Bless this mess: Tyler, the Creator and the chaos of adulting

When Tyler, the Creator received his first Grammy for best rap album in 2020, winning for the experimental IGOR, the rapper accepted the honor with his mom, Bonita Smith, at his hip. "You did a great job raising this guy," he joked. For anyone tuned into the rapper's transition from cockroaching-eating edgelord provocateur to petulant, craft-focused tinkerer to progressive wave-maker, it felt like an acknowledgment of a maturation arc running in tandem with a creative breakthrough, reaping the rewards of her rearing. After taking a victory lap in 2021 with CALL ME IF YOU GET LOST, which won him an additional best rap album Grammy, he seems to have found himself at another crossroads, considering both the next stages of adulthood and stardom. Standing next to him again, through it all, is his mother. But even she can't help him through the challenges he's up against now — chief among them, becoming his own man.

Tyler's new album, CHROMAKOPIA, is an artistic rubicon, the point at which previous evolutions from mischievous (and, at times, offensive) instigations of his public to more level-headed bouts of self-discovery slam into a second wave of maturity, facing encroaching responsibilities with life-altering, lifelong and even life-or-death stakes. In the throes of the paranoia and anxiety brought on by these shifts, this second big transition of his career leads him on an exhilarating odyssey, oscillating dramatically between punchy proclamations and more subdued reflections. His off-kilter, Neptunes-ish instincts are amplified by a drill-team flair for both explosiveness and uniformity, as he navigates the whiplash of retaining a wide-eyed sense of wonder even while taking accountability for his actions.

A youthful inquisitiveness and grandiose imagination have always charged Tyler's work. So much of 2013's Wolf was simply about bike riding, and on 2021's "MASSA" he admits that puberty didn't really hit him until he turned 23. Most of the music he made before that point sounds like it; though aesthetically and texturally distinguished and complex, it could often be quite juvenile, playing up hate speech for laughs and lashing out at anyone telling him to grow up. It's easy to pinpoint 2017's Flower Boy as the inflection point: The aggression is dialed down, he is far more dialed into his own stressors and motives and he allows a few crucial firsts, opening up about his sexuality and embracing his Blackness in earnest. Flower Boy also underscored his true priorities: going outside, loitering, living in the moment, figuring out who you are through adventure. CALL ME IF YOU GET LOST was buoyed by that intrepid, visa-collecting spirit, and he accepted his Grammy for it while on a hike. Clearly he was budding, to follow his own metaphor, but there was still something distinctly boyish about his presence: fidgety and energy-filled, enthusiastic and unseasoned, not ready to reckon with obligations.

There is no shaking the looming dread of big-A adulthood on CHROMAKOPIA, a record expressly taken aback by the adjustments of becoming a thirtysomething, and the accumulated uncertainties that one suddenly has no choice but to accept. "Yеah, what's gotten into me? Nah, that ain't the energy / That version of T that you knew was a memory / Who is that? You n****s get too attached to hear it / Fear it, face clear, few wrinkles on my spirit," he raps on "Tomorrow." Even as he wrestles with his misgivings, there is a strong undercurrent fighting to keep the spirit of boyhood alive — and so the listener is treated to a real-time tug-of war as an imagineer confronts his grizzled future the only way he knows how, through rambunctious, high-concept rap fantasia.

Kanye West, perhaps the prototypical bratty rap genius, once rapped on "Power" that his childlike creativity, purity and honesty were being "crowded by these grown thoughts," revealing the internal conflict created by a chaotic inner monologue. CHROMAKOPIA bears out a similar friction sonically, as Tyler takes a color-outside-the-lines approach to aging out of his old skin and into a brand new series of problems. The production is full of activity: It's buzzy and crowded, teeming with whirring synths, glowing chords and clicking chimes. There are referee whistles, trumpets that sound like a wailing elephant, carnival game organ, all warped into a constantly moving maelstrom of hip-hop and soul that seems to forecast the turmoil of an impending psychological storm. "I'm not the guy that I was at 20," the 33-year-old Tyler said at a listening event for the album on Sunday in Los Angeles. "Folks having kids and families and all I got is a new Ferrari. And it does feel kind of weird. I'm gaining weight, I've got gray hair on my chest, life is life-ing." Those realities have pushed him to do some reevaluating: "I don't, like the, way that this is lookin' / Mirror got me, thinkin' about my bookend / I just need this time to myself to figure me out, out / Do I keep the light on or do I gracefully bow out?" he raps on "St. Chroma." He is not taking that time to himself but rummaging through many of his findings out in the open, revealing more of his private life than ever before in the process.

