Here’s one important Tyler, The Creator moment: Earlier this year, Tyler headlined Coachella, a festival that’s always loomed large in the mythology of a Southern California alt-rap star. By all accounts, this year’s festival presented a diminished version of Coachella, but Tyler’s set was a highlight. During the first weekend, Tyler brought out Childish Gambino, a previous headliner, as a surprise guest. When he left the stage, Tyler laughed, “You know what’s sick? I used to hate that n***a. Seriously, I don’t know why, I gotta go to therapy to figure it out.”
Tyler, The Creator jokes that he used to hate Childish Gambino until "Urn" came out pic.twitter.com/rXht7f0AM7
— Complex Music (@ComplexMusic) April 14, 2024
A few minutes later, Tyler brought out fellow alt-rap star A$AP Rocky, and they did a couple of songs together. Once Rocky was offstage, Tyler told the crowd, “You know what’s crazy? I used to hate that n***a too!” The goofy-intimate tone there is vintage Tyler. He’s an undeniable talent and a classic star, one who knows how to carry himself in the public eye while still keeping pieces of his life private. But he was a fan first, and he knows what fans like. When he talks about hating his peers, it’s in the context of a triumphant career-capper moment, but there’s a little bit of cackling skate-rap kid left in him. He never goes for full bombast. He’s always got to deflate himself just a little.
Here’s another important Tyler, The Creator moment: When the horns come in on “Sticky.” Before the horns come in, “Sticky” already has one dramatic beat-drop moment. It starts out almost a cappella, with an anarchic choir and a shrill whistle howling out a repetitive chant-hook that’s fun and annoying in equal measure. Then we get the drums, a clank-hammer blat-beat that owes plenty to the Clipse classic “Grindin’.” After the drums come in, “Sticky” gives way to a small parade of rap stars, all of them showing up for brief cameos and getting cut off after a couple of bars: GloRilla, Sexyy Red, an on-fire Lil Wayne. Tyler gives himself one of those roll-call verses, too. But then, when the song seems like it might end as a giddy publicity stunt, the horns come in.
Those horns come from Young Buck’s dramatic 2007 hit “Get Buck.” It’s a deep rumble; if there was a Decepticon who transformed into a tuba, it might sound like that. When those horns come smashing in, they call back to the long-ago halcyon days of ringtone-rap and G-Unit — the time when Tyler was a giddy teenager, just a couple of years away from becoming internet-famous — and to the HBCU marching bands that Polow Da Don’s original beat evoked. When those horns kick in, Tyler really goes into his shit-talk zone: “Yeah, bitch, I’m outside wit’ it, tell them n***as I did it/ Allergies to bum n***as, I see you, my eye’s itchin’.” Tyler already had a cool song, but that moment with the horns elevates it into something else. When Tyler tours next year, that horn drop is going to kill.
Those two moments set up almost everything that works about Chromakopia. Tyler, The Creator is a snarky prankster who’s also a born showman, and those two tendencies never seem to be in conflict with each other. Instead, Tyler’s snotty punk tendencies feed into his star persona. He’s too twitchy and nervous and unserious to ever work as a straight-up larger-than-life rap star, but he’s got the instincts to pull it off anyway. And because of his deep well of rap-head knowledge and his writerly instincts — not to mention the sampling budget that he commands — Tyler can pull up something like the “Get Buck” horns at the exact right moment.
Previous Tyler, The Creator albums came with easy narratives and unified aesthetics. Chromakopia comes with all the obvious landmarks — the new look, the overarching narrative — but it feels more like a combination of past Tylers. 2021’s Call Me If You Get Lost played as Tyler’s love letter to rap music as a glorious and chaotic whole, with DJ Drama playing the Greek chorus role throughout. On Chromakopia, Tyler mostly remains in rappity-rap mode, and he’s still enough of a student of the music to throw GloRilla, Sexyy Red, and Lil Wayne on the same song. But this time, the Greek chorus is Tyler’s own mother, and Tyler mostly uses his rapper side to get deeper and more vulnerable about the state of his own life, or about what could be the state of his own life.
