#wolf review

LILY-ROSE DEPP

Kids’ movies have their own little place in Hollywood, and always have something good to offer for everyone. They have a lot of fun, some lessons to be learned, and most of all, they are adorable

Wait, do I like Tyler, The Creator? Like actually? I’ve asked this from the minute I first saw him (the word “Goblin” scrawled across his face in pink; eyes blacked out; an upside down cross on his forehead, making him a mix between Harry Potter and this kid named Joel that I went to middle school with who kept saying he was a Pagan but was really just pale). Much like with Joel, I am unsure if I find Tyler interesting, threatening or worrisome.

What Tyler really is, I see now, is slightly familiar. Tactically, he uses the same shock-and-vom campaign that helped make Midwestern soccer moms accidental soldiers of the Eminem marketing team in the early 2000s, proving the idiom “Loud Angry People Make The Best Press” alarmingly true (note: this is not a real idiom, but I’m still down.) Tyler even features Rosenburg-esque interludes with his “therapist” Wolf Haley, mimicking the high-tension skits that Eminem peppered through his first EPs. Sonically, his influences are more apparent than ever, to the point where merely paying homage to the Neptunes’ stripped electronic funk proves to be small change in comparison to actually featuring a member on a track (so he does; Pharrell on “IFHY”).

But before I get into the titty-gritty of this informal, formal review, I want to ask a quick series of questions: can you ever really be sure of what you’re interested in? Of what parts of the zeitgeist or the cultural conversation actually trigger you? In that framework, does Tyler, The Creator really represent anything other than the extent to which self-promotion can lift lift lift you up like a house tied to a thousand balloons with a portly asian boy scout hidden, and make you into something bigger than yourself?

I wonder this out loud because Tyler is that sort of self-styled, self-created and self-inflicted cultural totem that tends to arrive every few years and make a ruckus, represent something on the level of cultural symbolics and then, like, maybe fade away so that we can’t see them unless we squint? Like, would the most mumbled Tyler talk be happening on even the lowest of decibels were it not for Frank Ocean?channelORANGE became one of those buzz albums that sort of cleared everything in its path both quietly and loudly at the same time. I like to think of Frank as the raptor that distracts Newman in “Jurassic Park” and Tyler and Earl as the two raptors who come in for the kill on either side. I don’t know what that means, stop asking.

Okay so the album! That would be Wolf. A lot has happened in the two years sinceGoblin: Frank Ocean came out of the closet, Earl Sweatshirt came back from an off-grid exhale, and Odd Future became a marketable brand by lowkey stealing the design of the Simpsons Movie donut. (Also, quick personal aside regarding Goblin: did you know that I accidentally downloaded a .zip of the album off Megaupload [RIP] that was titled “Tyler-Goblin.zip” and went almost two weeks listening to it, not understanding what all the fuss was about, and never realizing once over the course of those 14 days that I’d downloaded a mislabeled Neutral Milk Hotel album by total accident? Literally social suicide.)

Many (not all, but maybe most) discovered Tyler, The Creator in a sort of reverse order, starting with Goblin and then working back to Bastard. What made both albums so intrinsically interesting was more than just the profanity-laced language, but the sort of power-boil energy that erupted when the context was applied: once you got that it was about a broke skater rat who was still reeling from his father’s abandonment and channeling his daddy issues into a hyper-realized kiddie’s playhouse aesthetic and juxtaposing it with a desperate growl

There’s a lot going on on Wolf, and there are moments in which the album even feels like it completes some sort of narrative arc. If Bastard introduces Tyler’s problems and anxieties, and Goblin turns them up a notch in splendid celebration, Wolfattempts to mend him, and put them to bed—Tyler goes introspective here; a shift we saw first in the OFWGKTA family with Earl’s “Chum”, which showed the lyrically dexterous rapper go deep and talk about similar wounds as Tyler, like father’s gone and front doors left open. No one came back though (spoiler alert!) and these teens have been roughed up because of it.

In a lot of ways, that pain was what made me (and you—we’re not that different, maaaang) sort of “get” Tyler. His kinetic, frenzied energy was sort of a cry for attention, not in an A&E Intervention way, but in a buzz-drum way. Now he has his audience, a source. He’s not screaming obscenities into a void anymore; he’s not simply trying for attention, because he’s got it. It’s being channeled directly into someone’s ear buds. That someone might even be wearing OF donut socks.

Wolf was said by Tyler himself to be a departure form his previous works, acknowledging the changes since he started (“People who want the first album again, I can’t do that,” Tyler told Spin in late 2011. “I was 18, broke as fuck. On my third album, I have money and I’m hanging out with my idols. I can’t rap about the same shit”) and a revised thesis (“What interests me is making weird hippie music for people to get high to.”)

LITERALLY NOPE. Wolf is a lot of the same stuff, sometimes better, but usually identical. The production retains a lot of the influences from his past two albums, and being Odd Future’s unofficial nucleus, a lot of Tyler’s sound sort of stands in for the rest of the group’s: nightmarish synth looped with analog hums, infused within that Neptunes-inspired neo-funk DNA; the whole thing sounds like a hellish arcade which is, for the most part, at least consistent.

“Jamba” (featuring Hodgy Beats, an often under-admired rapper in his own right) is the album’s first real track, and immediately reminds us of the damage at the center of Tyler’s narrative: “Papa ain’t call/ even though he saw/me on TV/it’s all good” he growls over what white folks call a “pretty bumping beat.”

Things get slightly more devastating, I guess, on “Colossus” when Tyler weeps about being harassed by fans at an amusement park. “Bimmer”, which was tacked onto the end of the video for Wolf‘s single, “Domo23″, isn’t given any better real estate here, placed at the end of a three-song melody that have no real rhyme or reason in their being together. A shame, because “Bimmer” might be Tyler’s most fully-formed production, basking in that Neptunes progression but still remaining a definitively Tyler beat. Why one of his best pieces of work so far is shunned so intensely is beyond me.

“Rusty” features some of Tyler’s most adventerous rhyme work, though he does interrupt Earl’s verse, which is pretty much a cardinal sin during a time when we hang on to each every word he spits until his album drops. “48″ comes at almost the exact halfway point of the album, and is one of the most perfectly rounded tracks on any of Tyler’s album, utilizing a killer hook for what might be the closest Tyler comes to commercial appeal.

Which is his goal, but probably not in the stars. Tyler might be desperate to produce for his heroes and hear his songs on satellite rotation—and his production is pushing him in a direction that, while not traditional by the mainstream, is developing a sensibility indebted to the more foggy definitions of “pop” and “genre” that the Aughts have been essentially defined by. But his identity as a rapper seems to only be evolving in a direction defined as contrived; after all, what is the antidote to raw, unbridled aggression if not out-of-context pathos? Those are just wooooords, but take a minute and mine them for meaning. You won’t miss too much here in the meantime: Tyler’s still screaming—a little quieter because he knows he’s already being heard, but still screaming because we told him it’s what he does best.