Tyler, the Creator Brought This Reckoning on Himself

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 handwaved 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.        

No member of OF was immune to saying fucked up things in the early days, but Tyler, as the creative head of the unit, was most responsible for cultivating the edgelord atmosphere they’d quickly become known for in the early 2010s. Certain songs, especially from 2009’s Bastard and 2011’s Goblin, and social media posts often took on an over-the-top horrorcore edge, indulging violent rape fantasies, blurting out racist and homophobic slurs, and taking aim at celebrities like Bruno Mars, Tegan & Sara, and Spike Lee. Odd Future’s merch transitioned from Photoshop’d pictures of cats to reappropriations of Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazi iconography draped in rainbow flag colors, as well as shirts and hats adorned with sambos (KMD did it better). Listeners and other artists’ mileage varied. At its height, fellow OF members would frequently disapprove of his actions, and he was even banned from the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand for inciting hate speech.  

Much of this behavior toed the line between ill-advised attempts at satire and reappropriation gleaned from artists like Kanye West, and pure shock value meant to rile up detractors. It was an ugly but no less earnest form of venting for a person ultimately grappling, as fans later discovered, with their identity as a queer Black man. Tyler was, essentially, a troll, and he came up in an environment that was relatively more forgiving of the edgy shit he was pushing. But some of his words traipsed into full-blown anti-Blackness—particularly during a 2014 appearance on Larry King Now where Tyler suggested Black people shouldn’t be offended when white people use the n-word, and several tweets admonishing the existence of Black History Month. In 2013, during George Zimmerman’s trial for killing Trayvon Martin, Tyler wrote that he hoped Black Americans “DON’T RIOT OR GO ON TO PROVE TO THE OTHERS THAT THEY ARE ANIMALS AND SHIT.” To be a Black Odd Future fan, as I was at the time, meant constantly navigating these murky provocative waters—and pigeonholing Tyler’s pretentious “I’m not like these other Negroes” posturing—to enjoy the undeniably promising music created by alt-Black kids at the center of it all. 

Regardless of his intent, that provocation attracted listeners, many of them white, who enjoyed the ignorance unironically. Though many of them fell away around the pastel recalibration of 2017’s Flower Boy, enough have stuck around over the last eight years to serve as a reminder of the hell he raised in his late teens and early 20s. Though the air of pretentiousness still lingers, Tyler has clearly grown a lot since then, engaging somewhat more thoughtfully with his Blackness and queerness, dialing down his aggressive persona considerably, and making more fully realized music. But when you build a brand around that kind of rabble-rousing, especially considering how acidic and transgressive it was at its worst, you run the risk of having to explain and reckon with it every time new fans revisit the classics. 

I’m sure it’s part of why Earl Sweatshirt, another day-one OF member, was quick to reckon with the role he played in it on his immaculately rapped 2013 debut self-titled mixtape, which was released shortly before he was sent away to a Samoan boarding school. “You get to see that side of the fence, and then it’s just fucked,” he told GQ that year, when asked about speaking with sexual assault victims after rapping elaborate murder and rape fantasies on that project. “That fully draws the line, where it’s like you can stand on either side. There was nothing you could do when you’re looking at a fucking little girl who’s been horribly abused. There was never a moment where I was trying to fucking perpetuate that I was some [rapist]. That was my way of screaming, because I don’t yell.” To be fair, all Earl had to answer for was an album of questionable material, and his musical pivot was immediate and noticeable. Tyler took longer to account for far more, and in recent years has chosen to let his actions speak for themselves—but for many, that’s not enough. Especially considering his current position as a chart-topping rapper with multiple sold-out tours, this current re-airing of dirty laundry feels more substantive, stickier.  

Though Tyler clearly had some issues with his identity coming up and I still think many of his statements were beyond offensive, I personally don’t feel he should be canceled or excommunicated for the things he said and did 15 years ago. That said, while his ideas were guided by a desire to be understood, and his heart was in the right place, Tyler didn’t have the nuance of Vince Staples or the satirical range of a Lupe Fiasco, and you can’t expect everyone to forgive and forget. Tyler’s consistent love for Black music has always scraped up against his loaded portrayals of Black people in his music and on Loiter Squad. The rainbow-colored neo-Nazi symbol he put on shirts was a milquetoast and naive attempt at making a political statement, the 2010s equivalent of those stupid MAGA parody hats people swore were subversive. If I’d have seen a white or non-black OF fan rocking one of those sambo shirts or hats in public, who knows how I would’ve reacted. Hearing him dismiss those concerns in song, only for it to come back and bite him in the form of mass pushback that forced him to delete the tweets he was so eager to defend, is ironic, to say the least.

Tyler’s career will survive this wave of discourse. But when you make your bones playing with fire, I find it hard to have too much sympathy when you eventually get burned.