Tyler, the Creator Brought This Reckoning on Himself
The California rapper-producer spent his early years cultivating a fanbase of trolls. How much reckoning will it take to shake them?
In the video for Tyler, the Creator’s 2023 song “Sorry Not Sorry,” an audience is ushered into a theater where eight different versions of Tyler stand on a stage, each representing a specific era of the California rapper-producer’s 15-year career. The hellion in a ski mask from the Goblin era sways lightly next to the pink-headed imp from the Cherry Bomb era; Flower Boy-era Tyler, in a white tee and green snapback, clutches sunflowers and stares off into the distance while Wolf-era Tyler, in a colorful striped shirt, twiddles his fingers. At center stage is the Sir Tyler Baudelaire of Call Me if You Get Lost, his seventh studio album, standing next to a version who’s shirtless in black pants, standing in for a yet-to-be-defined future.
The song is, naturally, a laundry list of things Tyler is sorry and not so sorry for, from neglecting family relationships and leading on love interests to sporting iced-out jewelry in the face of his ancestors. He delivers his bars in the type of aloof, above-it-all cadence he embraced in 2018, as a newly minted superstar with Grammys and sold-out stadium tours, but one part of the song always stood out to me: “Sorry to the fans who say I changed, ’cause I did/Sorry you don’t know me on a personal level to pinpoint what it is.” Tyler is notoriously private, but that purported change refers to his early days as the ringleader of Odd Future, the California collective that blew up in the early 2010s from their potent mix of alt-rap and R&B, which they often served with a heaping dose of shock-jock antics.
Those antics come back to haunt Tyler occasionally. Mass discussion of the first generation OF days happens online at least a few times a year, usually when newer fans discover what type of time he was on back then. He’s hand-waved this stuff away in song before, most notably on “Manifesto” from Call Me (“I was canceled before canceled was with Twitter fingers”) and “Thought I Was Dead” from last year’s Chromakopia (“Pull up old tweets, pull up old T-shirts, I’ll moonwalk over that bitch”). But the discourse reached a fever pitch this past weekend after Tyler posted a picture of the late soul icon D’Angelo to his X account, and was bombarded with several racist replies.
Much of OF’s tongue-in-cheek madness was lost on a section of fans, many of them white, who were ready to “kill people, burn shit, fuck school” long after that was cool. On Friday, October 17, the account @Kurrco shared that Tyler had liked a tweet stating “tyler’s fanbase hates black music despite tyler himself having a very deep love and appreciation for it. nigga has charlie wilson, erykah badu, dj drama etc. collaborations and they still refuse to engage with black art on any meaningful level. very cannibalistic.” That tweet went viral and prompted a deep dive into Tyler’s past, unearthing tons of unsavory pictures, tweets, and song lyrics from the 2010s.
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