The Curious Case of Tyler the Creator
Kali H Grecia
The American rapper, musical producer, and fashion designer Tyler the Creator is an enigma. Since the start of his career, he has been a confusing figure who has made unapologetically controversial claims that could easily get him cancelled. For example, in 2011, Colorlines published an article that slammed Tyler for his homophobic lyrics on “Goblin.”1 Of course, we now know that the issue is complicated by Tyler’s queer identity. After all, on “I Ain’t Got Time” he openly said, “…I’ve been kissing white boys since 2004.” Faithful fans could have probably inferred this by taking Tyler’s testimony seriously,2 but the confusion concerning this aspect of Tyler’s identity is just one among many. Let’s spell out some others.
Tyler the Creator is Problematic
Case 1
On the song “Yonkers,” Tyler says, “I’m a [F-word] walking paradox, no, I’m not.” In this sentence, the second line recursively modifies the first, intensifying the assertion that the opening bar began with. How can we make sense of Tyler’s assertion? Is he a paradox, or isn’t he? On the one hand, since paradox involves apparent contradiction, it would not be paradoxical to invoke it here. To make the paradox consistent would be for it to cease being paradoxical. On the other hand, denying that he is a walking paradox would only serve to performatively prove this claim because that is precisely what a walking paradox would say. The paradox proves itself to be resistant to any analysis by a binary ‘yes’ or ‘no’ logic.
Case 2
In the music video for the paradoxically titled song, “Sorry not Sorry,”Tyler’s original stage persona violently kills Tyler Baudelaire, his most developed alter-ego to date. What was the significance of this killing? Was Tyler committing literal career suicide in this music video, or was he destroying his alter-ego to make space for something new to emerge?
Case 3
In “St. Chroma” Tyler says, “Give a [F-word] about tradition stop impressin’ the dead.” Yet, the rhythmic stepping sounds that form the sonic backdrop of this song invite us to hear it as a slave-march. The imagery in the music video for this song strengthens this invitation because Tyler’s new alter-ego, St. Chroma, marches a set of faceless black figures wearing matching uniforms and gold chains across a field to their own destruction. If this interpretation holds, then the initial assertion appears to be constantly contradicted at each moment by these stepping sounds. For, the slave-march is itself a reference to the tradition that was forced upon previous African-American people that Tyler attempts to negate through the initial rejection.
The Feeling of Being a Problem
How can we make sense of the problems and paradoxes in Tyler’s music? Is he just being an irresponsible artist, or is there something deeper going on? I think that the former claim is far too easy. For one thing, it is easy to condemn something we do not understand. For another, it is even easier to condemn something that cannot be understood by its very nature. This is the problem with the ineffable: It cannot be effed.
One way to approach the problematic nature of Tyler’s work without taking its mysteriousness away is through the thought of the African-American philosopher and sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois. In the Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois articulates the concept of double-consciousness,3 explaining it as the feeling of being a problem.
The feeling of being a problem is the lived contradiction that Du Bois identifies with the experience of being both African and American in a historical context that could not combine these two identities into one. To sum this up, he says, “One ever feels his twoness,–an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body.” Even though African-American slaves were freed in Du Bois’ time, they still faced significant socio-economic and legal conditions that kept them oppressed through the Jim Crow laws.4 As such, African-Americans in this time constantly viewed themselves through the gaze of another, evaluating their lives through a distorted perspective that could not see them for their true selves. So, the best way for Du Bois to adequately articulate the confusing nature of this lived experience was to express it confusingly, thus capturing the strife that he experienced.
An analogy can help to illustrate this idea. Capturing a confusing experience is a bit like trying to take a photo of a hazy morning. If what you are trying to capture is itself unclear, then it would be misleading to try to clarify it to accurately capture it. So too with the experience that Du Bois was trying to capture. Similarly, if Tyler is trying to capture a confusing lived experience, then it makes sense that he would do it confusingly. And, … what better way is there to capture confusion than to use contradictions creatively!
Recent research in Queer theory suggests that Du Bois’ concept of double-consciousness can also be extended to the kind of inner-experience of people whose identity does not align with the gender that they were assigned at birth.5 If this is the case, then another experience that Tyler could be exploring through the creative use of contradictions is the kind of double consciousness that comes with the instability of gender identity. Tyler eloquently sums this instability up on “It’s getting Sticky,” when he says, “[N-word], give a [F-word] bout pronouns, I’m that [N-word] and that [B-word].” Here, Tyler, who uses he/him pronouns, employs these slurs to both refer to and reject the gender binary.6 He achieves this by creating a conceptual split between these slurs through forcing them to collide with one another. Thus Tyler’s creative use of contradictions intentionally captures something intrinsically elusive.
