Who sticks up for women and gay people now?" (On Twitter, Tyler responded: "If Tegan And Sara Need Some Hard Dick, Hit Me Up.") "The more I think about it, the more I think people don't actually want to go up against this particular bully because he's popular. "Why should I care about this music or its 'brilliance' when the message is so repulsive and irresponsible?" Quin wrote. ![]() Sara Quin, of Tegan and Sara, wrote an open letter decrying Tyler in May 2011, after he released his first studio album Goblin on XL Records, home of Vampire Weekend and Adele. As the critic Nitsuh Abebe put it, on this song "you can actually hear the joy of people creating music because it doesn't exist yet, and they need it to." "Rihanna haircut, somebody tell Chris Brown to fuck me up," Tyler raps, accentuating the word "fuck" like it's a balloon to be inflated and popped. It's the last row of the school bus, the corner of the cafeteria where the aides can't see, the roughhousing of a carpeted basement broadcast into your ear. "Say sorry," Tyler blurts, "Say sorry" "I'm sorry as fuck," Earl cries. The two teens trade short, four-bar verses as an eager tag-team-until the song comes to a halt because, from the sound of it, Tyler is hitting Earl in a game of uncle. ![]() Track nine on Bastard, available to the world on Christmas, 2009, features Earl Sweatshirt. His new work no longer sets that particular antenna to twitching. But it's not a lens that Tyler's recent output calls for. Now, taking stock of the moral character of a song or album or movie or TV show or book is practically a given in arts criticism. The moral metric deployed in thinkpiece after thinkpiece in 2011 felt exclusive to the treatment of this particular group, especially for a generation of listeners and writers decades removed from the culture wars of the 90s. It's hard to imagine so much ink being spilled around a new musical act in 2019, because there's less money to spend on this sort of coverage and fewer outlets to run it. The story of Odd Future's rise, in terms of pieces filed across publications from Billboard to Pitchfork to NPR to Cokemachineglow to the Wire to the Root to New York magazine to the New York Times to Poetry Foundation, is also a story about media. 13 on the Billboard Hot 100, his highest-charting single ever. This year, Tyler's song "Earfquake" reached No. Was this music too toxic to consume, let alone support? Was it playfully transgressive ("Kill people, burn shit, fuck school!") or simply misogynist and homophobic? Was it a case of white journalists going gaga for Black rage? Was it a group of young people agitating the sanctimonious, or was it hate speech that endorsed violence, raping women, and gay bashing? "I can't see them having a radio or video hit without them changing their style dramatically," Hot 97's Peter Rosenberg told the New York Times in November 2010. He's made bashful love songs for years, across practically all of his albums (though he often undercut them with florid ugliness, like on "She," from Goblin) he's cared about beautiful chords and '90s neo-soul and the possibilities of orchestrating other voices from the jump.īut in 2010, and 2011 especially, when the mainstream media began writing regularly about Odd Future, all conversations returned to questions of morality. ![]() His interest in delicate, dreamy sounds is present on his first release, 2009's Bastard. In some ways, the challenge of writing about Tyler's journey is to refrain from making it unnecessarily shocking nothing about IGOR, his sixth solo release, is without precedent. 1 album about same-sex love and heartache? When a teenage Tyler and his young, disaffected crew, Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All, first emerged, it was difficult to see this turn away from shock coming, but in hindsight not impossible-especially when you consider the music, not the lyrics. ![]() If you had to bet then, would you have guessed Tyler would close the decade with an unabashedly pretty and tender No.
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