Posts tagged Odd Future.

 Yesss. 

Another great read on Tyler the Creator with a decidedly more wtf-tone.

Another interesting piece about Tyler the Creator and OFWGKTA.

Discuss.

…The critical discourse that surrounds Odd Future is already internal to the lyrics. From Tyler’s constant rejection of the term “horrorcore” to calling out Pitchfork by name, Goblin is as much about its own reception as anything else. The insight that Tyler cares about how he’s received is not an interpretation, it’s the literal meaning of the lyrics; “Mr. I-Don’t-Give-A-Fuck” plays both sides of his contradictions. Tyler’s critics underestimate the degree to which the art already understands the ways in which it’s misunderstood.

But more than just missing Tyler’s perceptive acuity, this kind of criticism forecloses the chance to look at Odd Future’s music as fiction, to see it as an attempt at truth, as artists’ creation rather than the simple abstraction of their selves. Taken through this lens – one afforded gratis to novelists and Lady Gaga – Odd Future’s fantasies of rape and murder belong not simply to them, but to the society in which they’re embedded. Odd Future is so threatening as art because American society has a problem drawing a distinction between violent youthful alienation as a developmental stage (witness “emo”) and the moments when it spills out as acts of death (school shootings, teenage suicides, self-mutilation). Odd Future – and none of its members more than Tyler – shatters the wall between, drawing a straight line from unrequited puppy love to rape, from compulsory schooling to suicide.

Odd Future aren’t the only artists to tackle this disturbing closeness, but as rappers and young people, critics refuse them the customary artistic distance between author and product

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As Tyler puts it in an interview: “It’s fucking art. Why when a fucking black kid says it it’s such a big fucking deal?”

It’s out of this therapist’s office that Odd Future’s music emerges, half-joking about being half-joking. Tyler used the framing device of a self-voiced school counselor in his debut mixtape Bastard, and returns to the technique in Goblin, the first Wolf Gang album sold in stores. Even though some of Tyler’s slogans (“Kill people/Burn shit/Fuck school”) are reminiscent of Pink Floyd’s adolescent rejectionism, his adult antagonist is no authoritarian. The counselor’s attitude is more like Tyler’s critics, spouting knowing condescension with a dose of liberal tolerance. As the ‘two’ of them discuss Tyler’s fame in the album’s title track intro, he defends his colorful language: “You’re gonna have to cut down on that ‘faggot’ word, that’s very, that’s a bad word-” “I’m not homophobic” “I mean, I don’t think you are-” “Faggot.”

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Odd Future is the articulation of antagonism in a nation that swears it doesn’t have any. Against Glee’s sing-song commercial pluralism and Gaga’s tolerant biological determinism, Wolf Gang screams that a world with so much suffering must have deeper conflicts, of the existential fear that being “born this way” is the problem. This contemporary collective version of Dostoevsky’s underground man is a rebuke to Dan Savage’s state-approved historical view “it gets better.” If adulthood is free from the agonies of youth, why do adults produce such violently sad children? When Earl calls himself a “rapist in training,” asking if he hates women is the wrong question. The inventor of adolescence G. Stanley Hall wrote that “youth is prophecy,” and Odd Future is no exception, they’re the dark promise of the shape of things to come.

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Tyler’s music is a radical critique, justifiably blaming his elders for the murderous voices in the back of his generation’s head. The papering over of America’s social antagonisms frays at its young edge, where the contradictions are still apparent.

Discuss.