Tyler, the Creator Finds Sanctuary On the Capricious, Limitless CHROMAKOPIA

“I’m excited for y’all to hear the album the second time,” Tyler, the Creator told a crowd at the Intuit Dome in Los Angeles on Sunday night. “That second time when it hits you, you know if you fucking think it’s the worst thing ever or if you’re really fucking with it.” With that idea in mind, Tyler’s new album, CHROMAKOPIA, demands to be heard more than once. There have been a number of rap records released in recent years—Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers, The Forever Story, We Buy Diabetic Test Strips—that are very, very good and have begged much of the same from their listeners. You don’t just digest “Mother I Sober,” “Stars” or “The Gods Must Be Crazy” on the first go. They present necessary challenges, making the idea of replay value as much of a pleasure as it is an obligation. Tyler, the Creator, whose storytelling talents improve with each release, is beginning to master that art as well.

Some of the most re-read books in the history of language—Pride and Prejudice, The Great Gatsby, The Catcher in the Rye, anything written by J.R.R. Tolkien or George Orwell, or A Wrinkle in Time and The Giver—are classics for a reason. Even when you know their stories by heart, you’re left wanting more; allergic to skimming, you comb every sentence for a new detail you may have missed previously. Now, I’m not here to say CHROMAKOPIA is a text as necessary in the canon of written and performed words as The Catcher in the Rye. Tyler, the Creator has made better records than this—well, one better record—but there is something to be said about the way he colors his albums like the kind of novel that, upon reading it for a high school class or seeing it on a college syllabus, could very well change your life. He’s like the Bryan Ferry of rap music. The main character of CHROMAKOPIA, St. Chroma, does elicit (non-explicit) callbacks to Chroma the Great, a character in The Phantom Tollbooth; there are no accidents within the margins of these 14 songs; Tyler wants you to connect the dots. He wants you to dog-ear these pages and smear yellow highlighter across each and every word.

Ditching the DJ Drama conduction from CALL ME IF YOU GET LOST, CHROMAKOPIA is guided by Tyler’s mother, Bonita Smith, whose life lessons color the blood that runs through all 60,000 miles of his body. At the beginning of “Hey Jane,” she warns her son to “always, always, always wear a condom”; “Like Him” concludes with her taking responsibility for his father’s absence. “He’s a good guy, so don’t hold that against him, because it was my fault,” she admits. “Just, you know, forgive me.” When CHROMAKOPIA begins, it is Smith who introduces us to St. Chroma, instructing him to never “in your motherfucking life dim your light for nobody.” The marching, siren-filled chant of “St. Chroma” builds until Daniel Caesar’s voice skyscrapes into a gospel: “Can you feel the light inside? Can you feel that fire?” The album is, in Tyler’s own words, how his childhood in Hawthorne, Inglewood and how, at 33, he’s finally starting to get what his mom was telling him about 20, 25 years ago. “All of that stuff is like, ‘Oh, that’s what the fuck she was talking about,’” he told the crowd on Sunday. “‘Oh, I’m not the guy that I was at 20. Like, oh, shit, people are getting older. Folks having kids and families and all I got is a new Ferrari.’ And it does feel kind of weird. I’m gaining weight, I’ve got gray hair on my chest, life is life-ing.”

Remember what Frank Ocean said in “Super Rich Kids”? “All we ever do is whatever the fuck we want.” Tyler, the Creator has never been down-and-out—not since he formed Odd Future nearly 20 years ago, at least. He was probably just bored, his bedlam cooked up on a whim. On CHROMAKOPIA, the other shoe has finally dropped. And then another, and another, and another. If you believed CALL ME IF YOU GET LOST reckoned with, as I wrote three years ago, “the splendors and consequences of success,” then CHROMAKOPIA is the aftershock of a man left even more hardened than before. Three years ago, Tyler retreated back to his Golbin era and sang about the perils of having too much but not enough—that all the cars, all the partners and all the cred was cool, but something deeper, pleasurable and meaningful was still missing. He won a Best Rap Album Grammy for CALL ME IF YOU GET LOST and the cord between it and his heart is still too short. So, he’s turning toward celebrity culture, parasociality, fatherhood (both absent and impending), desire, excess, monogamy, flamboyancy and, above all, just what the hell he’s supposed to do next.

