Tyler, The CreatorWolf
Odd Future

- It’s kind of funny, despite their close working relationship, how antithetical Tyler The Creator and Frank Ocean are. Tyler’s gruesome, menacing growl, spitting out horrors of beating bitches, immolating fags and getting down and dirty with a fresh corpse whenever he can get his hands on one. Wherever Tyler goes, whatever he says or does, it feeds the controversy industry that follows him like a blazing, fiery tail. Ocean by contrast, with his r’n’b croon, undeniably one of the most listenable voices in r’n’b, the sort of sound you like even if you hate r’n’b. Generally speaking too, he can’t put a foot wrong: not just a progressive voice, but a shining light in the urban music industry, saying that it’s OK to be gay and shutting up anyone who says it isn’t.

Frank might be all over Tyler’s new record, Wolf, but it’s fairly obvious to everyone that even he wasn’t going to be blot out Tyler’s darkness which still leaks out of every seam and plughole on his third, extra-full-length epic.

The very fact that the openly gay Ocean is here proves, again, that middle-class, suburban kid Tyler is much more of a badass on the mic. than he is in real life. Tyler himself tries to make that point on the track Rusty: how can I be a homophobe when Frank’s on ten of my tracks? Again, that doesn’t matter, he mightn’t be the completely unacceptable face of reality like Chris Brown, but no amount of hand-wringing and cultural tolerance is going to make homophobia or domestic violence OK, really and necrophilia isn’t going to be coming back anytime soon, either.

No excuses for me either: I really liked Goblin, beyond the fact that I’m a bit of a sucker for smack talk, it was a great rap record with some hot production. The kind of great that made me want to excuse all its many shortcomings. Those also include being way too long and self-indulgent in a really convoluted way: trying to follow the twists and turns of Tyler’s adolescent, split-personality ranting to an imaginary therapist could drive you mad.

It’s all back on Wolf, a concept album about the messed up summer-camp in Tyler’s head, along with all his various alter-egos. It’s entertaining for the same reasons: smart and funny in it’s gruesomely inappropriate conceits, with some great production and really exciting beats. It’s every bit as self-indulgent, although I still find the hideous corridors of Tyler’s mind more engaging than the wallowing of ten other urban musicians, Kanye especially.

The real problem and the one that will most probably sink Tyler in the end, Wolf isn’t as good as Goblin, it’s less fresh, too much the same, failing like most artists do, after a little while, to be as exciting as it once was. I mean, this is still pretty good. That odour though, that’s Tyler’s crap and while it still smells pretty fresh today, one day it’s going to smell a whole lot worse than everybody else’s. That’s an eventuality that Tyler would be wise to face up to sometime very soon.

- Chris Cobcroft.

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