TYLER, THE CREATOR would like to meet for breakfast. “You’ll probably hear him when he shows up,” the waiter says, while seating me in the tidy, relaxed Italian restaurant the rapper chose on Los Angeles’s Westside. “He usually pulls his Ferrari around back.” The Ferrari in question is an F40, the vintage supercar built between 1987 and 1992 in a limited-production run of fewer than 1,400 vehicles, the last model that Enzo Ferrari approved before his death. After years of longing, Tyler acquired his cherry red dream car in June. A month later, he gave it a cameo in his music video for “Stop Playing With Me,” the lead single off his ninth album, “Don’t Tap the Glass,” which unexpectedly dropped this summer, less than nine months after his critically acclaimed “Chromakopia” (2024).
Taken together, these two albums — equal in excellence but divergent in most every other way — attest to Tyler’s defining impact on hip-hop and the broader culture: namely, his surreal sense of theater and his unmatched capacity to curate cool. “Chromakopia” is a nearly hourlong exercise in world building, complete with tour attire that features a green military jacket with gold epaulets and matching trousers, hair spiked like horns and a matte black mask of Tyler’s own face. The songs are at times over-the-top, at others lacerating in their introspection about everything from the anxiety of aging to the anguished choice to terminate a pregnancy. By contrast, “Don’t Tap the Glass,” which is under 29 minutes and was written and recorded during the “Chromakopia” tour (sometimes backstage), is energetic and party driven, a joyful journey through a half-century’s worth of Black dance music, from 1980s talk-box funk to 1990s new jack swing to 2000s Atlanta crunk.
As I wait for Tyler, I listen for the growl of his twin-turbo V8 engine. But I don’t hear anything. Instead, Tyler walks in alone through the back door. He’s unexpectedly tall, around 6-foot-2, and solidly built — at 34 no longer the skinny kid he was at 18, when he broke out. He’s wearing his signature green: a green trucker hat from a pancake diner in Manhattan Beach; a green-striped short-sleeved polo; and green-and-white Jordan IIIs. He wears straight-cut jeans from his own fashion brand, Golf Wang — that, he later tells me, are fresh out of the dryer so that they snug up just right — and he’s got on clear-rimmed Cazals with lightly tinted lenses. He dresses with specificity and whimsy: playful yet purposeful. The waiter seats us on the back patio, and I see now, in the parking lot, that Tyler has opted for his more mannered Rolls-Royce Cullinan. These are the kinds of cars that get you featured in the Robb Report, as Tyler was in 2022 when he gave a tour of what he calls his “cool little fleet.” All of this finely tuned steel and aluminum, rubber and glass, however, can’t fully account for the weight of their worth to him. “That’s replaceable,” he says. “What matters is in the air around them.” He mentions his BMW E30 M3, among his earliest acquisitions, which to the untrained eye looks like an old car from the 1980s, though his affinity for it makes it fresh; he plans to pass it on to his future children. “I love and I drive and I eat in these cars,” he says. “I didn’t purchase them because I’m trying to keep up an image.”
Though Tyler may not be interested in keeping up an image, his art — and the attention it’s brought him — keeps him in the image-making business. As a rapper and singer, actor and filmmaker, producer and provocateur, Tyler has always relied on a certain slipperiness of selfhood. You never quite know what’s sincere, what’s satirical, what’s surreal. Listen to “Yonkers,” the standout track from his major-label debut, “Goblin” (2011), released when he was 20, and you’ll hear Tyler rapping this oft-quoted opening line, which I can’t quote fully here: “I’m a walking paradox — no, I’m not!” It’s an artistic mission statement: insisting upon defining and redefining himself, even within the span of a few words. Better yet, watch the song’s black-and-white music video, which plays like performance art: A fixed camera centers Tyler on a stool as he raps alone in an empty room, scleras blacked out with contact lenses, a cockroach slithering between his fingers. A minute in, he stands in shadow, spewing vomit. Ninety seconds later, a noose drops from above and he drapes it around his neck, atop his chunky chains. The final image is intended to shock: the tipped-over stool, his flailing legs.
In these early songs and videos, Tyler announced himself as an artist unafraid of being misunderstood. He made things to amuse himself and his close friends, which gave his art authenticity — and, once it found a fan base, an uncommon intimacy. That intimacy endures. All you need to do is read one comment below the “Goblin” video on YouTube: “As a kid I thought this was terrifying, now I just see this as normal Tyler behavior.” Many of Tyler’s fans have grown up with him. Over the years, he’s instructed them — sometimes implicitly through the work, sometimes explicitly through his public comments — on how to engage with his art. And because his back catalog lives on, a new generation of fans have caught on too.
