I may have been in depressing environments though. “With a lot of my old music, I was never depressed. “I’m in a good mood 95% of the time,” says Tyler when I bring up the dark tendencies of his early work. Positioned on the fringes of mainstream hip-hop at the very beginning of his career, Tyler seemed to get his kicks poking fun at popular culture with the unapologetically violent, sometimes murderous gags that he put on wax. Once you’ve watched the black-and-white clip of Tyler fake eating a cockroach before hanging himself, it’s almost impossible to unsee it. At once terrifying and utterly compelling, the video for “Yonkers,” off his 2011 debut album Goblin, is the most cited example. Tyler has made an art form of blurring the line between reality and fantasy. With a string of successful collaborations-Converse, Lacoste, Jeni’s ice cream, the list goes on-it seems that the rest of the world is finally catching on.Įven still, Tyler’s reputation as an enfant terrible lingers on. Now eight years old, his Golf Wang fashion and lifestyle brand has gained a cult following by flouting all the conventional rules of streetwear and engendering a notion of masculine beauty that is at once tender and tough. What’s more, he’s cleverly used the idiosyncrasies of his personal style as a springboard for something much bigger. With an approach to self-presentation that’s meticulously offbeat and thoroughly individual, he follows in a long line of hip-hop eccentrics that includes André 3000, Missy Elliott, and Pharrell Williams, who Tyler regards as a Yoda-like figure. He’s also fully realizing his power as a style renegade at a time when the once-narrow confines of men’s fashion are rapidly disintegrating. Tyler has long been considered a goofball outlier in the rap universe, though the music he’s made recently has edged him toward the center of the pop-cultural conversation. “Like, why is this interior not white? Or cream?”
“Dark wood is gross-it sucks up all the light,” he says, shaking his head. In fact, if he had his way right now, he’d redesign the car we’re driving in. His nails are lacquered in glittery pink and green, a polish he formulated himself-“because when I can’t find the thing I want, I make it.” Same goes for his crisp floral perfume.
#Tyler the creator hat full#
The jewelry he has on is minimal but full of personality: a gold ring studded with a heart-shaped emerald and a beaded plastic bracelet thrown onstage by one of his fans that reads one of one. “But this works because of the green.” He designed the baby blue Chucks on his feet. “I actually never wear navy-it’s my third least favorite color,” he says (black ranks on the absolute bottom of this list). Today the lanky, six-foot-two rapper is dressed in a dapper workwear jacket and matching carpenter pants in khaki green and navy blue. “This is what it must feel like to be hungover,” he says in his unmistakable guttural baritone.Įven when he’s running on empty, Tyler’s no slouch. Though he doesn’t drink or do drugs, Tyler is still a little worse for wear the morning after his electrifying performance at Brixton Academy, the second of three sold-out shows in the United Kingdom. Tyler, the Creator is ensconced in the back seat of an SUV with a Louis Vuitton bag propped up beside him and a half-eaten croissant balanced on one knee. It’s an unseasonably warm morning in late September, and the traffic around Oxford Circus, London’s central shopping district, is bumper-to-bumper.
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