If you're reading this review and you're a fan of one of Tyler, the Creator's many iterations over his storied career, chances are you're a bonafied
90s kid. You might feel the sting of nostalgia when the subject of playing Nintendo 64 with your friends comes up on your Facebook feed, even if you never owned a Nintendo 64 or had any friends. Life is full of uncertainty, and the only thing you really can be certain of in today's world is that things didn't always used to be this way. Injustice and inequality was certainly the norm, but we got by on sheer gumption, and somehow there was a bit more innocence and wonder in the world. You might find yourself unable to focus on a game of Cards Against Humanity with your roommates because your dad forgot to pay your cell phone bill on time. You might even long for a time when a phone was even still called a cell phone, because you had to specify which phone you were talking about. Some of Tyler's newer fans might not even remember what a "home phone" was. "Isn't my phone always at home if I'm at home? It's right here in my pocket."
These are things you might be thinking, or you might not be thinking. It really depends on which era of Tyler, the Creator's storied career you decided to "join the squad" so to speak. Tyler, for all his faults and all his triumphs throughout his storied career, is really just the embodiment of what it means to be a 90s kid. Tyler encapsulates the delicate balancing act of juggling nihilistic ironic detachment for half of your youth, and trying to atone for the sins of said youth in the last half of the game. Because, after all, with all that's going on in the world today, this really does seem like the last half, not just of the aging Tyler's storied career, but of the whole damn planet. Tyler is an avatar for a certain type of person, and our experiences become his own, whether Tyler himself lived through them or not. Tyler is the 32 year-old kid who gets red in the face with embarrassment when he remembers his high school senior quote was from a Quentin Tarantino film. Tyler is the 29 year-old kid who made up a lie on the spot when his partner (because who says "girlfriend" anymore, anyway?) discovered his old Eric Cartman t-shirt. And despite the surface level and vacuous beauty of Tyler's wide-eyed seriousness and sincerity displayed on
Chromakopia, that's really what the last half of Tyler's storied career is to many of his listeners who hopped on the Tyler train back in the OF days. He wants you and I to believe that South Park shirt actually belongs to his older brother, and this latest installment in Tyler's storied career is trying to convince us he's never even seen the show.
What makes the current crop of what I've termed the New Sincerity movement of hip-hop so hard to believe in all of its post-ironic, sadboy glorification, especially where Tyler's storied career is concerned, can be summed up by the difference between
Rugrats and
All Grown Up. The struggles of a thirty-something Tyler wrestling with the trials and tribulations of mortgage payments and the search for true love just doesn't quite square when, much like Tommy Pickles, we'd really all rather watch the guy sucking on a pacifier saying a bunch of funny crap. In a world where 30 is the new 20, and our college professors are wearing Monkey D Luffy t-shirts on casual Friday, Tyler's new sincerity seems not just
insincere but fundamentally dishonest, coming from a man who cut the musical teeth of his storied career boasting of defiling pregnant women in ways that would make even the so-called out-of-touch heavy metal boomers blush. This is a guy who once offended the punk rock pedo apologist Steve Albini, and now he wants us to believe he's been around the block
as long as Steve Albini. Listening to tracks like "Thought I Was Dead" (a meditation on mortality) and "Hey Jane" (a "mature" metaphor likening Tyler's love interest to the dynamic shared between Holden Caulfield and Jane Gallagher in
Catcher), it seems as if Tyler cannot figure out if he's 14 years old or 50, and the answer is likely in between, much like it has been for all of Tyler's storied career.
This is not to say that
Chromakopia is an entirely failed experiment of Tyler's storied career. The guy is not a bad singer, and it's clear he's been taking lessons. In a bid for artistic seriousness, I can surmise he's probably been listening to his old man's Luther Vandross records. He's discovered Miles Davis, because there is a jazzy undercurrent to the sampling. Still, the Fantano school of thought somewhat patronizingly holds these elements up as monumental achievements.
Every new hip-hop record has "jazz influence."
Every new hip-hop record has "introspective lyrics" in 2024. Are we now giving out gold medals to every teenage outcast who recently fell in love with
Pulp Fiction? Should every kid who makes it a hundred pages into
Infinite Jest get a spot in the Macy's Thanksgiving Parade?
Chromakopia, the latest installment of Tyler, the Creator's storied career, is indeed perhaps
safe enough to lead the world's most sterile and corporatized parade.
