His Secrets and His Success

Tyler, the Creator tangles with desires unfulfilled.

- CRAIG JENKINS

A DECADE AGO, a ragtag group of rabble-rousing artists, skaters, and jokesters from Southern California called Odd Future stormed the gates of the rap game. The collective’s open contempt for tastemakers and A-listers ran counter to the charm offensive that got you a career in hip-hop back then when legends were built one blog post, one famous co-sign, and one guest spot at a time. Odd Future was a self-contained unit housing all the rappers, singers, and producers needed to make records, and members featured heavily on each other’s songs, taking a page from the Wu-Tang playbook. As crabby as it was savvy, the group built a vast catalog, lashing out at icons, idols, and influencers high and low. Its members waged a campaign of deliberate transgression that netted support and fury in equal measure, then used the attention to shine a light on their stellar crafts. Their art blossomed. Their sensibilities mellowed. The collective drifted apart.

In de facto leader Tyler, the Creator’s biting new song “Manifesto”— a long-overdue reunion with his old squad’s gifted stoner rapper Domo Genesis—he revisits the era when Odd Future blew up: “Protesting outside my shows, I gave them the middle finger/I was a teener, tweeting Selena crazy shit/Didn’t wanna offend her, apologized when I saw her.” The song is a cut-off Call Me If You Get Lost, the 30-year-old’s sixth proper studio album, and a full-circle moment in which the lighter and more soulful aesthetics of 2019’s IGOR are scaled back in favor of brash beats and raw rhymes. Whereas the aim with his Grammy-winning last album seemed to be to stretch his compositional abilities to their limits, Call Me If You Get Lost follows the string of rap-centric loosies he has released since then.