The Paradox and the irreducibility of individuality; or to be a person is to be a problem.
As Søren Kierkegaard says,
One should not think ill though of paradoxes, because the paradox is the passion of thought, and a thinker without a paradox is like a lover without passion: a poor model. But the highest power of every passion is always to will its own annihilation. … . This is the highest paradox of thought, to want to discover something it cannot think. This passion of thought is fundamentally present everywhere in thought, also in the thought of the individual, to the extent that in thinking he transcends himself. One fails to discover this because of habit. In a like manner scientists have revealed that walking is a progressive falling.7
Kierkegaard offers an analogy concerning paradox: failing is to understanding, as falling is to walking. We learn from falling into perplexity in the same way that we make progress in everyday life, namely, by repetitively striving against the forces that keep us down. In this way, the paradox acts as the motor of thought that keeps the mind constantly moving.
This idea ties into Kierkegaard’s category of the individual in the Sickness Unto Death where individuality is described as something that is irreducible to any concept.8 In this sense, individuality is something extra-conceptual: It transcends words. This is so because being a person is a lived process, always in flux and constantly changing depending on the concrete conditions we come up against in life. As such, the identity of the individual cannot be reduced to any set of ready-made labels. Rather, to be a person is to be a problem. This means that the personhood of the person must be perpetually untangled throughthe process of a constant engagement with the personal projects that they have planned, executed, and failed at during the stages on life’s way. Hence, Kierkegaard says, “Life can only be explained after it has been lived…”9
Tyler’s music illustrates this idea well. We can see this from “The Brown Stains of Darkeese Latifah Part 6-12” where he says, “Solve ’em (Oh no!) You can’t, [B-word], I’m a problem.” By intentionally using contradictions to expose confusions and open up problems in seemingly fixed categories of identity, Tyler continues to create space for new identities to emerge on the scene. For example, Lil Nas X has said that it’s partly because of Tyler that he felt comfortable coming out.10 So, I suggest we interpret the creative use of contradiction by Tyler as a mode of radical exploration, a deadly serious commitment to the fun and painful play that is figuring things out, achieved through the endless activity of soul searching.11 This is a way of life where one constantly reflects on oneself, one’s environment, and the relationship between one-self and the environment, to inform the path of action that changes the world into the reality one wants to see in it. It is a life of inquiry. In the words of Tyler the Creator and Daniel Caesar,
“…And I hope you find yourself (Uh), And I hope you find yourself (Yeah), And I hope you take your mask off (Sad story, haha, yeah)” (“I Hope You Find Yourself,” Chromakopia, 2024)
Kali H Grecia is a transqueer South-African-Indian currently studying towards a PhD in Philosophy at the University of Georgia, in Athens, USA. They previously completed their Masters in Philosophy at Rhodes University, in Makhanda, South Africa, where they worked on Immanuel Kant’s transcendental arguments, studied electric bass, DJed, and made art with the collective STFU!
1 See: https://colorlines.com/articles/unapologetic–homophobia–tyler–creator.
2 See: https://colorlines.com/articles/unapologetic–homophobia–tyler–creator, where Tyler claims, “I’m not homophobic,” in this original article.
3 The Souls of Black Folk (Norton Library, 2022), 10-11.
4 For more details see: https://jimcrowmuseum.ferris.edu/what.htm.
5 For example, see: Alyssa Lynne, “Paired Double Consciousness: A Du Boisian Approach to Gender and Transnational Double Consciousness in Thai Kathoey Self-Formation,” Social Problems 68 (2021), 250–266.
6 For another gendered use of these slurs, see Ja Rule, “[N-words] and [B-words]” on Blood in My Eye (2003).
7 Repetition and Philosophical Crumbs (Oxford University Press, 2009) 111.
8 The Sickness Unto Death (Princeton University Press, 1946), 195.
9 A Kierkegaard Anthology, (Oxford University Press, 1973), 10. https://www.papermag.com/tyler–the–creator–lil–nas–x–come–out#rebelltitem9
11 Roy Ayers, “Searching,” Vibrations, 1976.
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