100
which police canceled when too many kids showed
up and started climbing the gates.) But he eventually
concluded that his penchant for controversy risked
distracting people from his artistic gifts, and so at
age 25, he says, “My music got better. I asked myself,
‘Why do Kanye and Pharrell and Jay-Z respect me,
but the people that respect them don’t f— with my
music?’ Well, maybe if I stop being funny on the
internet, people will focus on my talent.”
He got more experimental and ambitious in his
music and less inflammatory—and he did it with such
verve and conviction that his fans stuck with him.
Today he dismisses his first album, 2011’s scabrously
dark Goblin, as “trash—but I don’t regret making it.”
He laughs. “It’ll make the overall story sicker when
I’m 43 and I own a billion-dollar company, and it’s,
like, ‘Look what I was doing when I was 19. Who would
have thought those skate rats who like the color pink
would be doing this?’”
If there’s a through line to Tyler’s story, it’s this
exact desire to challenge expectations and, in the
process, let no one tell him what he can or can’t be.
Everything he’s put out has on some level been
about flouting boundaries, whether it’s boundaries
on acceptable speech, between musical genres or on
identity. “You know how many n— in the hood wanna
do ballet?” he says, by way of example. But thanks to
retrograde notions of black masculinity that he wants
to destroy, he says, “they f—ing can’t.” His philoso-
phy, he says, is “F— what everyone thinks. I’m gonna
do my thing. I’m gonna put on a wig and moonwalk
and wear these suits, and it’s gonna be fire. I wish
more n— had that.”
As Tyler put it in one lyric, from his Grammy-
nominated 2017 album, Flower Boy, his mission is to
“tell these black kids they can be who they are”—a
credo he extended on that album to include sexual-
ity, rapping about his own longstanding attraction
to men. He’d alluded to such feelings before but in an
oblique way that was easy to dismiss as more mess-
ing around. Now his lyrics were direct: “I’ve been
kissing white boys since 2004.” Given Tyler’s past
use of homophobic slurs, listeners were thrown for a
loop, especially because Tyler, ever allergic to labels,
refused to identify as either gay or bisexual—still
does. When I ask him if he was always at peace with
his feelings for men, he says, “I don’t want to answer
that.” He goes off the record for several minutes,
finally summarizing his public position on the topic
of sexuality like so: “I’m Tyler,” he says. “My favorite
color is kelly green. I love Baduizm, by Erykah Badu.
And I’m not anybody’s f—ing poster boy.”
WE’VE FINISHED EATING when a woman calls Tyler’s
name from an adjoining booth. His face lights up with
recognition: They went to high school together. He
gives her a hug, then we head outside, where he tells
me, matter-of-factly, “I sucked her toes once, like in
a Ralphs parking lot.” Walking toward the BMW, he
checks in on Instagram, passing me his phone to show
me a video he just received of a dude with a crew cut
suggestively eating a kebab. “These are the DMs I
get,” Tyler says, rolling his eyes. “This is how people
flirt these days.”
His next stop is a photo studio where he’s due for a
shoot. We hop into the car and zip toward Hollywood.
In Tyler’s free time, he says, he draws, paints, goes
on long, aimless bike rides and collects images on his
phone of flowers, sunsets, film stills, cars and any-
thing else he deems beautiful. He says he’s constantly
on the lookout for beauty and for ways to weave it
into his work. “I met one of the guys who models for
Golf Wang in a bookshop,” he says. “I was like, ‘You
are gorgeous. I wanna use you in something.’” The
way he sees it, this means his life consists of nothingbut free time. “I’m never in ‘work mode,’” he says. As
long as he only ever works on things he loves, that is,
they won’t feel like jobs—and the moment something
does start feeling like a job is the moment he knows
he should stop doing it: “My life is summer vacation,”
he says, “25/7.”
There’s a lot of not-work on his horizon. This
year’s Camp Flog Gnaw is happening this month, with
Solange, FKA twigs and 21 Savage among the per-
formers announced so far. He signed a first-look deal
with Sony Pictures Television in fall 2018 to create
shows with his old high-school buddy Lionel Boyce.
He just put out a Golf Wang BMX bike (his team says it
“sold out in seconds”), and he wants to launch his own
perfume soon, too: “I put out a candle [in March], and
it smelled good, so I’ll probably do that for a perfume.
Or a lotion. Who knows what the f— I’ll be into.”
Right now, he’s in the studio’s parking lot, barely
missing a Land Rover as he whips the BMW into a
tight parking spot. Our time is through. “F— you,”
he says—his version of a term of endearment—before
giving me a hug. “Little bitch.” TRACK RECORD
During his solo career,
Tyler, the Creator has
released five studio
albums, including, from
far left: Goblin (2011),
Wolf (2013), Cherry Bomb
(2015), the Grammy-
nominated Flower Boy
(2017) and IGOR (2019). FROM FAR LEFT: COURTESY OF XL RECORDINGS; COURTESY OF ODD FUTURE RECORDS (2); COURTESY OF COLUMBIA RECORDS (2)101NEW DIRECTION
“My music got better.
I asked myself, ‘Why do
Kanye and Pharrell and
Jay-Z respect me, but the
people that respect them
don’t f— with my music?’
Well, maybe if I stop being
funny on the internet,
people will focus on my
talent.” Marni jacket and
scarf and Golf Wang hat.
Opposite: Lacoste x Golf
le Fleur shirt and hat
and Golf Wang pants and
sunglasses. Grooming,
Autumn Moultrie;
manicure, Ashlie Johnson;
set design, Shelley
Burgon. For details see
Sources, page 150.