The first voice that we hear on Chromakopia belongs to Tyler’s mother Bonita Smith. She’s always been a key part of his story. Tyler grew up without a father, cursing out the absent man on his earliest mixtapes. His mother would accompany him to awards shows, beaming with pride whenever her son got to do anything. On opening track “St. Chroma,” she tells Tyler to never, in his motherfucking life, dim his light for nobody. Throughout the record, she keeps chipping in with advice about groupies and fraudulent accountants. At one point, she begs Tyler for a grandchild. Then she tells him how much he reminds her of his father, the man who wasn’t there.
That’s at the beginning of “Like Him,” a wrenching and soulful ballad about wondering how similar you might be to the person who has disappointed you the most in life: “Mama, I’m chasing a ghost/ Do I look like him?” Then, as the song ends, Bonita Smith, sounding close to tears, tells Tyler that his father actually wanted to be around: “I fucked up, and I take ownership of that, of my choices and decisions, and I’m sorry for that. He’s a good guy, so don’t hold that against him. Because it was my fault.” It’s a heavy moment, and I can’t imagine making the decision to share something that intimate and shattering in the form of a blockbuster A-list rap album. That’s not one of the winky curtain-yanked-back moments that Tyler sometimes gives us. It’s a lot more raw than that.
There’s a lot of raw stuff at work on Chromakopia. The album could’ve worked as a simple victory lap. Early on, Tyler gets in some shit talk: “It’s really Odd Future, all them other n***as wack now/ The biggest out the city after Kenny, that’s a fact now.” It feels good to hear Tyler invoke the name of his old crew, most of whom have gone onto huge success out in the world. (Tyler brings it up after crowing about his old friend Lionel Boyce, now one of the stars of The Bear.) It feels better to hear Tyler claim to be bigger than any LA rapper this side of fellow weirdo Kendrick Lamar and to realize that he’s probably right. The album might be better if Tyler just flexed for 45 minutes; he’s got a true gift for idiosyncratic anthems. But Tyler has other things on his mind. He wants to take us on a ride.
As for the overarching storyline of Chromakopia, spoiler warning: There is no baby. That’s the thread that runs through the record — the unplanned pregnancy that could’ve upended Tyler’s entire life. In the album’s early stages, Tyler talks a bit about his rap-star existence. On “Noid,” it’s the constant threats of privacy invasion and violence that always accompany rap success, no matter how lucrative that success might be. On “Darling, I,” it’s Tyler telling prospective partners that he can’t be tied down, that he just isn’t built for monogamy. Then, one track later, Tyler learns that it might not be up to him.
On “Hey Jane,” Tyler raps about an unplanned pregnancy. I don’t know whether this story is real or not, though Tyler throws in enough concrete biographical details that it feels as if it could be. Tyler accidentally knocks up a woman who he doesn’t know very well, and he wrestles with the idea that he doesn’t feel ready for fatherhood but that it could still represent the next chapter of his life. He knows that the decision doesn’t belong to him, and he signs off with this: “Look Jane, it’s your choice at the end of the day/ Just know I support either way, no pressure.” Even with that ending, it’s a self-involved and myopic verse, much more about Tyler than it is about the other people whose lives he might affect.
One verse later, though, Tyler flips everything around, rapping from the perspective of the woman instead. To hear Tyler tell it, she’s just as confused and conflicted as him, and she’s got things going on in her life that will complicate her decision, too. Tyler delivers all of this in the first person, rapping from the actual viewpoint of this woman: “I’m 35, and my ovaries might not reset/ I don’t wanna live my whole life feeling regret.” It’s a moment of striking empathy, a rare acknowledgment that other people’s interior lives are just as rich and complicated as his own. When the song ends, we still don’t know whether she’s having the baby. She doesn’t seem to know, either.
The baby question looms over the rest of Chromakopia. It’s there on “Judge Judy,” where Tyler describes the freaky fuckbuddy who matches his energy in part through her willingness to avoid commitment. There’s an implication that she might be the one who gets pregnant. The potential baby hangs over “Take Your Mask Off,” where Tyler dissects a few different characters — a wannabe gangster who grew up middle-class, a homophobic preacher who’s really secretly gay, a mother whose happy exterior hides wanderlust and depression — urging them to stop putting up fronts. Then he turns his scalpel on himself: “Boy, you selfish as fuck, that’s really why you scared of bein’ a parent/ Boy, that therapy needed, I dare you to seek it, but I’ll lose a bet/ Your respect won’t get given ’til we posting your death/ It’s clear you wish you got your flowers sent.” It’s there when Tyler wonders whether he’s like his own father. It’s even there on the bangers.
