He’d made himself and his friends rich, and he felt impossible expectations from all angles, including from himself. This nameless kid suddenly had more attention than he knew what to do with, and he knew he’d touched a whole lot of kids as lost as him. Goblin, the follow-up, was all over the place, but its best moments were animated by a sort of fearful euphoria. Instead, all the risible sentiments scanned as defensive red herrings, blasts of hate from a fatherless child who was still figuring out the right places to channel his rage. It was easy to get lost in the rape and the homophobia, but the whole thing was so raw, and it came from a kid of such obvious and surpassing talent, that it was impossible to dismiss out of hand. Tyler’s debut Bastard, barely three years old now, was an out-of-nowhere blast of teenage angst and confusion, one laced with so much violence and sexual rage that every anti-gay slur stung like a slap. All of which is to say that it’s an album deeply up its own ass. “I wanna quit, but I can’t / Because mother and sister can’t pay the rent.” “Hated the popular ones, now I’m the popular one / Also hated homes, too, til I started copping me some.” “You’d think all this money would make a happy me / But I’m ’bout as lonely as crackers that supermodels eat.” Wolf, in its entirety, plays out like an album-length extended version of Kurt Cobain’s opening line on In Utero - “Teenage angst has paid off well, now I’m bored and old” - but now, it’s coming from someone who only just stopped being a teenager himself, and who’s more anxious than bored anyway. Or maybe they’re not fans - maybe they’re “fags” who “didn’t even hear Bastard, they just bandwagon-jumping from a pogo.” This sentiment, and others like it, comes up over and over on Wolf, Tyler’s third album. To hear Tyler himself tell it on Wolf, though, he can’t walk through an amusement park or a Target without being mobbed by fans who want to take pictures with him. He’s internet-famous, certainly, and underground-popular, but he’s not Jennifer Aniston.
Is Tyler, The Creator really all that famous? I’m not sure that he is.
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