![]() ![]() is the male love interest has hidden the true nature of his sexuality. His ongoing series of collaborative trainers with Converse are a guaranteed sell-out whenever they drop, while his own-line brand, Golf Le Fleur, has evolved from a cheerful side hustle into a legitimate streetwear operation, with off-kilter lookbooks, a store in LA's Fairfax and a runway show. The overall story of Tyler, the Creator's newest album, IGOR, is something many have lived through. The titular Igor appears to act as both the album's unrequited narrative foil ("I want your company, I need your company, I want you to want for me") and his heightened alter ego ("If the cop says my name, bitch I'm Igor.")Īlong with writing, performing and producing all of his own material, Tyler is skilled at creating an aesthetic to accompany each of his releases, one that is inevitably riffed on by the global 'fit pic brigade, his every look pored over in the comment sections of Instagram and Reddit. ![]() Less a rap album than a 39-minute-long expression of sound and faint summer longing. It’s cool.With his sixth full-length album, 'IGOR', Tyler has moved away from the childish provocations of his past and created a spooky, woozy, reverb-heavy wall of synths, manipulated vocals, Japanese City Pop-inspired keys and layered, distorted soul samples. Despite the fact that the rapper's lyrics generated a lot of discussion about his sexuality, he hasn't made any public statements about it. It’s illustrated hiply, and as Tyler wears it, fit, and tucked with normcore aplomb. Tyler, The Creator revealed that he has been 'kissing white boys' for more than ten years on his brilliant 2017 album Flower Boy. (Tyler couldn’t resist putting his brand name "GOLF" on there, but even that non sequitur isn’t a distraction.) I imagine straight skaters wearing this shirt around the suburbs and flying the flag for gay rights whether they ever intended to. Throw a rainbow and the word "PRIDE" together, as Tyler does here, and you have a fairly universal statement of gay strength. ![]() Tyler uses the aesthetics of cool while being deliberate about what he’s using it for: to say that being gay is cool. But this new shirt does something else-it’s childish, yes, but earnestly so. ![]() In fact, Odd Future has stupidly used the swastika in some distasteful merchandise before. Without the politics to make it a truly radical statement, something as vitriolic as a swastika was reduced to another purposeless, toxic way to seem edgy, like smoking cigarettes to piss off your parents. During an interview with GQ Magazine, the rapper reportedly said that he likes girls. But, he has spoken about being involved with other men. Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McClaren often used Nazi symbols in their Sex Pistols-era Seditionaries clothing, which they sold to London punks in their boutique, but it always felt a little empty-shock without substance. Tyler the Creator hasn’t come out as gay to date. There is a heritage of punks (and Tyler is nothing if not a punk) appropriating oppressive symbols. How he’s selling it on his Tumblr might be convoluted, but I’m sold. This made the photo even more important to me, because it was me playing with the idea of taking the power out of something so stupid." Tyler is taking symbols that oppress him as a black man, and using them to empathize with gay men. The thing that tops it off is the homo erotic tone of the hand holding, which to some degree HAS to piss off the guys who takes this logo serious. It's easier to understand his sexuality on CMIYGL because he explicity says he likes men and women. and take a photo with a white guy in it and we have an amazing photo. In the blog post accompanying the photo, he writes : "Throw a little rainbow in the logo. Though I’ve never cared much for him and his music, partially for his past offensiveness, when I saw this shirt, my reaction was instant: I wanted it. It’s a juvenile spin, the type he usually makes brattily, but it’s genuine in a way he’s not been before. That’s the sole privilege of gay men and women who have had to endure its unruly wrath for far too long.īut then here he is today, posting a photo on Tumblr of him holding hands with another man, looking like a goon, wearing a twisted new piece of Odd Future merchandise that reimagines a white supremacist insignia emblazoned with the rainbow colors of a pride flag. Tyler does not get to decide where, when, and how that term gets used. He’s always passionately claimed he doesn’t dislike gay people, arguing instead that that term is "just a word," and that his overuse dilutes its hateful power. You have to work hard to use a word so much. With 15 tracks, that’s an average of 14.2 times per song. In 2011, the LA rapper and Odd Future figurehead used the word "faggot" a total of 213 times on his debut album Goblin. Gwyneth Paltrow’s Daughter Said Actress in State of Shock After Ski Crash. Tyler, The Creator has long had to defend himself against charges of homophobia. ![]()
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