Tyler, The Creator – ‘Nightmare’

After all the hype subsided and I managed to get myself one of the highly coveted review spots at Odd Future’s sell-out Sydney shows, I decided it was probably time to listen to ringleader Tyler, The Creator’s label debut with a fresh set of ears. The problem with the Internet sometimes, especially in the case of highly blogged artists or, you know, Radiohead, is that your mind is made up for you before you even have a chance to listen to a record. This was no more true than with Tyler’s sophomore record (and his first for one of our favourite labels on Earth, XL) Goblin, on which every person with a keyboard had cast their opinion before I’d heard a note outside of the positively mind-blowing ‘Yonkers‘. And while I hadn’t been thoroughly convinced by OFWGKTA’s -pretty sure my grandfather is now the only person in the world who doesn’t know that acronym- live performance, nineteen year old Tyler’s relentless energy was one of the undeniable highlights of the evening.

So Goblin is patchy in places and utterly degraded in others. It has all the violent rape and stalker fantasies everyone was talking about like they never bought a copy of Eminem’s ‘Stan’ where the subject locked his pregnant girlfriend in the trunk of his car and drove off a bridge, or anything by Limp Bizkit or Korn, the former having released one of the most popular tunes of my adolescence which was characterised by how many f-bombs it could fit into three verses (for the record, it was forty-six). Goblin’s entire tracklist is framed by mock discussions between Tyler and his therapist, who incidentally has his voiced pitch-adjusted to sound like the devil, and it’s this voice that opens ‘Nightmare’, by far my favourite song on the record because you get a real insight into the kid’s pathology. With that same ominous two-note bass treatment in the verse that made ‘Yonkers’ so thrilling and some modern R&B inflections coming through in the toybox ostinato that hits in the chorus (going deliberately out of key at the end, which adds to the sinster tone it’s going for), it’s a blank space for the head of the Wolf Gang to delve into some really interesting stuff, like growing up fatherless, not knowing what a home-cooked dinner was and being devoted to his friends because they’re the only family he’s got. “Life is a movie and you’re just a prop,” he says in one section, before really letting loose: “Love I don’t get none/That’s why I’m so hostile to the kids that get some/My father called me to tell me he loved me/I have a better chance of getting Taylor Swift to fuck me.”

Whether Tyler uses all those other attention-grabbing lyrics as a front is irrelevant; from a rap perspective, this tune is solid. It plays on words, wrings new meanings out of old phrases and most importantly, abolishes pretense and personas to actually make a point. He writes and produces this stuff himself, which people forget is still not as easy as screwing around on Garageband and hitting record, and the time and energy invested, at least on this song, is palpable. The nursery-rhyme strains of the chorus aren’t for show; this may just be Tyler’s ode to the childhood he never really had. And though he may be the latest in a long line of adult’s worst nightmares that started with Elvis, took a detour with Sex Pistols and also included Marilyn Manson, he may just have the verbal staying power that his contemporaries lack. Man enough to admit that he doesn’t like getting drunk and he can’t smoke because of his asthma, gangster enough to take notes from Biggie’s suicide handbook and smart enough that he’s already created about six different versions of himself at an age when Bob Dylan hadn’t even started rhyming, let alone lying to the press. “My only problem is death,” he opens “fuck heaven I ain’t giving no religion respect.” See? He hates everyone equally.

Tyler, The Creator – ‘Nightmare’

More strange futures here.