On ‘Chromakopia,’ Tyler, the Creator Has to Deal With the Truth
Tyler, the Creator’s life is a movie. Or, at least, that’s the impression he’s given us over the course of nearly 15 years. His debut mixtape, 2009’s Bastard, introduced us to its cast of characters — from Tyler’s pitched-down voice, serving as his therapist, Dr. TC, to Wolf Haley, or Ace. From the start, his origin story has followed the hallmarks of the so-called trauma plot, where a central emotional fissure is essential to our main character’s struggles. Bastard’s focus, Tyler’s turbulent home life (most notably his father’s absence), is delivered with a rawness that would become the 33-year-old artist’s trademark. With his latest, Chromakopia, he reaches the conclusion of what feels like a career-long narrative arc, except even with Tyler as the director, real life doesn’t play out like in the movies. Throughout Chromakopia, we find Tyler dealing with aging in a world very much of his own creation.
Since Bastard, Tyler has been constructing, and reconstructing, versions of himself — Tyler Baudelaire on Call Me if You Get Lost, Igor on IGOR, Flower Boy on Flower Boy — as a means of understanding the different facets of his own personality. No matter where fans’ starting point is, they’ve so far been able to slot themselves into the story in one way or another. Ahead of Chromakopia’s release, a popular trend on TikTok featured fans sharing photos of themselves in various Tyler eras, be it Flower Boy, Call Me if You Get Lost, or for us aging millennials, Bastard. The implication, that these fans grew up alongside Tyler, is in fact a feature of his success. Tyler is in a league perhaps only occupied by the likes of Kanye West and Drake, where multiple generations have been able to say they grew up alongside them. Now, he’s released his most sonically polished, introspective record to date.
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Album opener “St. Chroma” introduces Chromakopia’s narrative conceit, recordings from Tyler’s mother, dispensing the kind of life advice that resonates in your early thirties. Tyler teased the track ahead of the album’s release just over a week ago, introducing this latest sonic palette: a familiar constellation of sounds that arrives with a level of precision that seems final, as if Tyler’s now seen his signature sound to completion. Tyler’s penchant for angelic-sounding string arrangements is at its most potent on the track, with vocals from Daniel Caesar, while, lyrically, he’s vibrant and dynamic, switching up his flow as he brags from a place less material and more metaphysical. “I ain’t never had a doubt inside me,” he raps in a whisper. “And if I ever told you that I did, I’m fuckin’ lyin’.”
Tyler’s life has long played a role in his world-building, and the blurred line at one point felt revelatory. The early days of Odd Future on Tumblr coincided with an internet-wide shift toward sincerity and a kind of emotional transparency. Though, these days, as Tyler laments on “NOID,” the type of sharing expected online has crossed into a realm even he seems uncomfortable with. A general uneasiness follows him throughout the album. “Darling, I” features Tyler fending off monogamy, an inversion of the obsessive love songs of his youth. Now, forever seems too long to be with any one person. And while his perspective is furnished with classic boasts like comparing his different luxury cars to different romantic partners, you get the sense that there’s a sadness lurking underneath.
Among the tantalizing autobiographical details on Chromakopia is a supposed accidental pregnancy with an older woman, outlined on “Hey Jane,” a possible double entendre with a telehealth abortion clinic. The song is interesting in the abstract, told through the perspective of Tyler and said mystery woman, contemplating whether to keep the baby. Tyler awkwardly runs through the boy math of childbirth, though he arrives at some version of ally-ship when, catching himself complaining about potentially having a child, remembers that women exist. ”You gotta deal with all the mental and the physical change,” he raps. “All the heaviest emotions, and the physical pain/Just to give the kid the man last name?” The song feels like the confessional early raps of West, who’d deliver street parables on everything from love, shopping, and religion. Except Tyler’s focus still feels too singular for his more personal tracks to ring universal.
When other artists accompany him — like on the infectious “Sticky,” where Sexyy Red, GloRilla, and Lil Wayne team up for a posse cut of the ages — Tyler’s able to balance off the energy of others more readily. “Balloon,” featuring a red-hot Doechii, is probably the best example. Riding a sample of the Japanese jazz artist Akiko Yano’s “To Ki Me Ki,” the song is as close as we get to a new Tyler on the album, experimenting with different deliveries and sounding enlivened as ever. Doechii’s verse, featuring the off-the-wall line “I’ll air this bitch out like a queef,” is a case study in what makes her one of the most exciting rappers out right now.
Sonically, Chromakopia is well constructed and thoughtfully layered and for the most part complements the album’s storytelling. “Take Your Mask Off” is an elegantly constructed flip on a classic rap trope, from West’s “All Falls Down” to Kendrick Lamar’s “Sing About Me, I’m Dying of Thirst.” Tyler takes aim at the masks people wear to hide from their true selves, evoking a middle-class gangster and a closeted religious zealot. He eventually flips the lens on himself, poking holes in his own mythology, rapping, “Claim you never wore a mask and how you don’t get embarrassed/Boy, you selfish as fuck, that’s really why you scared of bein’ a parent.” It’s Tyler in a classic rap bag that makes his friendship with Lamar make sense, and a good reminder that, throughout his career, he’s taken the craft as seriously as the genre’s staunchest defenders.
You could see Chromakopia as Tyler’s Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers, an album where Lamar unpacked the contradictions of his own life which, up to then, had similarly played a central role in his music and fame. On “Like Him,” as many fans have pointed out, one of the founding myths of Tyler’s character, that his dad walked out on him, appears to have been more complicated than it seems. “It was my fault. Not him, ’cause he always wanted to be there for you,” we hear Tyler’s mother tell him at the song’s end.
As with other superstars of his generation, faced with the shelf life of their own brands, the Tyler of Chromakopia finds him making an effort to deconstruct some of his own narratives. For longtime fans, it’s an exciting proposition, one that opens up a new world of possibilities.
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