The West Coast hip-hop luminaries who appeared at Kendrick Lamar’s the Pop Out in June reinforced a reality apparent to even the casual observer: The defiant spirit of California rap endures, having molted and adapted over three generations, from the gruff gangsta-rap tenets of Dr. Dre and N.W.A to the haunted sociopolitical assessments of late-aughts acts like Lamar and his Black Hippy crew to the feisty younger artists building careers in their wake, like Cuzzos and Kalan.frfr. But few guests at the Pop Out saw a noisier crowd response than Tyler, the Creator. Leading the audience at Los Angeles’s Kia Forum through electric renditions of “Wusyaname” and “EARFQUAKE,” the 33-year-old rapper, producer, and designer framed his catalogue as a link between worlds, a fiery blend of L.A.’s more introspective and soulful musical traditions and their coarser counterparts. Gracing the nearby Intuit Dome four months later, at the listening party for his seventh album Chromakopia, he spoke about the honor of being able to perform at hometown arenas. He’d spent a portion of his youth living “down the street” in Inglewood in spite of the prevailing perception of Odd Future as a suburban latchkey skate-teen phenomenon. “I don’t mirror what people expect, so …” he said. Chromakopia ponders the contradictions in the life of the “biggest out the city since Kenny,” debating the merits of his signature flair for the macabre and owning the hang-ups that inspire him to lash out when he does. The end result is a kind of inverse Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers, a psychological deep dive into not wanting to be a family man.
Tyler was singing a different tune on the last album. 2021’s Call Me If You Get Lost flexed on passport stamps and DJ Drama drops, delivering the closest thing to a blustering traditional event rap album in a catalogue full of scrappy, sometimes deliberately unpleasant works. Just as 2019’s IGOR and 2017’s Flower Boy course-corrected for the giddily profane nihilism of his earlier music, with sweeter hooks and lyrics more rooted in romantic yearning than misanthropic urges, Call Me tossed a bone to fans who itched for the old brusque raps. The new album sees the artist occupying a more worried, insular mind-set: It’s dangerous outside for rappers. You can be at a Roscoe’s, like PnB Rock, gunned down in broad daylight; you can be at a music festival, like Drakeo the Ruler, fatally stabbed backstage; you can be in an Airbnb rental, like Pop Smoke, killed in a Hollywood Hills home invasion. Chromakopia touches on these chilling scenarios in the lead single “Noid”: “Loop around the block, eyes glued to the rearview / Rather double back than regret hearing, ‘Pew, pew.’”
It’s a bit of a pump fake, though. Chromakopia is more interested in observing and critiquing hypermasculinity than celebrating its own steely mettle. It feeds the hunger for a return to classic Odd Future aggression, approaching from a slightly more enlightened perspective. The album spends a good bit of its run time unpacking a stray line in the single that felt like one of old Tyler’s chauvinist quips — “Never trust a bitch, if you good, they could trap you” — revealing a man mulling over pathways to the future, whether he’ll die young or settle down or navigate the achy 40s Ye described in 2008’s “Welcome to Heartbreak”: “He said his daughter got a brand-new report card / And all I got was a brand-new sports car.”
Chromakopia is at war with itself, jostling through light, uplifting moments and self-defeating lows. The juxtaposition of the lovely and the terrifying has long been the main axis of intrigue in Tyler, the Creator’s oeuvre — recall that deep-but-still-pitched-down vocal cutting through the French jazz sample in Bastard’s “Odd Toddlers” in 2009. But the new album dips into a purposeful conversation about Black masculinity dating back centuries. Its monochrome military visual aesthetic — peep the martial, cartoonish gait in the “St. Chroma” video and the green Gaddafi getup at the Intuit party — and its Sam Cooke–in–Black Mirror artwork grasp at the historicity of the tussle with notions of manhood therein. Its lyrics dabble in and dart out of classic rap tropes; braggadocio has its situational benefits, but so does investigating and upending the inequities and insecurities that draw the behavior out.
