Tyler has been on a generational run with his past few albums! Flower Boy showed a clear maturity jump from the more child-like music that he previously made. While Flower Boy also got him more commercial appeal than ever before, Igor is where his popularity really started to go from huge cult following to a mainstream star. It was definitely weird to see because that album doesn’t feel accessible at all, outside of lead single “Earfquake”. In my personal opinion, it was his artistic peak though! I loved how cohesive the sounds were, but also how they played out alongside the lyrical story that was being told throughout the album. After that highly conceptual work, we got a pretty straightforward rap album with Call Me If You Get Lost. That album may have lost a bit of steam for me in the past couple years, but I still love it and think it’s one of the best projects of 2021. After the longer than normal wait time of 3.5 years, we finally got the newest Tyler, The Creator album last month!
Chromakopia takes clear inspiration from Mr. Morale and The Big Steppers. Tyler himself has talked about that album multiple times and how Kendrick’s vulnerability and ability to still sound hungry when he’s on the top of the game was inspiring for him. Tyler even joked that he had promoted the album more online than Kendrick did! That vulnerability that Kendrick used in that album carried over into how open Tyler was with this album. We have gotten some looks into Tyler’s psyche before, but it’s mainly through either a character or a seemingly embellished love story. Rarely has he ever talked about anything in his personal life directly to us without any gimmick, until now.
Over the course of the album, he talks about how he accidentally got a girl pregnant, him being in polyamorous relationships, him trying to break up a marriage, how he feels about finally seeing signs of age in himself and people he loves, and a lot about him almost becoming a father changed his relationship with his parents. Now, there are a couple times where Tyler is arguably too personal, like how he was describing his specific sexual preferences on “Judge Judy”. In fact, that song might be my least favorite Tyler song in almost a decade. I don’t mind it thematically, but the execution isn’t the most enjoyable. But if we talk about anything else personal that Tyler does on this album, it usually works! Not only does it work, but you can see his perspective on things change in real time.
For example, let’s look at how he mentioned trying to break up someone’s marriage. It was first mentioned on one of the album’s bangers “Sticky”. The whole song is a celebration about achieving stardom while staying true to themselves, but when it comes to Tyler’s verse, he has the line, “A homewrecker, I’ve been f*****n who I wanna.” It’s almost triumphant the way he talks about this, but on the very next song, the idea is flipped into a negative. “Take Your Mask Off” features four verses where Tyler looks at different people who are wearing a mask and how they should metaphorically take it off to live as their true self. The first three verses are about nameless people, but the final verse is clearly about himself. In all honesty, it might be the best verse that Tyler’s ever written! I don’t have time to go over every little reference to his life in the verse, but he explicitly says in the middle of the verse, “Dog, how dare you try to ruin her marriage.” Now, I know it doesn’t work the same isolated from the rest of the verse, but this is one in a long line of things he mentions where it sounds like he’s yelling at himself in the mirror. He’s clearly changed his mind on how he feels about going after this woman.
While Tyler is personal about a lot of his life in this album, the biggest revelation is his feelings on parenthood, both as a son himself and as a possible parent. “Hey Jane” talks about how he almost became a father. The first verse is from his perspective, but he also provides the woman’s perspective in the second verse. Both verses are filled with mixed feelings about the prospect of becoming parents together, but in the end, it appears that they ended up getting an abortion. In the aforementioned track “Take Your Mask Off”, he also has direct lines about why he didn’t want to become a parent, “Boy, you selfish as fuck, that's really why you scared of bein' a parent. Boy, that therapy needed, I'd dare you to seek it, but I'd lose a bet.” It appears that in order to feel good about possibly becoming a parent, Tyler needed to go back and see how his childhood affected him. It seems like it worked as well. Heck, it feels like his mom is speaking on every track of the album! But of course, if you know Tyler, you know his relationship with his father is more important. Or more explicitly, his lack of relationship with his father. All of the songs about his father before have been adamant about how he doesn’t need him. Now, it’s not that “Like Him” is Tyler reaching out to his father, but it shows him finally accepting his father’s disappearance. He seems to come to the conclusion that it’s hard to picture yourself as a father when your own father left your life before you ever knew him. He’s clearly worried that he’ll end up repeating the cycle of leaving, as evident by how he talks about how he thinks he’s too selfish for kids. Even in the final song, he says how having kids isn’t on his wishlist right now and reiterates that he’s too selfish for that. Not everyone has that type of self awareness, and even though many people would argue that being too selfish is something to change, at least he is aware of who he is!
I think Chromakopia is eventually going to fall into the same fate as Mr Morale. Not everyone wants to engage with themselves to this degree of introspection, and even for those that do, they don’t usually want to live in that place 24/7. People don’t always want to hear about you deciding whether or not you want an abortion. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, it just is what it is. But who knows, it seems like there’s enough people that want to see it because most of the tour sold out pretty quickly. Even the Milwaukee show is almost entirely sold out, with only a few single seats left (unless you want to sit behind the stage). When Kendrick came around a couple years ago, his show didn’t sell out anywhere close to as quick as Tyler’s did. I’m not sure if that’s just because Tyler has a larger dedicated fanbase or maybe more people are going to shows now than in 2022, but I’m glad that the show is going to be epic and people are engaging with this album! Who knows, maybe Kendrick’s vulnerability enabled Tyler to do the same thing and be more accepted. Either way, I’m glad it seems like people are really connecting with this Tyler, The Creator album because having music this personal be this commercially successful is wild. I’m not sure where he’ll go from here, but let’s just enjoy and digest this incredible new album from Tyler!
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