Tyler’s early work was marked by a gleeful transgression, pushing boundaries of genre and decorum. Though he doesn’t drink or do drugs, his music explored — and often still explores — extreme states of feeling and being (through sex, drugs, murder and a general spirit of mayhem), all within the safe space of his imagination. It just so happened that he chose to do this through rap, which for reasons both imposed upon and authentic to its history is presumed to be a space of strict sincerity. In the extreme, that presumption has allowed rap lyrics to be admitted in court as adverse evidence in criminal proceedings. Tyler himself suffered real-world consequences for his music when, in 2015, the home secretary (and soon to be prime minister) of Britain, Theresa May, barred him from entering the country because of lyrics she deemed homophobic and violent.
A decade on, Tyler is now free to move about the globe. His art has matured and expanded to reflect that. In releasing commercially successful new music (his last four albums have all reached No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart), he exercises his first-person voice atop inventive rhythms, melodies and samples to capture something more than just a documentary self. Onstage, he conceives sumptuous worlds (like the “Chromakopia” tour’s phantasmagoric blend of industrial grit and psychedelic bloom) through which he travels with strange elegance — marching, jerking, even twerking to the music. Onscreen, he opens the aperture for Black creative expression through visuals for his own songs, as well as through a series of television and web-based productions dating back more than a decade — from the irreverent sketch-comedy show “Loiter Squad” (2012-14) to the cartoon series “The Jellies!” (2017-19), which follows the life of a 16-year-old Black boy raised by jellyfish.
In December, he’ll make his feature-film debut in Josh Safdie’s “Marty Supreme,” a period drama about a relentlessly ambitious table tennis hustler (played by Timothée Chalamet) set in 1950s New York. Golf Wang, founded in 2011, blends bold colors and playful graphics with skate culture, streetwear and off-kilter takes on American prep. Last year, he designed a capsule collection for Louis Vuitton. And this past summer, he introduced a Converse sneaker line inspired by the brand’s back catalog. In all of these endeavors, Tyler is true to his idiosyncratic self yet increasingly focused on bringing others along with him. “He’s so vertically integrated,” says Safdie, 41. “There’s no difference between the windows at the Golf store and a piano interlude on [his sixth album] ‘Igor.’”
TYLER, THE CREATOR was born Tyler Gregory Okonma in the working-class city of Hawthorne, in southwest Los Angeles. Listen to his lyrics and you’ll hear a makeshift autobiography of a childhood shaped by maternal love and paternal absence. Only 20 years Tyler’s senior, his mother — who runs a health spa in Los Angeles — was fiercely protective of her son and supportive of his creative freedom, down to their midweek excursions to Six Flags: “I’d be like, ‘But, Mom, tomorrow’s Wednesday.’ She’d be like, ‘Cool. We out!’” His mother makes occasional appearances on his records too, most recently on a series of “Chromakopia” interludes in which she offers both affirmations and admonishments: “You are the light,” she begins the album. “It’s not on you, it’s in you.” From an early age, Tyler demonstrated deep curiosity about the world, particularly when it came to music. At 7, he would sit in front of the living room speakers listening to Brandy’s “Always on My Mind” (1994), Sade’s “Kiss of Life” (1992) and other soulful songs by women. “I would tell my mom, ‘Oh, I love when it slants. The cloud, the cloud, it slants!’” he says, recalling something akin to synesthesia, his ears prompting his brain to show his eyes marvelous things. “I didn’t know what chords were at the time. I didn’t have the language but, to me, that’s what it felt like.”
He began to cultivate a vocabulary for his creativity through community, both actual and virtual. Tyler and his friends would hop on their bikes and go to Manhattan Beach, a journey of six or seven miles, where they would marvel at the oceanside homes. Along the way, they’d come up with lyrics. Without the benefit of a smartphone, Tyler would memorize what he could or, if he had a marker, scrawl lyrics on his pants. By 13, he had a Myspace page, where he showcased his drawings and T-shirt designs as well as the songs he’d begun to compose. “I didn’t know what else to put, so I just put ‘Tyler, the Creator’ because of all the little things I was creating,” he says. More than 20 years later, he grudgingly accepts the moniker: “As a statement, ‘Tyler, the Creator’ is so dumb,” he says, noting the absurdity of having a comma in his name, “but the weight of it is within its honesty.”