There are lots of bangers on Chromakopia. They’re sprinkled throughout, as if Tyler understands that he’s working with a heavy narrative and he wants to keep things light. On “Rah Tah Tah” and “I Killed You” and “Sticky” and “Thought I Was Dead” and “Balloon,” Tyler puffs his chest out and channels all that nervous energy into wilding out. Those tracks are sonically stacked, with layers of exploding horns and rippling drums and blinky keyboard hooks. They’re bangers built for arenas. Tyler has clearly put a lot of energy into thinking about how these tracks will echo around the bast venues that he’ll be headlining for the foreseeable future. I have a vague theory that Tyler threw his listening party at the Forum yesterday because he wanted to give the tracks an arena test-run just before release.
Those triumphant-banger moments are the ones where Tyler sometimes shares the spotlight with his rap peers. Even in short verses, some of the guests go nuts — ScHoolboy Q on “Thought I Was Dead,” Doechii on “Balloon.” The songs are weird enough that only Tyler could’ve made them, but they’re exciting enough to sound bigger than him. I’ll return to those songs a lot. I might not spend as much time with the more insular tracks, but they’re still brave and striking. Frank Ocean never shows up on those songs, but Tyler brings in a series of multi-tracked harmony specialists — Daniel Caesar, Childish Gambino, Teezo Touchdown, sometimes even Tyler himself — to achieve the same bittersweet effect. As always, those tracks give Tyler a chance to indulge in the weird jazz chords and symphonic reveries that he loves so much. “Darling, I” has Teezo Touchdown attempting to sound like all of New Edition on his own. The “Judge Judy” beat sounds like a Burt Bacharach record that’s been left out to warp in the sun.
At times, those woozy fripperies make Chromakopia sound like Tyler’s take on Mr. Morale And The Big Steppers — Tyler’s therapy record, his self-conscious attempt to figure his shit out in full view of the public. Tyler has planned out the album’s arc with clear care, and the transitions between songs help it sound like an immersive whole, a cohesive work of art. The insular songs are crucial to the record, but they never lands as hard for me as his snarling, defiant anthems; that quality was what made Call Me If You Get Lost my favorite Tyler record since maybe Goblin. That’s why a moment like the horn drop on “Sticky” stands out to me. Maybe 40% of Chromakopia is absolutely top-self arena-rap. It’s hard and dramatic and catchy without sacrificing its weird particularities. Travis Scott would make record like that if he could. He can’t.
I’d love to get a Tyler album that’s nothing but big, booming tracks, but Tyler wouldn’t be Tyler if he gave a fuck about what I might want. Chromakopia is a dense and ambitious album, and I didn’t get a promo, so I’m experiencing it in real time, just like everyone else. I’ve caught plenty of the samples and allusions already, but there will probably be plenty more that come up on repeated listens. And who knows? Maybe the emotional arc of the record will stick with me. Maybe I’ll always want to hear it as a cohesive whole, to build up to the moment on closing track “I Hope You Find Your Way Home” where Tyler announces with audible relief that he is not, in fact, hiding a child. Past precedent tells me that I’ll be skipping though to the bangers in a week or two, but the non-bangers are just as thoughtful and absorbing right now.
From a zoomed-out standpoint, it’s amazing that a record this weird and personal can resonate as a blockbuster event-rap album. Tyler is now 33 years old, as he reminds us throughout Chromakopia. He’s developed his voice and perspective without losing any of the hungry energy that first jumped out on those early Odd Future mixtapes. The ongoing vitality of his career feels like a small miracle. After all these years, he’s still the kid who talks about hating big stars immediately after those big stars leave his stage, and he still knows exactly when to deploy the “Get Buck” horns. He’s one of the best things we’ve got going, and Chromakopia is another complicated and fascinating album in a catalog full of them.
Chromakopia is out now on Columbia.