As is often the case with Tyler, self-assessment comes in the wake of romantic misadventure. The central complication of the album revolves around a pregnancy scare, which then leads its seemingly autobiographical character — and the notoriously sure-footed artist behind it — to rethink his current standing. As Tyler unpacks why, at his big age and level of success, he isn't ready to be a parent, he spirals out into notes on autonomy and privacy, monogamy and the family unit, materialism and expectations. On "Darling, I," he lays out why he can't commit to a single partner, performing in both a squealed singing voice and an exaggerated bellow that betray a certain flippancy. Elsewhere, on "Hey Jane," "Tomorrow" and "I Hope You Find Your Way Home," he works through his thoughts on kids, whether a right time to have them exists, the ways that satisfying his own desires clashes with his ability to provide. Over and over, his self-examination winds back to a single question: What, exactly, makes a good dad?

Considering where Tyler's music career began, with an album literally called BASTARD, there's a poetry to his wake-up call coming in the form of potential fatherhood. So much of the Odd Future life force was reliant on fatherlessness — the sting of feeling unwanted inducing a bird-flipping rager ethos and an I'll show them disposition; its found-family nature nurturing an innovative think tank; an independent rebelliousness fostering the fortitude to build something from scratch. For Tyler in particular, rejection always prompted inspiration, as he moved and performed with a bullheaded intractability. But the rage has dissipated, and Tyler's reflections on his own absentee dad here are much more measured. "Father told me nothin', f*** it / I understand as a man that I wasn't his plan / Had some other ideas in his head / I hold no grudges, I heard he a fan," he raps on "Mother," a bonus track from the album's vinyl release.

Instead, he chooses to foreground Smith, the parent who did raise him. As the narrator of the album, she provides a sort of director's commentary to CHROMAKOPIA's introspective experience, leaving him little voice memos with advice, personal pleas and admissions from their shared life story. As she signposts his various detours, being a dad is never far from his thoughts, and things come to a head on the somber "Like Him," in which Tyler sits with the tragedy of bearing a striking resemblance to a man he has never known, serving as a constant reminder of his own displacement. His voice is high pitched here as well, but unlike on "Darling, I," there is a real rawness and vulnerability to the singing, showing an underbelly we've rarely seen. The Old Tyler might have crescendoed into a vindictive tirade or tried to undercut the earnest moment with a joke, but instead he reaches for catharsis: "How could I ever miss somethin' / That I'd never had? / I would never judge ya / 'Cause everything worked out without him." That plot twist, hinted at here and reiterated explicitly by his mother at the song's end — that she kept Tyler's father out of his life, that he was not abandoned — is the kind of revelation that could upend anyone's worldview. Yet he decides to see it as kismet, setting him on his path. In a way, the whole of CHROMAKOPIA feels like it turns on that shifted axis.

Tyler hasn't exactly been bashful before now, but he is habitually cryptic even at his most confessional. At least some of that, "Noid" seems to suggest, is out of fear of the parasocial ("You sing along, but you don't know me, n****," he raps). Though he's often still hesitant to reveal his hand here, CHROMAKOPIA is by far the most ruminative album of his career. Most Tyler albums demand serious consideration, but this is the first that could really be called thought-provoking. It isn't just that the Tyler of Cherry Bomb wasn't capable of making a song like "Hey Jane," which settles in an empathetic and ever-so-slightly more tolerant place. There is significant time dedicated to urgent matters of identity: the Black hair terrors of "I Killed You," the poser parables of "Take Your Mask Off," which includes petitions for a suburban wanksta and a closeted man to accept their true selves, and "Mother," which revisits the home Smith built for him as a young single mom, recovering from the abuse of her own rough South Central upbringing. There wasn't any room for such considerations in his music before, but at every turn, this album seems to be spilling the scattered contents of an evolving mind and trying to make sense of the changes. This produces some of his shiftiest music, but that shiftiness is a show of greater command, not less.

