CREATIVE DRIVE
“Money is great. But
that’s not why I do what
I do,” says Tyler. “I
keep making shit, going
for ideas. Whether
people like them or
not.” Junya Watanabe
Man coat, Golf Wang
T-shirt and scarf,
Lacoste hat and Tyler’s
own earring. Opposite:
Prada sweater and hat
and Tyler’s own jewelry
(worn throughout).
99To be a fan of Tyler, the Creator isn’t just to stream
his catchiest songs, it’s to immerse oneself in an
ever-expanding, interconnected universe of his own
eccentric construction—and his fans have come to
include both elders he’s long worshiped, like Pharrell
Williams and Dave Chappelle, and a younger genera-
tion of funny, angry, irreverent kids who came of age
looking up to him. “In my mind, I always thought
playing Flog Gnaw would mean I’d made it,” says the
17-year-old pop phenomenon Billie Eilish, who per-
formed at the festival in 2018. Tyler’s long been one
of her biggest influences. “I’ll always be grateful to
him for making me who I am,” she says.
The alley spills us onto Beverly Boulevard. Tyler’s
a car guy, with a garage full of McLarens and Teslas,
and his BMW is painted a lovely custom hue he asks
me not to describe because he’s had problems with
overly zealous kids getting so immersed in his uni-
verse that they try to sleuth out his license plate and
follow him home. (Which, for the record, is not cool:
“I don’t give a f— how many albums you bought,” he
says. “Stop being f—ing weird.”) Two bottles of wom-
en’s perfume—something Tyler’s enjoyed wearing
since he was a kid, sneaking spritzes from his mom’s
supply—sit in the cup holders: Prada’s Infusion d’Iris
and Chloë Sevigny’s Little Flower. After a few blocks
he reaches a salon called Lanny Nails, then curses
loudly, because it’s gated shut.
Five minutes later we’re back in the alley, a block
from the restaurant, where Tyler stows his car in a
lot behind Golf Wang’s flagship store. Golf Wang, like
Flog Gnaw, is a play on the phrase Wolf Gang—a nested
series of inside jokes intended to delight the initiated
and confound outsiders who don’t know that Wolf
Gang refers to the ragtag collective of musicians,artists and assorted L.A. skater kids, known as Odd
Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All, that Tyler founded
when he was just 16. (And from whose ranks sprang
several other important musicians, including Frank
Ocean, Earl Sweatshirt and The Internet.)
Tyler’s secret, to hear him tell it, is that he’s always
trying—and failing—to scratch a deep-seated cre-
ative itch. “Money is great,” he says. “But that’s not
why I do what I do. Some people’s end goal is this and
that, whether it’s a nice house or whatever, so they
work hard and put all this hunger and energy into one
thing, music. But once they get that result, they relax.
They bust a nut, and now they’re chilling. Whereas
me, I get off to the music itself, and that’s something I
can’t grasp. I can’t go to a store and buy that feeling—
but it’s a feeling I keep wanting. So I keep making
shit, going for ideas.” He grins. “Whether people like
them or not.”A
T JON & VINNY’S, Tyler, who’s accepted
that his cuticles will have to remain
“rugged,” as he puts it, dumps a
mini-pitcher of maple syrup onto his
scrambled eggs. In conversation he
toggles without warning between
earnestness and a more teasing, prankish impulse.
At one point a twentysomething waitress he knows
comes over to say hello. “What up, little mama?” he
asks her.
“How are you, girl?” she replies.
“Drunk as f—,” he says, which she knows is a joke,
because Tyler doesn’t drink or do drugs. (He does tell
me, later on, that he would like to try psycho active
mushrooms some time.)
“This is Teenpo,” he says, introducing me and fol-
lowing up with two more fabrications. “He’s from
Samoa. He’s interviewing me for Basketball Times.”
When Tyler was starting out, his prankish streak
could take harsher, more trollingly confrontational
forms. He built his following from the ground up—
one Tumblr post and YouTube upload at a time,
racking up views and, with time, booking shows and
signing a label deal. He was raised in Hawthorne,
California, by a single mom. (He doesn’t know his
dad.) In the absence of any industry connections or
other shortcuts to fame, he used shock and instiga-
tion to augment his raw talent and attract attention.
His breakthrough 2010 video, for the song “French,”
included shots of Tyler vomiting and assorted Odd
Future kids riding skateboards headfirst into a
Christmas tree and sexually assaulting a shopping
cart: Larry Clark’s Kids meets Jackass. Tyler’s early
lyrics, inspired by Eminem at his most outré, fea-
tured a litany of gruesome murder fantasies, heinous
rape jokes and homophobic slurs—all of it delivered
in a transfixing (and, at times, repellent) spirit of
goof ball menace.
When he got popular enough for critics to call
him out for these choices, Tyler insisted he was just
messing around, exploring incendiary terrain from
an ironic remove, without malicious intent. If people
got offended, he argued, well, that was their prob-
lem. (And people did, from gay-rights activists to
then–U.K. home secretary Theresa May, who went so
far as to temporarily ban Tyler from entering Great
Britain—he returned for a show this past spring,he’s a showman—and headline a bunch of North
American arenas, Madison Square Garden included,
with a few London shows in between. “I gotta knock
out so much stuff,” he explains, hurtling past back-
alley dumpsters. “Two clothing lines...videos and
all types of stuff.” Yesterday he hunkered down and
worked on show mixes, because “every tour, I make
versions of my songs that are different from the
albums.” It’s the sort of granular task another art-
ist might delegate, but Tyler, the Creator is not the
delegating type: Since the start, he’s produced every
single song he’s put out, designed every bit of album
artwork and had a major hand in conceptualizing,
directing, editing and color-timing every one of his
music videos.
He’s maintained that degree of involvement
even as his output has sprawled into what he now
describes, not unreasonably, as “my empire.” In addi-
tion to music-making, Tyler (born Tyler Okonma)
has helped devise three different TV shows at the
millennial-targeting cable channels Adult Swim
(Loiter Squad, The Jellies!) and Viceland (Nuts +
Bolts). He’s designed a number of apparel lines, on
his own (under the Golf Wang name) and in part-
nership with Converse and Lacoste (under the name
Golf le Fleur), in which he scrambles the line between
streetwear and more rarefied fashion, selling both
graphic T-shirts and dainty clutches, bold hoodies
and chunky cardigans. He’s pursued unlikely obses-
sions such as developing a Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams
flavor called Snowflake and a signature Golf le Fleur
scented candle; and he’s built an annual L.A.-based
music festival, named Camp Flog Gnaw, that’s grown
big enough since its 2012 debut to take over Dodger
Stadium two years running.