Tyler, The Creator is on a generational roll right now. Since 2017’s Flower Boy, each of his albums have introduced outstanding new sounds, aesthetics, and personas to his oeuvre, and each one has been warmly received by both critics and fans. He’s won multiple Grammys, sold out arena tours, and with each release, effortlessly topped the Billboard 200.
And today, he’s extended that run with the release of his ninth studio album, Don’t Tap The Glass. What’s crazy is he only announced the project three days prior to its release while still on tour for his last one, Chromakopia. While I praised his rollout and release strategy for that album at the time, the fact that he doubled down just shows his belief in doing things his own way.
What truly gasts my flabbers about it all, though, is that Tyler might be the only artist to come from hip-hop who gets to do this. By “this,” I don’t only mean play fast and loose with album releases and promotion schedules, but also to so wildly experiment with sonics and visuals in an increasingly risk-averse creative climate. The endless pursuit of shareholder value and growth has stymied practically any sort of exploration in the musical landscape (especially at Tyler’s echelon) in recent years, but the Hawthorne, California native remains mysteriously, thankfully immune.
And his successes should be a wake-up call to the corporate commercial interests that seek to exploit art and entertainment for capitalistic purposes. Tyler, The Creator is what you get when you let the creators (ahem) be creative.
To be fairer to the spreadsheet surfers than they’d ever be to any of us working stiffs, I get it. Predictability of return on investment, in their minds, largely depends upon replicable wins. If it works, do it again ’til it doesn’t. Taking risks is a sucker’s game; Leaps of faith could leave you free-falling with no parachute. But the music industry has never really operated by conventional wisdom and regular-people logic; It’s Looney Tunes rules a lot of the time.
Just consider the foundation on which hip-hop, the baseline for Tyler’s musical influences, began; kids with the first digital musical equipment, much of it of dubious provenance, using that equipment “wrong” to invent record scratching, sampling, dub tapes, and rapping where singing had powered so much of popular music. Then, when the prevailing style was party rap, here comes gangsta rap. Then, when gangsta rap dominated the scene, Kanye West appeared to turn the business on its ear. Then came his musical progeny, both direct and indirect.
Tyler is just one of those, a musical omnivore just as likely to sample an obscure European jazz sample to spit vicious battle raps over as he is to bang out a bewildering synth symphony and sing about making his earth shake with an incomprehensible verse from one of rap’s maddest mad scientists. On Don’t Tap The Glass, he says, he wanted to encourage young Black men especially to be able to dance, to move their bodies again (I’ve written about this before) in a world of intense surveillance and increased scrutiny.
On this new album, he goes from ’80s LA freestyle (perhaps inspired by Kendrick Lamar’s similar excavation on GNX) on “Sugar On My Tongue” to Zapp-like funk-R&B a track later on “Sucka Free” (Troutman would be proud), from ’90s Atlanta bass on “Don’t You Worry Baby” to a straight-up drum-n-bass breakdown on “I’ll Take Care Of You” sprinkled by the HBCU trap of 106 & Park faves Crime Mob. It’s a living museum of Black music from the past four decades, freewheeling its way through the various scenes that made us move our bodies to release the stresses of life. There’s no better time for it: There’s a lot to be stressed about these days.
But the confusing part is why only Tyler is allowed to be this free, this untethered from financial considerations, to… well… play the way he does. Listening to this, I racked my brain for another artist to have come from hip-hop who’s gotten the same sort of leeway to be their eclectic self, to put the full range of their influences on display in the past two decades. I got Beyoncé and maybe Janelle Monáe. Even at their most expansive, artists like Drake, Kanye West, and Kendrick Lamar have only ever gotten to rap over “weird” beats that nod to Black-birthed genres like house, techno, freestyle, and DnB.
For a while, acts like Outkast could tool around with different styles, and more recently, acts like Channel Tres, IDK, Leikeli47, and PinkPantheress get to experiment with nostalgic sounds while flying under the radar. But Black music has always encompassed far more sounds than just R&B and rap, gospel, and jazz. And while “cohesion” has become a turnkey for assessing albums as bodies of work, it would be so nice if more artists were allowed to be like Tyler, The Creator and just… create.
Going back to Beyoncé for a second, remember when she dropped Cowboy Carter with the insistence that it wasn’t a “country” album, because she wanted folks to embrace the breadth of Black influence on Americana and pop culture? Tyler, The Creator is the proof of concept. Let artists — especially Black artists and specifically those you are dying to classify as just rappers — stretch their creative wings as far as they’ll go without making a “concept album” like Lil Yachty’s rock album Let’s Start Here or Drake’s Honestly, Nevermind.
As Tyler himself said on Twitter just after announcing Don’t Tap The Glass, “Y’all better get them expectations and hopes down, this ain’t no concept nothing.” And it’s not. It’s an expression of a concept, that creators create — they create what they need, and what they see that the world needs, in a moment in time, whether that’s a message of hope and solidarity, a physically driven emotional catharsis, or just the permission to be everything you are without reservations.
Don’t Tap The Glass is out now via Columbia Records. Find more information here.