This past January, as wildfires descended upon Los Angeles, Tyler, the Creator, like thousands of other residents in the evacuation zones, was forced to sort his life’s possessions according to what he could save and what he might have to let burn. He protected some predictable things — certain cars, clothes and jewelry — but for unpredictable reasons. “The value is not within the stones or the materials,” he says, “but within the air that’s around them. Each one is a diary of an era for me.” The rapper, now 34, packed his actual diaries, too, which he’s been writing since he was a child, and which are filled with “all my drawings and ideas and raps.”
As Tyler sorted, he FaceTimed friends. One of them was the film director Josh Safdie. A month earlier, they’d finished making Safdie’s “Marty Supreme,” Tyler’s feature film debut, a period drama due out in December and set in 1950s New York in which he shares the screen with Timothée Chalamet. Much to his surprise, Safdie, 41, saw Tyler boxing up old magazines: hip-hop and pop culture periodicals like The Source and Vice and Mass Appeal, dating back more than two decades. “They’re disposable,” Safdie told me, “but they helped shape his persona.”
The Palisades and Eaton fires displaced tens of thousands and destroyed 18,000 homes and other structures. Tyler’s home was spared. Nevertheless, the act of preservation the fires incited underscores the worth Tyler attaches to unexpected things. “I’m just in a place because of all the chaos where I find this settled peace in the things I love,” he says. His affinities create unexpected juxtapositions, too — cool through collision: wearing what he playfully describes as “Jesus sandals” with a crisp fit from his own luxury brand, Golf le Fleur, which offers a refined expression of Tyler’s personal style; sampling a rare Czech psychedelic rock track, “Vsichni Praznj” (1981) by Siluetes 61, as the rhythmic bed for his raps on “New Magic Wand” (2019). Whatever the source, he’s always sampling: “I love the feeling of that brain scratch.”
At any given time, the thing scratching Tyler’s brain could be an art catalog he picked up at a used bookstore or a song from a young rapper with only 150 streams whose music he encountered by chance. “It’s spiritual to me,” he says. “I love the stuff that I love so much.” In reporting and researching the cover profile of Tyler in this year’s issue of “The Greats,” T created a list of some of his influences, both ephemeral and enduring.
1. Jane Dickson’s “Study of Cocktails” (1984)
The artist Jane Dickson arrived in New York in 1977, one year after graduating from Harvard with a degree in visual studies. Her second job was programming Times Square’s first Spectacolor billboard, which had computerized light . The view from her studio on 42nd Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues inspired some of her early work, which included both photography and painting. Her loose studies in oil stick on black paper are particularly entrancing to Tyler, who marvels at the contrast Dickson achieves between the negative space of the black paper and the nearly incandescent neon signs, crowds in motion and wet pavement. “She’s ill,” Tyler says. “Most folks get white paper and then color things black. She would color around the black. The fact that your mind can work like that is crazy to me. All her work has this glow to it.”
2. Jared Hess’s “Napoleon Dynamite” (2004)
This quirky indie film, directed by Jared Hess, hit theaters the year before Tyler entered high school. The actor Jon Heder’s portrayal of the titular character — a socially awkward high schooler adrift in rural Idaho — resonated with Tyler. “I didn’t know what surrealism was at 16. I just loved the way ‘Napoleon Dynamite’ felt.” With its offbeat characters, disjointed scenes and banal yet haunting settings, the film operates in a register that definitely borders on the surreal — not through dream logic or visual distortion but through its exaggerated stillness and emotional detachment. Tyler would later channel that same energy, making the mundane strange and the strange magnetic.
3. Maggie Bullock’s “The Kingdom of Prep: The Inside Story of the Rise and (Near) Fall of J. Crew” (2023)
For his 11th birthday, Tyler’s mother gave him a library card. It would help foster a lifelong love of reading. “I’d just grab anything that looked cool,” he says. “Mad Magazine, a book about rocks. I loved the Goosebumps series.” Recently, he came across Bullock’s account of how J. Crew grew from a modest mail-order catalog operation in the 1980s to a standard-bearer of American preppy style. Tyler’s style draws in part from the same vocabulary, and though he never wore J. Crew growing up, he found much in the company’s story compelling. “It wasn’t around me as a kid at all,” he says. “So I looked it up and 1760000947 I really am into this.”
