With his eighth studio album, Chromakopia, Tyler the Creator has secured his longest-running streak atop the album charts, staying there for three consecutive weeks so far. The 33-year-old rapper and producer announced the accomplishment during his headlining set at the music festival he started, Camp Flog Gnaw, which celebrated its tenth year this past weekend.
During that decade, Tyler has consistently released music that expanded his sound, from Flower Boy’s sun-drenched pop influence in 2017 to the DJ Drama-hosted Call Me If You Get Lost in 2021. All the while, he’s crafted a by-now-robust universe across every medium — from the beloved sketch show Loiter Squad to his clothing line Golf and, more recently, his capsule collection with Louis Vuitton. Tyler has accomplished what many of the figures we consider rap greats continue to strive towards, yet his name is conspicuously absent in discussions around the greatest rappers of all time. As he caps off a historic year, that might finally start to change.
If you listen to the lyrics on Chromakopia, as well as the handful of public interviews he’s given this year, you get the sense that the topic of legacies is beginning to come into focus for Tyler. On the song “Darling, I,” where Tyler considers a life of monogamy, he raps: “Nobody could fulfill me like this music shit does/So I’ll be lonely with these Grammys when it’s all said and done.” Later, on “Tomorrow,” after an intro to the song featuring Tyler’s mom asking him about grandchildren, he sings: “The thought of children, it brings me stress/Because time is changing.”
In August, Tyler gave an interview on the web series Mavericks With Mav Carter where he bemoaned the effects of social media and streaming on music, calling out what he’d dubbed “meme musicians.” Behind his critiques is a concern that the genre he loves, as he puts it in the interview, is being watered down by the algorithm. It’s perhaps a more level-headed way of expressing some of the frustrations that fueled some of the outbursts in Kanye West’s career, back when he felt his musical genius was going unappreciated and well before his right-wing transformation.
In many ways, Tyler is at a similar point in his career today as Kanye in the 2010s, fresh from the release of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. That album was Ye’s fifth and the beginning of an era where he began to cement his legacy and seriously branch out into broader creative realms like fashion. The path paved by Ye arguably opened the door for Tyler and his crew, Odd Future, who broke through around the same time. Today, Tyler similarly stands at the forefront of a culture he helped lay the groundwork for. Much like Kanye, Tyler brought an expanded cultural sensibility to hip-hop, taking inspiration from the worlds of indie rock and skateboarding while remaining fiercely dedicated to rap as an art form. It was within that message-board-driven streetwear milieu that the other headliner at this year’s Camp Flog Gnaw, Playboi Carti, emerged in the early SoundCloud era.
It’s difficult to overstate how big a shift Odd Future represented at the time. At this year’s Camp Flog Gnaw, a photo exhibit from the photographer Brick Stowell highlighted the period starting in 2011, when the crew first started taking off in a real way. They were among the first internet-born acts to pierce into the mainstream and helped upend the norms of how rappers were expected to sound, dress, and behave up to then. Here was this band of rebellious and silly kids in bright clothes rapping their asses off. Now, even more than a decade later, it’s not hard to find high school kids taking style inspiration from Tyler, just like the hordes of early OF fans in the 2010s did.
With the continued success of Chromakopia, Tyler’s impact on the current generation is becoming clearer. Already, Gen Alpha’s foremost influencer, North West, dressed up as Tyler for Halloween, and the crowd at this year’s Camp Flog Gnaw skewed towards high school age, placing Tyler in a unique position as a cross-generational superstar. That dynamic explains the shift in his music’s tone in these last few albums, and why Chromakopia feels like a significant moment for him. For better or worse, people don’t put you in the greatest of all time conversations until you start talking about yourself that way, and it looks like Tyler, the Creator is ready to start talking that talk.
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