Music is an industry that throws up constant paradoxes, but there were few more awkward for the guardians of public morals than when Tyler, The Creator started releasing stuff about Dr. Seuss.
This was, after all, one of rap’s most infamous enfants terribles; the former Odd Future maverick who’d once spit, ‘Kill people/Burn shit/Fuck school’, now releasing work aimed, it was said, at seven-year-olds. Just, wow.
Of course, the words about people and school etc being delivered on the track in question, Radicals, were satirical and sort of disclaimered to hell. And that was all a long time ago, well before on 2019’s Grammy-winning Igor the now kid’s entertainer threw R&B a similar sort of futuristic curveball as Frank Ocean’s Channel Orange had done before it.
Igor wasn’t a rap album, but it was brilliant, whereas Call Me If You Get Lost boasts plenty. But as with Tyler himself, easy classifications have become an obsolete framework to judge him, or his work, by.
This is nothing but ever a hungry game as we know however, so the guestlist is always an inkling of where a producer sees themselves. Here? Why only Lil’ Wayne (sounding majestic on the jazzy skit Hot Wind Blows), while Ty Dolla $ign and Young Boy Never Broke drop in to light up WUSYANAME’s neo-soul, and Pharrell vies with the highly present DJ Drama and Lil’ Uzi Vert on the bass-smeared JUGGERNAUT.
If this gives the impression that this is just a vanity project where everyone is here to be seen and get paid, then we should know better than that: first up, we’re introduced to a new character in Sir Baudelaire, the dizzying stream of rhymes that form our swipe-righted date including the baffle of, ‘We was takin’ Rolls Royces to go see alligators’, while later in Momma Talk you’re never sure if the maternal protectiveness is real or performative, either way it’s mad and unfiltered and somehow insanely listenable.
That tag could probably just sum up the whole thing, but the flamboyant ringmaster thing isn’t checked in all the time; on Manifesto the dense, intricate (and masterful) flow deals with freedom of expression and a refusal to simply conform (‘Internet bringing old lyrics up/Like I hide the shit…I was cancelled before cancelled was with Twitter fingers’).
It’s not accurate to talk about centres, but because of their structure, two parts of this odyssey stand out the most: Sweet / I Thought You Wanted To Dance runs for almost ten minutes, starting out as lightweight R&B and then spends most of its time lilting in cod-reggae style, but the pattering funk of Wilshire reveals more, a want to be love story laced with more than hints about Tyler’s sexuality: ‘I could fuck a trillion bitches every country I done been in/ Men or women, it don’t matter, if I seen ’em, then I had ’em’, the matter of factness like it was an every day thing in a movement backing up on four decades of machismo and homophobia.
This should be a scary time for people who hate either rap and themselves or both. One of its potty mouthed agitators is transforming it, blowing up the rules and going where there’s no precedent, ignoring what needs to be ignored to make it human and charmingly weird.
Call Me If You Get Lost is what you want it to be and Tyler, The Creator certainly gives a fuck that it is. This is an energy you can’t just phone block, whether you’re seven or seventy.