4. Clipse’s “Mr. Me Too” (2006)
In the words of Pusha T, one-half of the Virginia Beach brotherly rap duo Clipse, Tyler is “the number one Clipster.” When the pair reunited after a nearly 16-year hiatus to release their Pharrell Williams-produced album “Let God Sort Em Out” this past summer, Tyler not only contributed a guest verse (on the song “P.O.V.”) but hounded Pusha T about the release date. Tyler’s fandom goes back more than a decade, when he first came to appreciate the care with which Pusha T and Malice write and perform their lyrics. Though the subject matter of their early songs rarely strays far from drug hustling, the craft is immaculate. “When I was 16,” he says, “I promised myself that in every car I get for the rest of my life, the first song I play will always be ‘Mr. Me Too.’ I’ve kept that promise.”
5. The back cover of Ngozi Family’s “45,000 Volts” (1977)
Earlier this year, Tyler made his seventh appearance on the YouTube channel of the eccentric 57-year-old Canadian music journalist Nardwuar the Human Serviette. Nardwuar, who’s interviewed everyone from Kurt Cobain to Jay-Z to Sexyy Red, has a habit of gifting guests arcane artifacts that relate to their lives and music. When he met Tyler for a stroll through Vancouver’s VanDusen Botanical Garden, he presented the rapper with, among other things, an LP called “45,000 Volts,” by the Zambian rock band Ngozi Family, whose work Tyler had sampled on “Noid,” a track from his album “Chromakopia” (2024). Holding the record, Tyler was visibly moved — particularly by the back cover’s graphic design. “I love the cutout,” he said, pointing to the jagged rim of white showing around the clumsily cropped band member photos, as if a child had removed them with safety scissors. “Oh, that is so beautiful, man!” he told Nardwuar. Perhaps it’s no surprise that similar edges appear around Tyler’s own image on the cover of the next album he released, this summer’s “Don’t Tap the Glass.”
6. His “Chromakopia” mask
While conceiving “Chromakopia,” Tyler got a vision of how he wanted to look onstage and in supporting visuals. It started with an idea, simple and surreal, to wear a mask of his own face. He contacted his longtime collaborator Tara Razavi, whose production company, Happy Place, has helped realize Tyler’s visions for more than a decade: They worked together to make facial prosthetics for the “IFHY” (2013) music video, in which Tyler plays a doll version of himself; and the distorted white-kid mask for “Who Dat Boy” (2017). For “Chromakopia,” Tyler imagined a mask made of molded plaster. When fitted to his face, it’s seamless, though its features are stylized: the pronounced philtrum, the inanimate gloss of the skin, the holes where the eyes should be — all of which serve to distort and disturb. “I’m low-key a drama club kid at heart,” says Tyler. “They’re watching me onstage, but they’re not really watching me.”
7. Mongoose’s chrome BMX bike
Seventeen minutes into the Louis Vuitton men’s fall 2022 show, a presentation of the last collection Virgil Abloh designed before his death less than two months earlier, Tyler rode a bespoke monogrammed bicycle with a handlebar basket into Paris’s Carreau du Temple. It was a moment of whimsy in an otherwise elevated setting, contrasting innocence against the clothing’s sophistication. For Tyler, bicycles have always represented imagination and possibility. “That brings me so much joy. I don’t know what it is. I love riding my bike,” he told Apple Music’s Zane Lowe in 2019. That love is rooted in childhood. Many of his fondest memories are connected to one of his childhood bikes, a chrome Mongoose. “I loved being outside,” he told me, “just looking at the sky.”
8. His CD bar code collection
During the 1990s and early 2000s — before file sharing and streaming took hold — the compact disc was king. Tyler collected CDs the way that most kids collected action figures. And he didn’t just stack them on a shelf; he indexed them. “I would keep the bar code that would be at the top of every album I bought,” he recalls. He pasted those strips onto blank pages, taking something designed to be discarded and honoring it as part of a growing archive of his sonic world. From Brandy to Eminem, Jay-Z to Sade, the music lived for him not only in sound but in a tactile record of ownership. This instinct is central to his creative practice: It’s the same tendency that drives him to treat sketchbook doodles as the DNA of his album cover art. The bar code collection survived until 2004, when his mother, reasonably mistaking the pages for garbage, threw them out. “My mom trashed them,” Tyler says. “But, man, what I wouldn’t do for some of them.”
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