It goes some way towards fusing the two extremes of Tyler, the Creator’s persona – the hard hitting rapper who, as he’s often wont to point out doesn’t “give a fuck”, makes jokes about terrorism and brags about having been “cancelled before cancelled was with Twitter fingers” and the sensitive, lovelorn melodic experimentalist who claims “I would rather hold your hand than have a cool handshake”. It’s a process of evolution that continues on Call Me If You Get Lost, an album on which all the tracks elide into each other that deals largely in short, sharp bursts of music but finds room for two episodic epics that each clock in close to the 10-minute mark. But I have to keep doing what I’m doing.” A year from now no one will give a fuck about this interview,” Tyler told the Guardian in 2012. ![]() Occasionally, those voices belonged to Odd Future themselves. It had provoked the kind of bad-faith performative outrage in which certain corners of the internet specialise, but, if nothing else, it functioned as a reminder of different era, in which the Odd Future collective were held to be The World’s Most Notorious Rap Group – a broiling mass of wilful controversy thanks to their lyrics – and Tyler, their de facto leader, was quaintly thought such a threat to public morals that the then-home secretary, Theresa May, successfully petitioned to have him barred from entering the UK.įor all the column inches expended on them, you would have been forgiven for thinking that this was not a career built to last: the succès de scandale tends to burn bright, but not long dissenting voices wondered if it were possible to translate infamy and a willingness to give their music away for free online into a career. CALL ME IF YOU GET LOST, though, is a chance to see if they can recognise rap greatness once it has kicked their door in.Earlier this week, Billie Eilish was obliged to issue an apology, after an eight-year-old video of the singer emerged, featuring her mouthing along to a racial slur in Tyler, the Creator’s Fish, in a lyric that is also about date rape. Giving the Grammy the benefit of the doubt, maybe they wanted to reward all the great rapping he’d done until that point. “WILSHIRE” is potentially best described as an epic poem. And then there’s “RUNITUP”, which features a crunk-style background chant, and “LEMONHEAD”, which has the energy of Trap or Die-era Jeezy. The vibes across the album are a disparate combination of sounds Tyler enjoys (and can make)-boom-bap revival (“CORSO”, “LUMBERJACK”), ’90s R&B (“WUSYANAME”), gentle soul samples as a backdrop for vivid lyricism in the Griselda mould (“SIR BAUDELAIRE”, “HOT WIND BLOWS”) and lovers rock (“I THOUGHT YOU WANTED TO DANCE”). ![]() Tyler made an aesthetic choice to frame CALL ME IF YOU GET LOST with interjections of shit-talking from DJ Drama, founder of one of 2000s rap’s most storied institutions, the Gangsta Grillz mixtape franchise. The focus here is very clearly hip-hop from the outset. Tyler superfans will remember that the MC was notoriously peeved at his categoric inclusion-and eventual victory-in the 2020 Grammys’ Best Rap Album category for his pop-oriented IGOR. But in this case, an exceptionally great one. But across CALL ME IF YOU GET LOST, the man once known as Wolf Haley is just a guy who likes to rock ice and collect stamps on his passport, who might whisper into your significant other’s ear while you’re in the restroom. The Los Angeles-hailing MC, and one-time nucleus of the culture-shifting Odd Future collective, made a name for himself as a preternaturally talented MC whose impeccable taste in streetwear and calls to “kill people, burn shit, fuck school” perfectly encapsulated the angst of his generation. There’s a handful of eyebrow-raising verses across Tyler, The Creator’s CALL ME IF YOU GET LOST-particularly those from 42 Dugg, Lil Uzi Vert, YoungBoy Never Broke Again, Pharrell and Lil Wayne-but none of the aforementioned are as surprising as the ones Tyler delivers himself.
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