Eyeing the ascendant pop stars of the moment, he promised to “stab Bruno Mars in his goddamn esophagus” and waved off B.o.B with an anti-gay slur - crude Marshall Mathers mimicry that did not exactly scan as a stroke of genius. The lyrics were a similarly sharpened take on Tyler’s usual material, a mix of wounded reflections on his absent father and spiteful one-liners designed to provoke any and everyone.
#TYLER THE CREATOR GOBLIN YOUTUBE CRACKED#
The production here was raw too, but - despite a lack of hooks and Tyler’s claims that he made the beat in eight minutes as a joke - also bright and piercing and professional: a low end that cracked and rumbled like the best New York boom-bap, a squealing synth melody like DIY G-funk, shrill high-pitched stabs out of a horror movie. 10, “Yonkers” made it clear that 19-year-old Tyler Okonma was capable of much more than the grimy lo-fi beats and grisly baritone grumbles that first caught people’s attention. I probably screened it for at least a dozen friends too, just giddily loaded it up and waited to see how they’d react. How many times did you watch the “Yonkers” video? For me it must have been at least 100. And then, one week in February 2011, the excitement surrounding the group went nuclear. As Andrew Nosnitsky later explained in a Billboard cover story, the distinct lo-fi sound and meticulous iconography were “effectively made in a vacuum by a bunch of hyperactive teenagers… Odd Future was a fully formed and self-sustained entity before anyone in the music industry had even heard of it.” At their tangled network of social media pages and their notoriously chaotic live shows - particularly one at NYC’s Webster Hall in November 2010 that reportedly packed in the tastemakers and A&R reps - the group was making converts at an impressive pace, Kanye West among them. They had developed such distinct chemistry, such a clear point of view, and such a fleshed-out internal logic that comparisons to Wu-Tang were inevitable. OFWGKTA was less a hot new band than a whole alternate universe to be immersed in. We’d later learn Earl’s mother had shipped him off to boarding school in Samoa to distance him from an environment that had him rapping cavalierly about rape and piling drugs into a blender in music videos, but at the time his absence accented the burgeoning Odd Future hysteria with a note of mystique. Subsequent releases like Earl Sweatshirt’s EARL, MellowHype’s Blackendwhite, and the full-group showcase Radical accelerated their momentum, as did Earl’s disappearance just as he and his friends were becoming an underground sensation.
The electricity surrounding the group in those days was impossible to deny, a breathless escalation that arguably peaked with the release of Tyler’s official debut album Goblin 10 years ago today.Įver since Tyler released his Bastard mixtape on Christmas 2009, the edgelord hypebeast skateboarders known as Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All had been gradually building buzz, accumulating a devoted core of rowdy disaffected teenagers and gawking music critics in search of the next big thing. In the moment, it just felt like rupture. Looking back, you can see parts of Odd Future’s ethos imprinted on a whole generation of cool art kids, visionary outsiders, and aspiring next big things. Tyler, The Creator’s obsessions were plainly evident - Eminem and the Neptunes, Jackass and Adventure Time, skate videos and streetwear brands - yet he and his crew were taking these elements somewhere unmistakably new. I was 27 when Odd Future popped off - too old to think of them as my peers, but young enough to tap into that old teenage excitement about a transformative force sending shockwaves through popular music. As a music fan, it’s not often you realize you’re witnessing a revolution in real time. Hopping aboard the Odd Future hype train in the early months of 2011 was exhilarating, and maybe inevitable.