Last month marked the tenth anniversary since the release of Tyler, the Creator’s first label-signed album, Goblin. This renowned artist’s mainstream success of recent years has focused on experimental pop mixing and rich production to encapture loneliness and heartbreak, with Igor and Flower Boy seamlessly accumulating various colourful elements of jazz and R&B. However, should one decide to retrace his growth and witness the fruition of his colourful career, you may be a little surprised as to what you will find.
As a skateboarding youth willing to experiment with the influence of artists like N.E.R.D and MF DOOM, Tyler, The Creator formed the teenage hip-hop group Odd Future in the late 2000s, who released various online mixtapes and marked a new rebellious age of internet rappers. The creative sparks that flew from Odd Future’s young bonds resulted in some of the most infamous and controversial material from the last decade, as well as a career boost for three of hip-hop’s most popular modern musicians. The young teenage Earl Sweatshirt ripped onto the scene with his Earl mixtape in 2010, utilising complex rhyming schemes and tenfold the explicit nature of projects like Eminem’s Relapse to create memorable lines and talented flows:
I'm a hot and bothered astronaut Crashing while jacking off To buffering vids of Asher Roth Eattin' apple sauce Sent to Earth to poke Catholics in the ass with saws And knock blunt ashes into their caskets And laugh it off
Tyler was next to follow, with his debut mixtape Bastard in 2010 being a raw expression of teenage angst. With arresting self-produced beats and spitting flows, Tyler went on to rap tasteful storytelling and metaphors of rebelling against society’s standards, creating a serial-killer alter-ego that abducts women, and generally flinging whatever punchy bars came to him. The concept of his therapist, Dr TC, was also introduced in Bastard. Here, a deep-voiced alter-ego of Tyler’s (Tyler’s Conscious) would take him on various sessions to understand why he’s been misbehaving at school, leading to Tyler shouting fits of repressed rage to TC’s disgust. After Bastard’s success with critics, whilst also not escaping a tidal wave of controversy over his lyrics, Tyler followed up with his much-anticipated second release in 2011, Goblin. Would this release have been the uncaringly rip-roaring voice of the future as it was hyped to be?
Goblin sparked a giant leap from the dark corners of the web and into stardom for Odd Future. With Tyler’s original drives for his rageful creativity now being boosted with paranoia from critics and his newfound need to meet expectations, Tyler’s decisions on this revolutionary album remain interesting to this day. With the album cover showing a 19-year-old Buffalo Bill, reflecting the rebellious nature of the also 19-years-old Tyler, abundant loud basses, blaring synths and angry vocals signified a new portrayal of this teenager’s insecurities, paranoias and drives for the future to musical life.
Opening with the title track, Dr TC welcomes Tyler back to therapy and, as Tyler gives a rundown of the recent struggles in his life, criticises him for faking his content about murder and suicide when he would be too much of a coward to do any of the mentioned acts in real life. This ignites the untamed flame for the rest of the album, delving into rapped middle-fingers at critics and honest confessions of loneliness and heartbreak. A pinnacle of this being found in the hit single, Yonkers, sporting an iconic gritty beat and a lyrical experimentation into the split alter egos of the creator. Many iconic imaginative lines gave contradicting viewpoints from Tyler himself and his murdering alias, Wolf Haley:
I'm a fucking walking paradox No I'm not threesomes with a fucking triceratops Reptar, rapping as I'm mocking deaf rock stars Wearing synthetic wigs made of Anwar's dreadlocks
In highlights like these, Tyler combines meditations on unexpected bouts with fame with expressing his own vulnerabilities and need to be offensive. The song Nightmare, can be considered one of the most brutally-honest rap songs of the last decade. Rather than fiddling with random metaphors, Tyler embeds a ghostly finger-snapping beat and expresses all the darkest OCD thoughts and urges of an isolated teenage mind, desperately spouting thoughts of family violence and the depressed view of losing time and the things he values, as well as missing his best friend that was sent away. His rapping on this legendary track ranges from his iconic method of vivid storytelling to paint out visions of violence, to metaphorical emotive descriptions of being a spirit wandering unseen through life, to unfiltered spat attacks on critics and superficial fans who only leaped onto the Odd Future discussion due to lyrics about rape and murder while completely disregarding the underlying elements in the songs.