“Rah Tah Tah” and “Noid” are maniacal ragers, with the former featuring some of Tyler’s sneakiest lines yet (“You see the bed top-bunker, the boy got thumpers / I’m a bonafide face seat, box muncher”; “Met her in the Hamptons, dick-ridin’ in the white fit / Never raise a hand, the strap on ‘em like a dyke bitch”; “Don’t you call me brother, I just met you, you can keep that”). He name-drops an Odd Future pal’s turn as Marcus Brooks in The Bear (“Me and Lionel Boyce in drama class, my boy can act now”), references Usher and lets the world know that, after Kendrick Lamar, he’s the biggest rapper out of Los Angeles now. (For reference: if Tyler wins Best Rap Album for CHROMAKOPIA, he’ll have as many wins in the category as Kenny.)

The paranoia of “Rah Tah Tah” turns into “Noid,” a buzzsaw of fandom reckoning (“Don’t wanna take pictures with you n****s or bitches / Nervous system is shook, way before 19”) made muscular by a brilliant sample of Ngozi Family’s “Nizakupanga Ngozi.” “I can’t even buy a home in private, home invasions got my brothers dyin’,” he raps, calling back to the “I’m paranoid, I sleep with guns” line in “MASSA.” Take a closer look into the Ayo Edebiri-starring music video for the track, and Tyler’s use of phones as guns is damningly acute. Laser synths thwart, voices stack on top of each other and, in the track’s final verse, Tyler doesn’t mince words: “Her, him, they, them, or anybody—I don’t trust ‘em at all.” It’s a truth echoed by Bonita’s interlude (“Keep to yourself, keep your business to yourself, don’t even trust these motherfuckin’ accountants”).

“Darling, I,” which features a guest spot from CALL ME IF YOU GET LOST alum Teezo Touchdown, goes from sweet to braggadocious. Tyler uses samples of Q-Tip, Missy Elliott and Busta Rhymes’s “Vivrant Thing (Violator Remix)” and Snoop Dogg and Pharrell Williams’s “Drop It Like It’s Hot,” lamenting accolades in the wake of unsatisfying romances. His awards still sparkle even when the sex goes stale, the studio is warmer than the bed. “I like a long time, I’m on my own time / I love this girl though, I hit the gold mine / I’m thinkin’ new crib, I’m thinkin’ two kids” goes down easy and then swings immediately into “Until I get infatuated with a new bitch / But when that gray hair finally come, at least I felt somethin’ if I ain’t find the one / Nobody could fulfill me like this music shit does / So I’ll be lonely with these Grammys when it’s all said and done.” Few voices in rap can appraise the payoffs of fame quite like Tyler, the Creator.

CHROMAKOPIA’s emotional centerpiece, “Hey Jane,” is a story of parenthood told from two perspectives. Tyler begins as himself, detailing how pregnancy news left him in shock (“If it was bound to happen to me, I’m luck it’s you”) and celebrating the good qualities of his girl that could get passed down to their child (“You’re not dumb, and your face good, and your head strong”). But “Hey Jane” exists in the “small window” of a decision; “I’m terrified, petrified,” he admits. “I don’t wanna give my freedom up, or sanitize it. This my fault, the results are justified, I fucked up, I’m stressed out, I’m dead inside.” Tyler knows the choice isn’t his, and he grapples with the truth of that in unattractive ways. It’s not easy on the ears, to hear a man respond to a pregnancy by saying “I’m dead inside.” But, in patience comes revelation: “We still learnin’ each other, I don’t know all you / And you don’t know all me, how am I to live with / That is not a good foundation to have kids with / Or maybe it is, maybe it’s not, just not yet.” His verse ends not in resolve, but in affirmation: “Just know I support either way, no pressure.”

