TC (Tyler’s therapist) posing a question - he ends it the same way on “Inglorious”. Tyler’s title-track on his first album, “Bastard”, begins with Dr. Tyler’s next album is scheduled to be called Wolf (guess who is gonna take center stage?) Thus far, Tyler has two releases under the name - his 2009 release Bastard - a minor commercial success met with much critical acclaim - and his first official album release, Goblin.
Tyler, the Creator is Tyler’s stage name, as well as the name under which he raps. Tyler has produced every Odd Future release to date, and (other than for Radical) Tyler has “created” just about every beat from scratch - no sampling required.
Wolf Haley is a voice in Tyler’s head, his self-described “evil, white alter-ego.” Tyler described the song Yonkers as being a back and forth debate between he and Wolf.Īce is Tyler’s persona under which he produces and makes beats. Tyler’s consciously-modeled counterpart to Eminem’s “Slim Shady” - this is his Freudian Id - his anti-social persona run amock. Based on the therapeutic beef discussed below, I’m guessing this is Tyler grasping for a father-figure. Thurnis Haley is a golf loving “about 53 year(s) old” man, who indirectly promotes Tyler’s upcoming release of Goblin. Thurnis Haley was a recently established meme on Odd Future’s tumblr. In 2018, the man himself claimed that he’d only keep seven of the record’s fifteen tracks, but to revise ‘GOBLIN’ retrospectively would be to do a disservice to its spirit - it remains a messy, discomfiting monument to mainstream subversion.“Tyler the Masturbator” was a meme established in Odd Future’s “Nardwuar v.s Odd Future” interview with Nardwuar Serviette - serviette is French for “tissue* - so quite appropriate… It’s astonishing, now, to think that a rapper hailed as a queer icon for his insights on ‘Flower Boy’ and ‘Igor’ was once brushing off justified criticism from the likes of Tegan and Sara with the same homophobic slurs on social media that ‘GOBLIN’ itself is littered with. His lyricism on ‘GOBLIN’ remains a blend of cattle-prod provocation, flirtations with horrorcore, and a genuinely unsettling appetite for the macabre. By the time Tyler chips in with his own, the track’s quietly taken on a nightmarish air. Frank Ocean, now THE pop enigma of his generation, makes a memorable contribution on ‘She’, his mellow vocals blended with a woozy beat that threatens to veer off the rails at any given minute, while the star-studded ‘Window’ does so much with so little, taking a basic but thickly atmospheric synth loop and using it as a backdrop over which Domo Genesis, Hodgy Beats and Mike G queue up to deliver softly sinister verses. The record’s a stark reminder, too, of just how much talent existed in the Odd Future pool at the time. There’s also the creeping sense, however, that early-career Tyler leaned unnecessarily heavily into shock-tactic lyricism, with the dark dioramas he draws on ‘GOBLIN’ routinely unsettling you wonder how much of it he would get away with today. There are moments of towering innovation across the record - the manner in which raw minimalism meets slick production on ‘Yonkers’ and ‘AU79’, for instance, or the swirling meeting of menace and beauty that came to characterise so many of the album’s instrumentals. By the time the rapper’s solo debut dropped, ‘GOBLIN’ served as the culmination of one of the most thrilling upendings of the musical rulebook in recent history, and one that excited and frustrated in equal measure - as much now as it did then. Even at ten years’ distance, the nature of Odd Future’s 2011 gatecrashing of the mainstream still feels like a fever dream nobody since has staged quite such a hostile takeover, with everything from Tyler’s stripped-back and shocking ‘Yonkers’ video to his performance of ‘Sandwitches’ on Jimmy Fallon with Hodgy Beats, scored through with a thrilling sense of unpredictability.
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