We All Have Bloody Thoughts
The first season of Deadwood found Seth Bullock in a desperate tantrum not to be sheriff. I mean come on, that’s what Tom Selleck wanted to be on Friends. At the end, no longer content to merely approximate a human fist, Bullock brutalized that skeeve who said his olfactories were keen to the smell of shit, better known as Alma’s father. (As Brian Bosworth would say, he let his fist party with his face.) Bullock, to be sure, is the worst moral hypochondriac since James Spader woke up this morning; “we all have bloody thoughts” is what General Crook tells him, in the season finale, to get him to chill the fuck out (I may have just summed up Bullock the same way D’Angelo summed up Jay Gatsby on The Wire).
Tyler The Creator is a piece of work, loved and feared prodigiously. A streetlevel, micro-managerial j.-of-a.t. who’s part Bart Simpson, part Willie Horton, and all heart out there, glaring in at his enemies. He’s practically running the internet; OFWGKTA rolls right off its tongue. He’s got more unread hate mail than Dov Charney, is equally skilled at flashmobbing and stage-diving, and is kind of homeless, except maybe in that apocryphal Cobainian way. So what’s to love/fear?
You have to remember the power of old white people, or don’t you know Common is for criminal? Tyler the Creator’s America is the same judgy bitchface country that dismayed Kurt Cobain. Tyler and Kurt get compared a lot—they entered their respective decades at similar points and Tyler even tweeted something about wishing he’d been around during the Grunge era. If 2011+ ends up the actual odd future, it won’t be because Tyler got a Barack pass from the media. Tyler has an enemies list that’s still spewing computer paper onto a gummy floor.
As Caramanica put it in his rather fantastic NYT profile (which ended up, unbelievably, way more measured than the Voice’s relative smh at Goblin): “Odd Future has become the flashpoint for reigniting the culture wars in hip hop for a generation that hasn’t previously experienced them”. Opposite that are the old white people who have never experienced anything else.
Goblin, Tyler’s new LP, may be a bas relief of all the OF diaspora but it jams, hard. It also says “pimple-covered dick” and other stuff that disappears somewhere between kinda rude gross-out comedy and full-on twitching orgasm of chimerical violence. Google if you wish but it’s better hearing Tyler say it all. It’s like watching the English language take a whore’s bath.
To the nearsighted, Tyler the Creator is either really good at pushing buttons or really bad at brand management; in either case, he’s a sociopathic deviant who hates families, America, and drinking soda with meals. They’ll try to tell you he hates women and will inculcate iniquity in the hearts of suburban kids, those breakable alembics.
But the hard kinds of hip-hop say hard kinds of things so you don’t have to. It doesn’t take a performance artist to like the sight of his own blood outside his body. Tyler, The Creator isn’t for everyone, but all of us need him.