Having graduated in ten years from the puckish commitment to facilitating a wild night that got him arrested for inciting a riot, Tyler seems more interested in patterning himself after the “Black men who were not at all interested in the patriarchal ideal” bell hooks honors from her “Reconstructing Black Masculinity” essay in 1992’s Black Looks: Race and Representation. He’s surveying the pitfalls of chest-beating. (“Every self-positioning or self-fixation maintains a relationship of dependency on the collapse of the other,” leftist thinker Frantz Fanon wrote of the lives of Black men in Martinique in 1952’s Black Skin, White Masks, echoing the present. “It’s on the ruins of my entourage that I build my virility.”) But he still itches to be the dominator and free spirit his peers embody in their records.
In a knotty midsection, which rapidly progresses from a celebration of polygamy in “Darling, I” to fallout from a pregnancy scare in “Hey Jane,” Tyler stresses wants and needs while their real-world consequences throw pebbles at the windows of his mansion to get his attention. A feel for ramifications is what this kind of conversation too often lacks in mainstream rap; we love to hear about Future’s bedroom antics but do not give much thought to the ripples. “Jane” argues a fleeting sexual connection isn’t the ideal foundation for a family, but it gets more compelling as it jumps into the shoes of the pregnant woman anxious about her body changing, her friends and family losing respect, and a man running off: “I’m 35 and my ovaries might not reset / I don’t wanna live my whole life feeling regret.” The value of fighting against a more traditional path plagues Tyler as he stares down the barrel of maturity. Listening to the advice that peppers Chromakopia from his mother, Bonita Smith, you sense that he regrets ignoring certain bits but does so in service to following his own compass.
Late in the album, Tyler explains where that instinct comes from and reveals the absent father he’s cursed in records since Bastard actually wanted to be present in his son’s life. It’s a revelation as jarringly personal as the matter-of-fact bisexuality of Flower Boy. The obvious antecedent for Smith’s maternal counterpoint in songs like “Tomorrow” — “We need a little Ty-Ty walking around here, okay? / We need a little dookie booty” — is the rip-roaring phone message from Frank Ocean’s family friend Rosie Watson in Blonde’s “Be Yourself,” containing a warning not to smoke weed and end up “sluggish, lazy, stupid, and unconcerned.” But as Smith’s interjections come to unpack her own problems, the exchange resembles the weary motivation offered in Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes’s 1922 “Mother to Son”:
Well, son, I’ll tell you:
Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.
It’s had tacks in it,
And splinters,
And boards torn up,
And places with no carpet on the floor —
Bare.
But all the time
I’se been a-climbin’ on,
And reachin’ landin’s,
And turnin’ corners,
And sometimes goin’ in the dark
Where there ain’t been no light.
So boy, don’t you turn back.
Chromakopia’s amorphousness feels instructive. One minute, “Sticky” is mining HBCU marching-band aesthetics; the next, the Jungian “Take Your Mask Off” is serving the same sort of conscious, cautionary tale as Common’s “Between Me, You & Liberation” and TLC’s “Waterfalls”; “Balloon” is bursting traditional gender roles open in a joyful Doechii duet. The closing moments of “I Hope You Find Your Way Home” spell out a thesis — “The light comes from within” — that was there all along. “St. Chroma” lifts a name from Norton Juster’s 1961 children’s novel The Phantom Tollbooth. Chroma the Great is a bastion of reason and “maestro of pigment” in a tale of strange philosophical absolutists. He commands the realm’s colors like musical instruments, coaxing out a sunset as a conductor leads an orchestra. But one day, he’s late to rise, and Milo, Tollbooth’s listless protagonist, attempts to manage the morning in his stead, rocketing time a week forward in a string of seven failed sunrises that luckily go unnoticed. He trips while stepping into the shoes of a man who inspired him, a noble intention curdling when he neglects to ask for guidance. Invoking Chroma, Tyler offers a swatch book of shades of manhood, an update to Pharrell’s “You Can Do It Too” inspiring fans to escape oppressive masculine stereotypes and offering a word to the wise: Heed your elders sometimes.