As he states, a lot has changed in the Odd Future camp over the past year. As he sits on a bench in Odd Future’s hastily assembled pop-up store on Oxford St, Sydney, and speaks in slow, considered sentences, his voice sounds less as if it is ripped from the belly of the beast, and more akin to an asthmatic wheeze. He’s making music for himself that’s often therapeutic: It’s art for art’s sake, and in today’s entertainment landscape, that is incredibly hard to come by.“It’s obvious a lot has changed,” remarks Tyler, The Creator. That’s what makes Tyler’s genius so rare. This is a fair, albeit small-minded, criticism. For many it will come off as the whining of a now-rich 21-year-old who was bullied in high school. Similar to Tyler’s first two records, Wolf is wrapped in yet another story-driven concept, this time illuminating the rapper’s ordeal with bipolar disorder through the introduction of even more of the rapper’s identities, as well as his coping with the death of his grandmother - who he claims on Bastard was the person who raised him. The track easily could be billed as a sequel to the equally moving “Crack Rock” from Channel Orange.
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The album’s shining moment comes on “48,” a moving ballad about the crack epidemic in the black community wrapped in a metaphor about rap music that features not only a spoken-word sample of Nas but also a beautiful chorus sung by Frank Ocean. Rudimentary chord progressions and annoying bastardizations of southern “trap” sounds are replaced with lush piano melodies and complex bridges that, regardless of your views about Tyler as a rapper, are undeniably pretty. Starting with the album’s title track, it is clear that this isn’t a typical 2013 rap album. Instead, Tyler quite masterfully uses this persona to sell his magnificent production on the record. Tyler admitted to being bored with rap in one of his legendary Twitter rants, and it shows in every line of his album. Outside of the uncharacteristically mature “48,” “Answer” and “IFHY,” none of the subject matter on Wolf is particularly surprising. That’s the reason Wolf isn’t much of a rap album.
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As Tyler raps on his new album’s seventh track, “Slater”: “I ain’t ask for this, I did it out of boredom.”ĭespite a TV deal, owning a record label and being the catalyst for a generation-defining album in Channel Orange, Tyler remains ambivalent about his fame, making the moves that he wants to make as opposed to the ones that sell. Part of the reason Odd Future remains the most interesting and exciting act in music is the fact that there isn’t an ounce of professionalism in their work. This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who follows the group closely.
Tyler consistently takes shots at critics who claim the group’s 15 minutes are up, and he even returns to a lot of the homophobic language that marred his early releases. Lyrically, Wolf is far too self-conscious for a third album. There has never been any doubt that a tremendous once-in-a-generation talent was present among these kids, and after a relatively long period of silence, Tyler returns with his third album, Wolf, to remind the world exactly why there’s never any doubt. The title track ended with the powerfully honest line “F*ck a deal, I just want my father’s email / So I can tell him how much I f*ckin’ hate him in detail.” The album was both troubling and beautiful in its expression of anger and frustration with being an outcast and growing up in a broken home. Then of course, there is the group’s late-night comedy show “Loiter Squad,” now in its second season on Adult Swim.Īt the crux of all of this is 21-year-old Tyler Okonma, better known as Tyler, The Creator, who in 2009 shook the very foundation of rap music with his debut album, Bastard. Odd Future member Earl Sweatshirt even attracted attention from the highbrow magazine The New Yorker, which published a rather extensive piece about his stay at a Samoan camp for troubled youth last year. Their consistent use of vitriolic language regarding gay people and women has baffled critics, especially given Frank Ocean’s beautiful and heartfelt coming-out letter on Tumblr last summer. There is an endless amount of noise surrounding Los Angeles-based rap collective Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All.