Tyler The Creator Vinyl, CD & Tape

Cockroaches as shock factor

Tyler Okonma is an undisputed musical visionary today. Stars like Billie Eilish profess his artistic influence, and with his aggressive, sometimes disturbing lyrics, he attracted attention early in his career as Tyler, the Creator. Born in Los Angeles in 1991, the rapper grew up without his father and soon sought refuge in music – as a teenager he taught himself to play the piano, and in 2007 he founded the Odd Future Crew with friends. The group, which included later greats like Frank Ocean and Earl Sweatshirt, recorded its first horrorcore-inspired tape a year later and became a local household name over the next few years. Their track French went viral on YouTube, and Tyler’s first solo mixtape, Bastard, followed in 2009 – his songs also garnered press attention, generating such hype among British youth that Conservative politician Theresa May banned the rapper from entering the country. In the music video for Yonkers, Tyler first ate a cockroach and then hanged himself – the strip shocked the Internet in 2011. With his crew, he signed to a major label that same year and even appeared on Jimmy Fallon.

From horrorcore to hippie music

“Kill people, burn shit, fuck school” – Tyler is not one for restraint. That’s evident on his first major record, Goblin, on which he continued to live out his horrorcore identity: “I don’t have a therapist, so I use me as my own therapist when I’m making the music”, he explained of his lyrical excesses. Despite his stardom, however, he still hung out with the Odd Future crew, which got its own series on Adult Swim in 2012. He even charted at number three with the next record, Wolf, and despite Tyler’s stylistically gore lyrics, the album hinted at a change of heart: “What interests me is making weird hippie music for people to get high to.” He delivered a concept album that set him up as more diverse as an artist than ever before, and also featured a number of notable guest musicians like Pharrell and Erykah Badu alongside his crew. In 2015, after extensive touring activities, he recorded Cherry Bomb completely on his own, and offered no less than five different cover artworks. With the help of extensive sampling, the influence of soul music, features with ASAP Rocky and Kanye West, and recording sessions in the studio of film music legend Hans Zimmer, he created a body of work bursting with creativity and sometimes chaos – you never know what to expect next with Tyler.

More than a rap album

With Flowerboy, the rapper made waves in 2017 after he more or less obviously outed himself as homosexual in several lines of lyrics – the same Tyler who was previously often accused of homophobia in his lyrics. He had told Rolling Stone two years earlier that he was “gay as fuck” – and on Flowerboy he now reflected more on inner processes, trying less to shock. On the record Igor, released in 2019, he expressed himself even more clearly: the record is about love and jealousy, in promo videos he dressed up and followed the album concept of a darker side of himself, which shines through again and again in various tracks. For this he received a Grammy Award for Best Rap Album, but he had mixed feelings about the award: the Urban category for his music would be nothing more than a politically correct N-word, and his music would be actually too genre-crossing to considered that. Two years later, his album Call Me If You Get Lost came out and got him another Grammy, though: the record again followed a concept, is musically broad, and above all introspective. The line between alter ego and authentic self often blurs, and we hear Tyler here full of honesty.