Tyler switches the POV, rapping as Jane and championing his unwavering support. She responds to his worries (“We can both relate to the fact we got great skin / You’re not dumb, and your energy is a good mood / A lil’ weird, but overall, you’s a good dude”), admits that she’s worried about her body will respond to an abortion (“It’s a voice inside me begging me to keep it / I’m 35 and my ovaries might not reset / I don’t wanna live my whole life feelin’ regret”). Resolution does come, through admittance (“Things happen, no one is wrong, it was an accident”), acknowledgement of independence (“I got my own bread, I don’t need you to buy things”), bodies changing (“My titties gettin’ bigger and I’m cravin’ a 10-piece”) and content with single-parenting (“I can move back to London and avoid any static between us / No need to make it hard like a callus”). But “Hey Jane” isn’t just about two people going back and forth about whether or not they should keep their child—it’s a song that interrogates life coming to collect, and the mortality that exists within our faults. “I’m scared to tell my momma, scared to tell my bitches, scared of all the people who don’t know what’s in our business,” Tyler, as Jane, concludes. “Scared of all they advice, and my intuitions. Scared of not knowin’, but too scared to make decisions.” Words flutter, a light beat presses on, and “Hey Jane” zips into an answer: “T, no matter the decision or day, I just want us to be cool either way. No pressure.”

The guest list on CHROMAKOPIA is extensive and impressive. Along with Caesar featuring on two tracks and Teezo filling out the shape of “Darling, I,” “Sticky” is an “Oldie”-style cypher featuring verses from Sexyy Red, Lil Wayne and GloRilla. Childish Gambino, fresh off his “final” album Bando Stone & the New World, appears on “I Killed You” and, potentially, “Judge Judy.” Schoolboy Q and Santigold hop on the mike on “Thought I Was Dead,” while Doechii carries on “Balloon” (“I air this bitch out like a queef / I’ll send your ass back to the streets”).

No two songs on this record sound alike, offering a kind of sonic whiplash that’ll surely be revered by some and bemoaned by others. There is no musical throughline present; consistency is a matter of singular, track-by-track excellence folded into a collection of oneness. “Sticky” is easily Tyler’s best banger since “NEW MAGIC WAND” or, hell, even “SMUCKERS,” as he, Sexyy, Glo and Wayne trade memorable one-liners (“These bitches tryna scrap, but I’m knuckin’ if you buckin’, ho”; “Jack of all trades, name a n***a who ahead of me, must be God instead of me”; “I don’t fight for my respect, bitch, I fight for dick”; “Drippin’ condensation, gotta whisper conversations”; “Allergies to bum n****s, I see you, my eye’s itchin’”). Tyler samples his own song, “DOGTOOTH,” on “Judge Judy” and taps into tracks by Rosinha De Valenca, James Brown, Young Buck and Akiko Yano, too. Just like how “HOT WIND BLOWS” and “GONE GONE / THANK YOU” turned folks on to Penny Goodwin and Tatsuro Yamashita, CHROMAKOPIA is a time capsule of found media as much as it is a document of Tyler’s life.

The best song on the record is “Take Your Mask Off,” a legitimate instant-classic stratified in all that makes a post-Cherry Bomb Tyler, the Creator song tremendous: no-frill bars (“Body ain’t been the same, postpartum is long, your identity gone / Mama your first name, the last one got changed / They dream about your nest but you crave flyin’ alone”), a splendid soul sample (People’s Pleasure and Alive and Well’s “A Feeling Inside”), conversations around queerness (“Gotta hide how you live, what you really enjoy / So got a wife, got a kid, but you be fuckin’ them boys / Sick of all the shame, sick of all the pain that’s within / Scared of bein’ seen, tired of rebukin’ the sin / Trade it all to be free and shine bright like the sun”) and a perfect feature (Caesar harmonizing “I hope you find yourself” with Tyler). Add a break from Bonita in the mix, in which she delivers the thesis of CHROMAKOPIA (“You don’t have to put on no costume / You don’t ever have to lie to kick it”), and you’ve made your zenith legible.

Elsewhere, “I Killed You,” “Tomorrow” and “Like Him” are more pages in Tyler, the Creator’s rolodex of ambition—revolving around each other while wearing different clothes, like palm tree-shaded rage-rap, gospel and strokes of synth-pop tethered to an art-rock nucleus. “Judge Judy” has Flower Boy acoustics written all over it, while “I Killed You” adds a fresh, panicky style of horror-core to his ordnance of sonics. On “Thought I Was Dead,” Tyler and Schoolboy Q go toe-to-toe in a sparring match of dick-swinging verses (“Get love in the hood, but I must leave,” Q raps. “Born way in the hills where they can’t see me, swear I burned 20 Ms, 2018, like I play for the Bills”; “I’ma crash shit out ‘til my hair white / I got too much drive, I’m a terabyte”).