Tyler attended Westchester High, where he was a good student. He listened to Eminem’s “Marshall Mathers LP” (2000) and “The Eminem Show” (2002), N.E.R.D.’s “In Search of …” (2001) and “Fly or Die” (2004). During his senior year, he enrolled in a theater class, where he grew close with a classmate named Lionel Boyce, who now stars as Marcus Brooks on the FX series “The Bear.” Boyce credits Tyler with encouraging him to think seriously of himself as an artist. “He had a very distinct sense of humor that I understood,” says Boyce, 34. “But there were kids who didn’t get it. They’d get upset: ‘What are you saying?’ The point of it is not to be got. That’s always been his baseline.”
Soon, Tyler began to gather his friends into a loose-knit crew of creative people — aspiring rappers, singers, producers, actors, filmmakers, skateboarders, fashion designers and more — that originally went by the unwieldy name Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All, or Odd Future. The very impulse to join a crew was in part a response to the pressures of the generation before them, which had cliqued up along the lines of blue and red: the gang affiliation of Los Angeles’s dominant Crips and Bloods. Tyler and his friends were nobody’s gangbangers. Instead they were self-fashioned nerds and outcasts. They found safety in numbers.
Watch Odd Future’s early performances and you can’t help but notice Tyler. He evinces an older sibling’s assuredness (he has a younger sister) with the punk energy of a born iconoclast. Tyler recalls performing the song “Odd Toddlers” (from his 2009 self-released album, “Bastard”) alongside his fellow Odd Future members Hodgy and Left Brain. “I think I pulled my pants down, got into the crowd and tried to mosh with the moms,” he says. “But it was so free. Wasn’t even trying to be good. It was just being, at the highest level.” Yet it would be a mistake to think of Odd Future as an incubator for a lone star bringing his friends along. Really, Odd Future was less a crew than it was a collective of gifted artists with distinctive and, at times, divergent visions. Boyce, Frank Ocean, Syd, Earl Sweatshirt and more fed off one another’s creative energies. Although Tyler’s was often the loudest voice, it was never alone.
AT THE RESTAURANT, Tyler sits with his back to the street, choosing a view of our fellow diners. He seems to enjoy being recognized and unsettling people’s expectations of what, where and who a celebrity should be. “I really be outside, man. Like, for real,” he tells me. I mention to him that no fewer than 10 students in my hip-hop poetics lecture at U.C.L.A. this past spring reported sightings of him over the years: riding his bicycle somewhere in the South Bay, cruising Sunset Boulevard in his McLaren, playing tag with friends at some Brentwood park. “That’s me,” he replies. “That’s gonna be me forever.”
Tyler’s secret to living a private public life seems to lie in how cannily he employs selective self-exposure. On “Wilshire,” a nearly nine-minute, single-verse song with no hooks from “Call Me if You Get Lost” (2021), he raps an open letter to an unnamed love interest who’s already dating his friend. The story he tells is so rich with detail, both incidental and emotive — “dirtyin’ my bakin’ pots, tennis at my mama spot”; expressing regret for letting infatuation get in the way of friendship — that it’s easy to forget he’s withheld the basic facts of his lover’s identity. He uses this same strategy when it comes to questions about his sexuality, a longstanding subject of fan curiosity. For a decade or more, he’s made explicit claims to queerness in his lyrics. On “I Ain’t Got Time!” (2017), for instance, he rhymes the couplet “Next line will have ’em like, ‘Whoa …’ / I’ve been kissing white boys since 2004.” On “Wilshire,” he boasts, “Men or women, it don’t matter: If I seen ’em, then I had ’em.” By staging a drama around his sexuality, saying aloud what others might have whispered, he liberates himself to live as he chooses.
Perhaps it’s this particular admixture of openness and mystique that accounts for the diversity and devotion of his fans. It’s rare for an artist 15 years into his career to be at the peak of his popularity, but here he is — and today, Tyler’s fans range from middle schoolers to baby boomers. That’s a testament to his appeal, though he has his own theory. “I don’t know if youth culture exists anymore,” he says. “I think a 42-year-old and a 15-year-old could have the same humor and style.” He thinks back on himself as a teen, caught up in “Crank That (Soulja Boy)” (2007), a song that many older hip-hop heads despised. (At the time, Ice-T said that the song “single-handedly killed hip-hop.”) “And now,” Tyler adds, “it’s like, people be on Twitter, 25 years’ age difference, talking about the same thing.”
