Like a lot of great artists, Tyler, the Creator is hard to figure out, especially regarding how much of a character he’s been playing on his records. On Bastard – his 2009 debut, an online release made when he was 18 that is too musically accomplished and lyrically lacerating to dismiss as a mixtape – he set a mischievous, even malevolent, tone with songs about rape and mutilation that dared listeners to wonder how fictional a creation the rapper was. His albums since – Goblin (2011), Wolf (2013) and Cherry Bomb (2015) – have mixed piteous confessions with homicidal obscenities, but always with the arch tone of a detached observer. That Tyler has established himself as a video director (not to mention festival entrepreneur, and photobook and media app creator) has furthered the sense of a renaissance man amusing himself before making the inevitable move to something grownup, like making movies.
But Flower Boy – promoted in the weeks since it leaked as Scum f*ck Flower Boy – doesn’t seem like the work of someone treating music as a trifle. In fact, it feels like a statement, even a concept, an impression enhanced by reports that Flower Boy marks Tyler’s coming out.
Ever since Bastard, on tracks such as Blow, Tyler has been juxtaposing murderous abasem*nt with mellifluous beats – Scum f*ck, meet Flower Boy – but it has always seemed like a distancing technique, or perhaps even a sardonic comment on the banality of evil. Here, as he puts his N*E*R*D worship to use on gorgeous pillowy synths and lush chord progressions, there are precious few such moments of corrosive sorcery-cum-savagery. Probably only Who Dat Boy will appeal to those desperate for a French! or Yonkers. Those sumptuous sonics are mostly used to soundtrack barely concealed declarations from Tyler regarding his sexuality and his difference from the rap pack.
There are explorations of his psyche, his inner torment and loneliness, even – especially – now that the former Wolf Gang leader is a multimillionaire mogul with a Ferrari. But it’s his sexuality that is the album’s oblique leitmotif. Opening track Foreword finds him rejecting material possessions, dreaming of “the woods with flowers, rainbows and posies”. He admits he’s “sick of sitting in doubt”, apologising to the women he’s used, or rather, misled (“Shoutout to the girls that I lead on / For occasional head and always keeping my bed warm”). On Where This Flower Blooms, he acknowledges his position as a role model, a tall, skinny, gawky beacon who mocks rap’s hyper-masculinity (“Tell these black kids they can be who they are / Dye your hair blue, sh*t, I’ll do it too / Look, I smell like Chanel”). On See You Again – featuring, on celestial coos, Kali Uchis, one of several guests from Lil Wayne to Estelle – he’s dreaming of a fantasy lover, and perhaps the presence of Frank Ocean, appearing on the fifth anniversary of his own coming out, is a clue.
It’s not until dazed slow jam Garden Shed, over typically lustrous chords, that Tyler outs himself less ambiguously (“Ain’t no reason to pretend… Them feelings I was guardin’”), with an extended metaphor that seems to confirm him as the most high-profile gay rap or R&B artist this side of, well, Syd the Kyd and Ocean.
Of course, there is still the possibility that this is one almighty put-on from the rapper who was banned in 2015 by Theresa May from entering this country for his work [that] “encourages violence and intolerance of hom*osexuality”. But if he was only about eliciting shock and awe, he could just peddle more extreme serial killer rhymes. Why go to all this effort?
And besides, it’s not as though Tyler hasn’t been hiding in plain sight for years, with tweets about coming out the closet and bold admissions in the press (“My friends are so used to me being gay, they don’t even care … I’m gay as f*ck”). As he declares on Ain’t Got Time!, “I been kissing white boys since 2004”. True: he’s long professed his adoration of Leonardo DiCaprio while on this track he’s driving around, “Passenger a white boy, look like River Phoenix”.
When he’s not mooning over Hollywood pretty boys, he’s confessing to feeling like “the loneliest man alive” (911/Mr Lonely) or longing for an unspecified moment in the past when he was last happy (November). But if anything, Flower Boy captures Tyler at his least tormented and twisted; it is an album of exquisitely arranged, melodious synth-rap, wistful and reflective, heavy on the heavenly. It’s not all dreamy – watch out for the occasional profane pothole – but largely this is the work of an evolved artist and mature person. In 2011 he expressed his fondness for Joy Division and Roy Ayers, so it’s no surprise to hear these billowing, textured, resonant synthscapes. That he’s ditched the “no hom*o” asides and aliases such as Wolf Haley and Ace to reveal the real Tyler underneath, perhaps, is.
Unless he’s kidding, in which case, it’s the con – the coup – of the year.
