The reason why Tyler, The Creator has never worked with Drake or Kendrick Lamar
Tyler, the Creator has never been shy of collaborating, yet he’s never actually worked alongside the two biggest rappers of his generation. That is, he’s never released music with either Kendrick Lamar or Drake.
Tyler’s Odd Future collective, which he set up when he was a teenager, is built upon collaboration, and this is an attitude he’s carried with him into adulthood. Whether getting people on board for his own songs, or by featuring on other people’s, he seems to like working with others.
Tyler has worked with the likes of The Game, Freddie Gibbs, and Pusha T through the years, not to mention his Odd Future colleagues and too many others to mention. But it’s never been Kendrick or Drake, nor, for that matter, has he ever worked with Eminem. He once admitted to feeling too intimidated to ever consider doing that.
As early as 2013, this fact was noticed by the music press. Why was it that he had never linked up with either Kendrick or Drake, as they were rising to the tippy-top of the rap game. An interviewer from Rolling Stone straight-up asked him about it.
Tyler’s reply was suitably offensive, which was par for the course for him around this time. “That shit is fucking gay,” he said. “I don’t need people’s help.”
Tyler was frequently accused of homophobia around this period, and it isn’t terribly difficult to see why. His songs were full of casually homophobic rhetoric, but, moving on from that, he elaborated during this Rolling Stone conversation as to why he wouldn’t ever want to work with Kendrick or Drake.
“I see famous people being friends when I know they don’t fucking even like each other,” he said. “I think that shit is fucking sad, that people can’t think for themselves.”
He went on the decry that this is “what’s wrong with the kids these days,” those young people “on fucking Tumblr” who copy “everything they see.” They don’t have “a fucking mind for themselves.” They’re just following the pack.
It’s not an entirely coherent point that Tyler was making here. He appeared to be bemoaning the trend in modern hip-hop, in which every single seems to have another famous name featuring on it, even though he has done it himself. Regardless of his reasons, though, he still hasn’t budged. No Tyler-Drake nor Tyler-Kendrick collabs have ever appeared.