Tyler was a bit put off by what he saw as IGOR's relegation to the rap categories in 2020. His follow-up was, in defiant Tyler fashion, almost flagrantly hip-hop, alluding to classicist mixtape culture as if to say, If you want rap, I'll give you rap. There's no debating this new record as rap, either, especially considering choice sonic nods to the hip-hop of his millennial youth — Q-Tip's "Vivrant Thing," Snoop Dogg's "Drop It Like It's Hot," Young Buck's "Get Buck" — but it's rap as rendered by a caricaturist. The album swings between ideas, and has little interest in toning anything down or coming at it straight on, but at its core there is a throughline of self-awareness meeting self-acceptance, an inward-looking journey him Tyler to his most confidently realized music. "Always talkin' 'bout potential, b****, I am the better me / Jack of all trades, name a n**** who ahead of me," he raps on "Sticky." It's true: The future is now. Tyler has never been more comfortable in his skin, as a rapper or producer. From his near-constant manipulation of his voice to his artisan-like handling of his compositions, which can be maximalist spectacles ("Thought I Was Dead") or muted overtures ("Judge Judy") or maximalist spectacles that crack apart to reveal muted overtures within ("I Killed You"), to the methodical way he deploys his collaborators, he is coming into the full measure of his powers and how to wholly utilize them.

Bar for bar, CHROMAKOPIA isn't as dynamic as CALL ME IF YOU GET LOST. As a rule-breaking exercise, it isn't as boundaryless as IGOR. And as a painstakingly arrayed sensory mosaic, it isn't as sound-rich as Flower Boy. But it does carry the most charming qualities of all three — brash and far out and abnormally pretty, selectively unguarded, undeniable and impossible to ignore. These are songs that demand your full attention. "Sticky," a marching-band procession that unveils triumphant verses from GloRilla, Sexyy Red and Lil Wayne with pomp and circumstance, is overloaded in the best way, and Tyler keeps popping up in different voices like costumes, as if doing a Nutty Professor bit. The like-minded maverick Doechii matches his inflated energy on "Balloon," flailing about with abandon, and "Noid" flips Zamrock into the manic buzz of a paranoid episode. Even at its most topsy-turvy, CHROMAKOPIA always feels like there is an ace pilot at the helm.

Artistic maturity, it must be noted, should not be mistaken for emotional maturity. Despite the album's fullness and confidence embodying all the heady development of a growth spurt, the Tyler that exists within the songs doesn't actually evolve much over the runtime, and he ends in an unsettled place. That said, "growing up" is a moving target, and learning you don't have all the answers is part of the process. Being a little more honest about what he does not know isn't nothing, and the messiness of his outlook is mirrored in the way the record sounds: blaring, busy, full of crackling drums and horns, its chorus of voices singing "I hope you find yourself."

What he can claim for certain now is an ascendant position in the rap hierarchy. Once a niche internet oddity and experimental coming-of-age tale, he emerges on CHROMAKOPIA as not simply the next great hip-hop auteur, but a bona fide star, whose flexes can include a star-studded stadium listening event and off-cycle Monday drop (which likely won't disrupt his string of No. 1s despite the limited tracking period: The projected first-week haul nearly doubles his previous album's showing). When he declares himself "the biggest out the city after Kenny, that's a fact now," on "Rah Tah Tah," it feels like the opening statement in a case he's presenting to the audience, with the album itself as a table piled high with evidence. In facing up to his mess, Tyler, the Creator finds the most complete version of himself as a maestro. If necessity is the mother of invention, maybe adversity is the father.