TYLER IS AMONG the first generation of artists to harness the digital power of the internet to present themselves simultaneously as avatars and real people. As a result, much of his coming of age is archived on social media. His Twitter feed, stretching back 15 years, conveys strong opinions lightly held, petty beefs, fleeting interests and personal revelations. On July 29, 2010, he tweeted, “The only two people approval I want in this world is Pharrell Williams and my mothers.” Williams’s production duo, the Neptunes (with Chad Hugo), and his rock/rap side group, N.E.R.D. (with Hugo and Shae Haley), offered Tyler a chance to imagine a sound that blended hard-edge rap flows, expressively vulnerable singing and melodic instrumentation. “Oh, he’s had my approval since I met him [14 years ago],” says Williams when I tell him about Tyler’s tweet. “Our job as human beings in this world, certainly my job, is to spot the light in people. Tyler is one of those people that has the light. He can sing, he can dance, he can act.” At 52, Williams is still producing contemporary music (including Clipse’s hit album “Let God Sort Em Out,” released this past summer), while serving as the creative director of men’s wear for Louis Vuitton. He recognizes Tyler as a kindred spirit: “We share very similar DNA. We’re the same archetype.” That archetype — the cultural polymath, the sonic trickster, the cool nerd, however you define it — also includes what’s often left uncredited: their work ethic. “His work is his friendship,” Williams says. “To know his work is to be his friend. This is all I’ve ever known of him.”
But if Williams exudes grounded energy, Tyler remains a joyfully unstable force, responsive to his surroundings and attentive to spectacle — at times an instigator of it. Our four-hour breakfast is regularly interrupted, not by a smartphone (he never reaches for his) but by his mind. Sensory stimuli, both great and small, intrude upon his consciousness: a house finch that alights on a nearby table, the vibrant yellow blazer of a middle-aged woman walking into the restaurant, the viscosity of the maple syrup. Most of all, though, it’s the music that captures his ear, a playlist that bends toward 1990s and early 2000s R&B. At one point, Tyler redirects our conversation for a three-minute reverie on the genius of André 3000’s “The Love Below” (2003); another time, he stops to postulate about the prevalence of female-fronted R&B groups in the mid-90s to early 2000s: Groove Theory, City High, Lucy Pearl.
All of this is an expression of his love. In that way, Tyler embodies a modern interpretation of a storied type: the flâneur, what the French poet Charles Baudelaire described as “a gentleman stroller of the city streets,” who finds art in everyday experience. It’s seductive to associate Tyler with Baudelaire, the poet of “Les Fleurs du Mal” (1857) — “The Flowers of Evil” — a surreal collection that scandalized readers, leading to a public obscenity trial in Paris. Listen to “Sir Baudelaire,” the opening track of “Call Me if You Get Lost” (2021), and Tyler seems to embrace the comparison, dubbing himself “Tyler Baudelaire,” a “true connoisseur” well known to concierges at all the best hotels, “traveling the world, passport stamped up.” But the rapper, in fact, has other references in mind: the Baudelaire children, the resourceful orphans at the center of Lemony Snicket’s young adult books “A Series of Unfortunate Events” (1999-2006). Across 13 novels, the Baudelaires grow from innocence to experience, much like Tyler has.
Still, Tyler carries something of the poet too. In his 1863 essay “The Painter of Modern Life,” Baudelaire describes the consummate artist as “a kaleidoscope gifted with consciousness, responding to each one of its movements and reproducing the multiplicity of life.” Propelled by unquenched curiosity and a lust for beauty, he craves the company of the crowd while crafting art in solitude. “He is an ‘I’ with an insatiable appetite for the ‘non-I,’” Baudelaire writes, “at every instant rendering and explaining it in pictures more living than life itself, which is always unstable and fugitive.” In his unstable and fugitive art — from the shock antics of his youth to the confessional lyrics that somehow render him even more unknowable — Tyler models a way of engaging with the unstable and fugitive qualities of himself and of the world around him. His art is both public spectacle and personal sanctuary. “I’m in a place because of all the chaos [in the world] where I find a settled peace in the things I love,” he says. “Yeah, that’s where I’m at.”
Hair by Ronnie McCoy III. Makeup by Grace Ahn for Day One. Set design by Spencer Vrooman. Producer: Connect the Dots. Lighting tech: Harris Mizrahi. Photo assistants: Fred Mitchell, Luis Ramirez. Digital tech: Adam Corbett. Tailor: Hasmik Kourinian. Set designer’s assistants: Christian Duff, Roland Cano, Bryan McGovern Wilson. Stylist’s assistants: Jose Cordero, Ruby Bravo, Damien Lloyd
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