The two British rock stars who inspired Tyler, The Creator
Tyler, The Creator is on what today could be called a generational run.
The musician, celebrated as being a pioneer in 2010s and 2020s alternative hip-hop, released the hugely acclaimed Chromakopia in 2024 and the similarly brilliant Don’t Tap the Glass this summer. The former is a vivid, successful blend of genres hip-hop, soul and jazz; the latter, an exploration of dance, funk, house and techno styles, with writers including Nile Rogers and Busta Rhymes. Both albums debuted at number one in the US Billboard 200.
And he is by no means done. The end of October saw the rapper add Mother to Chromokopia+ to acknowledge the album’s one-year anniversary. An appropriate song title, considering the album – as fans will know – is narrated from the perspective of Tyler’s own mother, Bonita Smith, in the structure of a diary.
It was “the first song I made for this project that year,” the musician wrote on Instagram. “Still not sure why I took it off last minute. It’s pretty much the grounding piece of the album.” He continues on to note that he approached the album “more like a diary. Things I’ve touched on before, things I haven’t. The pressure of monogamy, the fear of fatherhood, how I felt about my hair, the judging of sexual freedom, my paranoia.”
Themes personal to Tyler, and present across all music genres; including, of course, rock. Speaking in a 2011 article with Interview magazine, in which Tyler was interviewed by fellow rapper Waka Flocka Flame, Tyler discusses the British rock stars that inspired his musical career.
“When I’m on stage, it’s like Ian Curtis and Sid Vicious,” Tyler said, referring to the Joy Division and Sex Pistols frontmen, respectively. “Like, real punk rock and shit.”
“I’m like a big 10-year-old when I’m on stage,” he continued. “I just go up there and do whatever I think is cool at the moment. And then, when it comes to rappin’, I like watchin’ a lot of cartoons and movies and shit. Usually, when I’m rappin’, I’m creating a big story or a concept song that sounds like a movie to me.”
As Tyler, the Creator fans will know, it is entirely unsurprising for the rapper to have looked to Curtis and Vicious for onstage inspiration. Rap is already often claimed to be the 21st-century successor to punk as the anti-establishment genre of choice, and Tyler is a blazing example of a musician within hip-hop that exhibits old-school punk behaviour.
Even at the start of his career, when he built Odd Future (OFWGKTA!) as a collection of rappers and skaters making music and merch without any label support, their shows were known across the early days of the internet for being chaotic and confrontational. Not dissimilar, of course, to early punk gigs in London in the 1980s.
He’s also exhibited his punk streak in how he dresses, too. It may have been couture brand Valentino that quipped “pink is punk”, but it’s an attitude to style Tyler has carried with him, often wearing pastel suits, wigs and pearls – especially in his IGOR era – which only reinforced his masculine image.
But be careful to overthink his approach. “A lot of people think that stuff is deeper than it really is,” Tyler said to Flocka, when asked about the deepness to his music video imagery. “Some people just think too much.”