Album Review: Is Tyler, the Creator Trolling, or Has He Made the Year's Most Beautiful Record With “Flower Boy”

Tyler, the Creator—frustrating to fans and despicable to everyone else; banned from the U.K. and kept out of Australia—has made the most beautiful record of the year so far.

Tyler Okonma’s early projects used to open with therapy sessions, setting the scene for the sociopathy that followed. Tyler, in a down-tuned voice, would hold a conversation with himself about the dark impulses he frequently rapped about. Over the album, multiple more personas and bad influences would emerge, each more evil, explicit and homophobic than the last. They were all voiced by Tyler.

Understandably, it became difficult to discern which persona was responsible for each provocation. And the artist—an uncannily talented 20-something world-builder and producer—became harder to defend.

Those personas—Wolf Haley, Tron Cat, Ace, Doctor TC—don’t rear their heads on Flower Boy, his fifth release. Instead, it opens with a “Foreword”, which clicks into action like a metronome as the gravel-voiced Tyler begins once again spilling his demons. Guest Rex Orange County takes over for Wolf, Tron and the rest, outlining Tyler’s new vulnerabilities: “Sick of sitting in doubt/ Please let me figure this out.”

Whereas the opening tracks on Bastard and Goblin sounded like horror movie stabs, “Foreword” literally blossoms with sweetness into slow-jam “Where This Flower Blooms”, featuring Frank Ocean, and “See You Again”, a piano-plinking duet with Kali Uchis (both explode into colour with the addition of thumping drum beats and bass lines, respectively, midway). On all three, he plants the seeds for the eventual reveal on the gentle “Garden Shed”, where he hints at a bi-curiosity, lured by Rex again: “You don’t have to hide.” (Admittedly, he claims he hasn’t been hiding.)

Coarse language warning.

Is this just another provocation of a different kind? Tyler went to great pains to differentiate the ugly actions of his old personas from his own, but there was no doubting he used to enjoy pushing our buttons with his slurs. However, his early albums opened a real argument: Why do we assume musical artists are always and only singing from the first-person, when we don’t expect the same from filmmakers and authors? As he intoned on the iconic, grinding “Yonkers”: “Actions speak louder than words.” Didn’t it mean more that OFWGKTA, his defunct hip-hop collective, contained two openly queer members (Ocean, Syd tha Kyd)?

This well of contradictions only grows deeper on Flower Boy, and defending Tyler only becomes more complex and problematic. Yet the album itself—even taken not entirely at face value, but with some scepticism—feels more honest and open than anything he’s done before, while retaining his darkly comic quirks and sonic menace (particularly on ominous lead single “Who Dat Boy?”, complete with trademark sinister, electronic strings). Compared against its predecessor—the discordant, aimless Cherry Bomb—Flower Boy literally hums with affection and a greater sense of personal peace. Tyler still sings about being lonely (on “911/Mr Lonely”, again with Frank) and nostalgic (“November”), though at least now his alter ego’s desires to soothe themselves by kidnapping, stalking and… worse have been settled, and abandoned.

Not that his uncluttered mind has clipped Tyler’s boundless, grating enthusiasm, or zest for violence. On “I Ain’t Got Time”, a love letter to trolling, Nat Turner—leader of a bloody slave revolt—gets his second shout-out of the album. (To add further doubt about Tyler's coming out of the closet, it’s here he sings, “Next line will have ‘em like, ‘Woah!’ I’ve been kissing white boys since 2004.”)

And then the record ends with the earnestly lovely musical interlude, “Enjoy Right Now, Today”. Whatever he really means, and whoever he really is, Tyler is undoubtedly heeding that advice.

4/5

Flower Boy is now available.

Coarse language warning.

Photo: Columbia