Tyler, the Creator’s previous three albums—Flower Boy, IGOR and CALL ME IF YOU GET LOST—linger in the zeitgeist because most of us enjoy returning to them. Maybe that’s because the lack of misogyny and homophobia on those projects felt like the same kind of reprieve a parent might feel when their asshole teenager finally grows up. Gangsta rap was in a decline by the time Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All broke out. You can’t fault a bunch of California kids for filling the gap between the alt-hip-hop rise and G-funk-inspired conscious rap with grotesque, white-knuckled, near-dystopian West Coast angst. On Goblin, Wolf and Cherry Bomb, Tyler positioned us with narrative chaos—the kind of music that certainly wouldn’t garner industry brass or turn a streetwear brand into designer-level fame. His work, for almost two decades, has always been delivered in crisis—of both society and the self.

Instead, those records dared to make you uncomfortable, dared to make you wish you’d never heard anyone rap the lyrics “I just wanna drag your lifeless body to the forest and fornicate with it, but that’s because I’m in love with you, cunt.” Back then, when Tyler, the Creator wasn’t even in his mid-20s yet, he got off on making his listeners squirm. He was anarchic and hellbent on pushing anyone and everyone’s buttons, turning body horror into a freestyle. He was banned from other countries, and Odd Future garnered a reputation for being the music collective equivalent to Punk’d or Viva La Bam. I mean, they did make Loiter Squad, after all. It was all enthralling, even if you felt a little guilty for enjoying it.

CHROMAKOPIA is not like any of the last three or four albums Tyler, the Creator released. Sure, it may nab comparisons to the polarizing disorder of Cherry Bomb, or even the collage inspirations of CALL ME IF YOU GET LOST, but this record works because it is a combination of all of those things without, if we’re being honest, sounding explicitly like any of them. It’s the most Tyler, the Creator that Tyler Okonma has ever sounded and yet, CHROMAKOPIA sounds nothing like him—at least nothing like what we’ve heard from him since he dropped Bastard in 2009. Few greats can stand on business like that. When you press play on a Kendrick Lamar album, you likely already know what to expect. The differences between To Pimp a Butterfly, DAMN. and Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers are circumstantial. There’s a reason why Tyler compares himself to Kenny on this record: It’s further proof that the rap world runs through Southern California, that there’s room for more than one head at the table. CHROMAKOPIA, through imperfections and rigidity, gives us a clear, damning portrait of Tyler’s humanity.

A crying synthesizer serenades CHROMAKOPIA’s conclusion, a final lap around Tyler, the Creator’s speedway of riches. He’s eating candied yams and catfish on a private plane; riffing on skipping the Met Gala but still holding influence on the fashion game. He rebukes rap tradition—nevermind the drugs and the alcohol, all he wants is “sweets and them wheels.” “You could never moonwalk in my Chuck Taylors, brodie,” Tyler asserts, after spending 50 minutes dredging the aqueducts of his deepest secrets and making himself more accessible than ever. All of his voices harmonize with each other, and the “I Hope You Find Your Way Home” outro sounds like it’s being played on a stylophone that’s plugged into a polygraph machine. “The light comes from within” gets said and repeated four times. Run it back, run it back, run it back, a voice echoes.

Tyler, the Creator’s story inside of those sepia-toned cardboard walls of CHROMAKOPIA bursts with color and, miraculously, shows us more of him than all of his previous albums combined. And yet, Tyler’s seventh album still ends without resolution, only contradiction, shit-talking and gang politics lost to middle class autoclaves. He’s strapped with grandeur and growth to the gills. Age is catching up with him, but he’s not slowing down anytime soon. The mask stays on—good luck locking down just who Tyler Okonma is. With industry praise comes irreversible loneliness; distance turns into a requisite. When schedules get claustrophobic, grief grows thicker. Tyler, the Creator has a lot to get off his chest, but he’ll probably still keep all of his cars in the meantime. It’s taken him 33 years to figure this much out, that fame has a caveat: with finesse comes sacrifice. You might as well make your suffering look good.

Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Northeast Ohio.

Keep scrolling for more great stories.