I haven't got around to telling my mom shit Cause I don't know how to All I want is her support, whenever the fight's at home When mommy cusses out cousin, some knifes get shown Now she's really fuckin' pissed, so the knives get thrown And hit her in her fucking neck, now her throat's all gone Looking like a fucking monster from the Twilight Zone
Goblin only further delves into Tyler’s emotional side, with songs like Analog and Her plainly expressing his need for companionship and to cherish his youth. These songs express heartbreak over a girl who gets feelings but then gets back with her ex at the last second, as well as Tyler inviting a girl to cherish a sunset together at a lake. This can be seen as a gateway to the more recent parts of Tyler’s discography, abandoning shock-factor with lines like ‘rape a pregnant bitch and tell my friends I had a threesome,’ and adopting more emotional lyrics with chilled beats. Even the song ‘She,’ which shines as an eerie R&B ballad with a returning formulae of a stalking protagonist, also shows Tyler’s yearning for affection amongst hypnotic synthesisers and vocals from rising-star Frank Ocean.
However, this album has undoubtedly shown its age, even as a musical example of teenage angst. By observing Tyler’s much-improved production skills on recent albums, even the following album Wolf two years after, with more tasteful jazz and pop progression, Goblin’s more immature and crude mixing now shows. Cheap synths and backing vocals that tried so hard to sound apocalyptic and menacing are scattered around this 73 minute journey, showing the care that must be put into one’s mixing for the lyrics to shine. Tyler also exemplifies on Goblin a key weakness that held back some of his potential for years: his lack of subtlety and awkward grasp on what counts as offensive. While tracks like Tron Cat and Sandwitches excellently encapture the uncaringly-offensive nature of Tyler’s alter egos as live show roarers and musical guides on how to piss old people off, others like Transylvania and Radicals do quite the opposite. In these songs, Tyler screams lines he perceives as offensive and worthy of overthrowing the system and instead end up laughably corny and would likely now be his equivalent of looking back at one’s old Facebook posts.
On first listen, the song Radicals can be considered the album’s biggest weak spot and diminishing to Tyler’s credibility as a youthful voice of angst. Feeling the need to open a song about, quite simply, not giving a fuck with a wary disclaimer and then embarking on an awkwardly-shouted chant of ‘kill people, burn shit, fuck school!’ with wobbly synths and vanilla lyrics about hating college and defiance getting one’s sweet spot hard can be considered a sloppy parody of Eminem’s early work. However, when I looked up ‘can offensive lyrics get you banned from university?’, the first ten Google results linked to an event of a 21-year-old student getting kicked from South Alabama University and being arrested for a terrorist threat after writing the Radicals hook on a flip chart only two years ago. So maybe Tyler was oddly ahead of his time in this regard.
But in other areas of this album, Tyler made it clear he was still a trolling teenager loudmouth who knew his mainstream outbreak and talent peak were inevitable, thus resulting in ugly-aged tracks like B.S.D and Boppin’ Bitch, where he dilutes the album to savour a few low-effort moments to screw with critics. Thus, hilariously terrible non-rhyming staccato flows to describe receiving oral sex are adopted, with masterpieces like ‘Now I’m at. A. Fucking. Clinic. Because my dick. Is. Swollen. And keeps. Itching. I’ma kill this bitch.’ Ah, Odd Future. Why did it have to end so soon?
With this acknowledgement of future success in mind, Goblin also contains a few new but unpolished elements that would also pave way for Tyler’s refined music of recent years. The amateurish piano instrumental on Fish and the flat synthesised interlude of AU79, while not having aged well, shows a defining trait of the artist at hand: the willingness to dabble and experiment while being able to openly-admit to not being an expert. Some tracks on Goblin still stand as iconic heavy-hitting artifacts of Tyler’s accumulated experience at the time, others have become less enjoyable but are now observable as gold in the process of mining. This is also shown on later projects, such as PartyIsntOver and Find Your Wings having disorganised and unmemorable synth and jazz melodies but showing a willingness to expand on unfamiliar musical element to inspire future projects.
Goblin remains a vital turning point in the history of rap as a catalyst for a vibrant new wave of young internet rappers. A meditation into a disturbed teenager’s mind through fictional therapy sessions and murderous alter egos with hate-fuelled vocals and creative wordplay make for some incredibly raw musical experiences. While Tyler may have continued his ultra-explicit lyrical traditions from Bastard to express dark emotions he found difficult to portray, the few moments where he decided to show his honest side as a lonely misfitting youth also made for some of Goblin’s exceptional moments that stood the test of time. The overarching styles and music that encaptured the soul of Odd Future, unsurprisingly, had a huge impact and connection over a wide audience, inspiring them to expand their musical horizons and create their own material. But while the album is indeed flawed in its hit-and-miss production, occasional divergence into effortless nonsense, and lyrics that range from ground-breaking to outdatedly immature, this only makes Goblin more fascinating as a benchmark in the development and maturation of one of modern music’s most renowned artists.
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