinks ‘Scum Fuck Flower Boy’ is his best album. “It’s more accessible, easier listening. I got great hooks, the beats are great, shit doesn’t need taking out. It’s cohesive. The album art is fucking flawless. I get all my points across. The features are done well. I found my version of writing a pop song but still a rap song. I still get weird musically, but it’s not too gross.”

Just because it’s his best doesn’t mean it’s his favourite. “‘Cherry Bomb’ is my favourite,” he says, of the immediate predecessor of ‘Flower Boy’. ‘Cherry Bomb’ is an excursion into hardcore abstraction that tanked commercially, threatening to derail his career as well. The Grammy nomination for ‘Flower Boy’ was an establishment nod to it being firmly back on track. “That validation is not a make or break. I know I’m good at whatever I do, but that’s a little cool extra thing to have.”

Tyler’s speaking voice is the exact same gleeful baritone, punctuated with the booming bass notes of an old movie trailer announcer, as his rap delivery. Sometimes on record it can deliver genuine malevolence and menace. In person, it is soothingly butch, like talking to a young Barry White after a spoonful of Ritalin, punctuated by the occasional dot of carefully planted hysterics. He is a reactively witty man, like a blue-chip stand-up comedian; he notices the texture, shape and colour of everything, like a poet. At certain points throughout the day, Tyler’s conversational metre slips into the rhythm of the music playing on the radio in the car, one of the bonuses of spending time in the company of a disciplined professional orator whose life is spent thinking about the way words and beats best coalesce.

I wonder aloud why Tyler likes to document his dreams.

“I don’t know,” he says, shrugging.

 

It is his favourite response.

 

“I’m a dumbass,” he says. “I’m a stupid bitch.” He taps the shoulder of his security guard in the passenger seat. “Right, Vil?”

 

“I can’t agree with you on that,” says Vil.

 

“Why not?” says Tyler.

 

“I’m entitled to my own opinion,” says Vil.

 

“You are entitled to your own opinion,” affirms Tyler.

 

“I don’t think you’re dumb,” says Vil.

 

“Whatever,” says Tyler.

 

“I think you’re a crazy tiger,” says Vil.

 

“That’s weird,” says Tyler. “Don’t say that to me.”

 

We have arrived at a new destination, a vintage shop in which Tyler will briefly consider the sartorial value of a pair of overalls. “I don’t like fashion,” he says. “But I like clothes.” He doesn’t buy anything.

Let’s flip back five hours.

The purpose of the shopping trip is for Tyler to buy a book of the Comme des Garçons archive he hasn’t been able to locate in America or online. It is a precious commodity he intends to give pride of place in the library of his new house. We’re first introduced in the courtyard that splits the two separate wings of the Comme store on rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. Tyler has a friend, Travis, in tow and Vil at his side. The three are talking about the strange nature of “indigenous” cuisine. It’s 2.30pm.

“French toast is weird in France,” says Travis.

“Belgian waffles are weird in Belgium,” says Vil.

“America takes everything,” says Tyler, “and makes it dumbass weird.”

Tyler notices a strikingly handsome assistant in the store as we leave. “He was gorgeous,” he says, to no one in particular. “Did you see his beautiful eyes?”

Like Tyler’s records, the day takes pleasingly impulsive twists in unexpected directions. I began the day’s shopping expedition from the hotel to the Comme store in a Renault Espace people-carrier, alone, trailing the Mercedes he’s hired for his time in Paris. From Comme to the next destination, 0FR. bookshop and gallery, Travis travels in the Espace and I sit next to Tyler in the Merc. That arrangement continues for the rest of the day. A recorder is switched on for the six consecutive journeys that take place in between. While he’s shopping, I watch him, quietly mesmerised by his funny, dutiful, inquisitive manner. Due to the sluggish nature of Parisian traffic and Tyler’s cordiality in offering an undiluted, bird’s-eye of his world, a lot of talking gets done in these car journeys.

During the trip to 0FR., he winds down the window, noticing another model-esque, slim blond man walking aimlessly, artfully across the street.

“This is fucking crazy,” he says, wowed by the vision before him. “Look at what the fuck is going on. This is insane. This is fucking insane. Why didn’t we…? What the fuck…? Where were they yesterday? Oh, shit, this is fucking crazy. What is going on?” He asks if it’s fashion week. That’s next week. “Oh, they’re here for castings?”

I ask him to explain for the tape what he’s just seen.

“Nah, it’s just beautiful people. He was gorgeous, dude. Jesus Christ.”

At 0FR., Tyler spends a clean $700-plus on art books, including ‘Homo Americanus’, a compendium of the work of the brilliant graphic artist Raymond Pettibon. Watching Tyler stand upright in a chic bookstore, with his animal print hair, Aertex golfing polo shirt, beige slacks, cap, white socks and sandals carrying the book’s title under his arm makes a fleetingly potent image. He talks to another tall blond man at the magazine stand. “Did you see that?” he says as he leaves. “Gorgeous.”

The hunt for the Comme des Garçons book ends later, downstairs at the clothing shop The Broken Arm, where an assistant tells him it is all but impossible to buy any more. Tyler consoles himself by rapping slowly, quietly about the US government with contrapuntal emphasis on long, heavy syllables to the bracing techno playing on the shop’s stereo.

He looks at a rail of Céline womenswear. He gives Phoebe Philo a special place among the upper echelons of the contemporary fashion canon. He is actively worried about what will happen now that Hedi Slimane has taken over his favourite brand. “I wonder what he’s going to bring,” he says. “It’s been nine, ten years and I guess she wants to leave, but I just don’t want the beautiful marble and the plants and the colour palettes to turn into all black, skinny, heroin-looking white boys. Ah, man, I just don’t want it to lose that.” We walk the streets for a while. He buys a cookie, then enquires about a €260 pastoral tapestry in a shop of curios, mostly selling old wartime paraphernalia.

OKRA

Tyler is not so much a consumer as he is one of mankind’s great beauty scavengers. His eyes are hungry. Sometimes that translates into a vernacular halfway between frat-boy humour and gay porn (“I am pregnant!”), but often it is a thing of tranquil reflection. There is something uniquely transparent and simultaneously unknowable about him.