In a recent chat with Zane Lowe, he revealed that he was keen to get Nicki Minaj on the second verse of I Ain’t Got Time to open his music up to a new audience while also tweeting that he wanted a No 1 album “sooooo bad”. He’s made it clear in the past that more mainstream success is of high importance to him. It’s a different way of poking (his justification for using the word faggot was that it “hits and hurts people”) and the delivery has been formatted to make it more palatable for a wider audience. There’s clearly something fetishistic for Tyler about homosexuality and the latest bout of gay references could just be a more tempered iteration of calling everyone a faggot or equating gay with stupid. When queried about it, he claimed to be “gay as fuck” and said his friends were used to him “being gay”, but when asked outright, he denied it. In a Rolling Stone profile from 2015, the journalist Ernest Baker noted the constant references to being gay amid the banter of Tyler and his entourage, causing him to wonder what exactly was at the root.

In the past, when he’s been questioned about his sexuality, his answers have been able to fit into either school of thought, although probably more easily into the latter. I TRIED TO COME OUT THE DAMN CLOSET LIKE FOUR DAYS AGO AND NO ONE CARED HAHAHHAHAHA- Tyler, The Creator April 13, 2015īut what are we really witnessing here? Is this a young man’s earnest struggle to come to terms with his sexuality in a public forum, awkwardly using humor as a defense mechanism to protect himself from a potentially unforgiving rap community? Or is this just another example of a button-pushing attention-seeker, ridiculing the gay experience for puerile effect? Without explicit clarification from Tyler himself, it’s difficult to define exactly what’s at play. Similarly, fans have been confounded by lyrics that seem to suggest that Tyler might have been trolling us all along. Ocean, a longtime collaborator of Tyler’s and fellow member of the hip-hop troupe Odd Future, caused speculation when journalists noted frequent usage of male pronouns in love songs such as Bad Religion and Forrest Gump, leading to Ocean’s powerful statement on his sexuality soon after. This progression has come to a crescendo with his latest album, the dreamily melancholic Flower Boy, the title of which potentially acts as a clue to what might be his most controversial statement yet.Ĭould the rapper who used the word faggot, or other anti-gay variations, 213 times on his debut album actually be gay or bisexual himself? Since his latest release leaked two weeks early, rumors have been circulating online, similar to those that emanated from pre-release listening parties of Frank Ocean’s Channel Orange five years prior. I’ve followed his career and noticed a maturity develop, a softening of sorts, the decision to opt for woozy stoner romance over grim and graphic bile. It’s based on things I made when I was super young, when no one was listening.” “I’m bummed out because it’s like, dude, I’m not homophobic.

”I’m getting treated like a terrorist,” he told the Guardian in 2015. They’ve even propelled him into legal troubles after he was prevented from performing in both the UK and Australia, labelled as a threat. I’ve found this especially problematic with the music of Tyler, the Creator, the 26-year-old provocateur whose lyrics have often aimed to shock and repulse, whether addressing violence against women (“Punch a bitch in her mouth just for talkin’ shit”) or his apparent disgust at gay men (“Come take a stab at it, faggot, I pre-ordered your casket”).

Tyler the creator flower boy