On his eighth album, Tyler is both mask-on and mask-off. It’s an electric, revealing, and perennially odd journey back into his aging psyche.
In the 2023 music video for “Sorry Not Sorry,” one of the B-sides from Call Me If You Get Lost, a soldier welcomes Tyler Okonma’s friends, family, and former lovers into a theater. CHROMAKOPIA reveals this figure to be its masked protagonist, St. Chroma. Inside the glass enclosure, after issuing a litany of apologies, a shirtless Tyler, the Creator murders his past personas—ripping off Sir Baudelaire’s pastel ushanka for the finale. Three notable figures sit front row: an anonymous couple dressed in traditional garb from Nigeria—homeland of Tyler’s estranged father—and his mother, Bonita Smith. She’s the first voice on Tyler’s eighth album, Chromakopia, offering encouragement: “You are the light. It’s not on you, it’s in you.” Tyler spends the album modulating his shine—dimming it when he takes accountability and lighting up like a supernova when it’s time to remind everyone that he could be in rap’s Big Three if he wanted.
He wastes no time getting to the latter. A flute mimicking ululations sounds like a battle cry under militaristic stomps on opener “St. Chroma.” Tyler whisper-raps as if to say, Listen close, I have something important to tell you. That, along with Daniel Caesar’s ethereal gospel vocals asking “Can you feel that fire?” and a modular synth speeding up its frequency like a kettle about to blow, makes it feel like we’re traversing space and time straight into Tyler’s psyche.
“Noid” magnifies a part of Tyler’s mind relatively shut out to the public: his worst fears. “Someone’s keeping watch,” he lilts of fans with parasocial attachments and haters dredging up his juvenile tweets, “I feel them on my shoulder.” At 33, he’s watching his friends build families while he worries that a crazed stan could break into his house at any minute. The reverberating electric guitars give the track a horror-movie feel; they’re sampled from Zamrock legends Ngozi Family’s “Nizakupanga Ngozi,” a song partially about warding off toxic energy from your life. It’s reminiscent of the Swahili song that plays when the protagonist of Get Out, Daniel Kaluuya’s Chris, goes to meet his white girlfriend’s suspiciously nice family. “Listen to your ancestors. Something bad is coming. Run,” is a rough translation of the lyrics.
Tyler’s mother guides him across Chromakopia, even if her voice notes often just summarize the content of the songs. The exception is the devastating “Like Him,” in which Tyler questions if he’ll end up just like his estranged father and his mom suggests the truth is more complicated. “He’s always wanted to be a father to you. … He’s a good guy,” she tells him. That line is a major plot twist in the Tyler, the Creator lore: For over a decade, he’s blasted his dad for being absent. “Dad isn’t your name, see ‘faggot’’s a little more fitting/Mom was only 20 when you ain’t have any fucks to spare,” he rapped on 2013’s “Answer.” This revelation, paired with the pregnancy scare in “Hey Jane,” illuminates why he’s been thinking so much about fatherhood. “Boy, you selfish as fuck, that’s really why you scared of bein’ a parent,” he admits on the self-diss track “Take Your Mask Off.” Few things are more humbling than seeing yourself in someone who, up until this point, existed only as a villain to you.
Trips to Milan were flexes on Call Me When You Get Lost, but on Chromakopia, Blackness is a status symbol. Tyler is a Kendrick and Jay-Z fan—performing at this summer’s Ken and Friends Juneteenth show and rapping over a 4:44 instrumental in 2017—so he was bound to rap about white supremacy someday. Surprisingly, the man who once declared that he wrote music for “white kids with nigger friends who say the n-word” nails it on “I Killed You.” The song starts off as an interpolation of the children’s ditty “Wheels on the Bus” but morphs into an interrogation of Western beauty. Drums that sound like a djembe and intermittent horns wouldn’t be out of place in a New Orleans street parade. Tyler, flute in hand like the Pied Piper, urges Black people to embrace their kinks, dark skin, and other features that the world tries to stamp out: “You the room, baby, they the motherfucking elephant.”
Black women rappers seem to remind Tyler there’s more to making music at 33 than uber-serious lyrics. “Give a fuck ’bout pronouns, I’m that nigga and that bitch,” he raps on album standout “Sticky,” featuring GloRilla and Sexyy Red. The beat is simple; it sounds like he hired a live step team to record background vocals. You can tell he’s just elated to be with the girlies and the refrain is destined to cling to your hippocampus. Tyler is an amazing rapper when he wants to be, even on cartoony beats like “Balloon” and “Thought I Was Dead.” Just like “STUNTMAN” on The Estate Sale, “Rah Tah Tah” channels the West Coast and Southern rap sound Tyler grew up on. “I’m a bona fide face seat, box muncher,” he says, making Munch sound like a position of authority.
For all of CHROMAKOPIA’s hitting-your-thirties ego death confessionals, it’s the braggadocious, Cherry Bomb-sounding tracks that really hit: “Thought I Was Dead,” “Rah Tah Tah,” “NOID,” and “Sticky.” His rejection of the past is understandable. “That version of T that you knew was a memory,” he says on “Tomorrow,” anticipating the critiques: “Who is that? You niggas get too attached to hear the theory.” Not too long ago, entire nations and commonwealths were terrified of Tyler because of his controversial lyrics. Then he started philosophizing and crooning about love and became a bit more brand-friendly. Few are as quick-witted in their raps as him, though. Fewer still have the kind of infectious arrogance that makes people want to bow down rather than roll their eyes. - via Pitchfork
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