On his sprawling new album, ‘Chromakopia,’ rap’s former enfant terrible settles into auteur mode.
When you sit back and think about it, Tyler, the Creator’s metamorphosis from brat to auteur has to be one of the most surprising career arcs in all of 21st-century pop. He arrived a precocious teenager who ate bugs in his music videos, and now he’s an industry-vetted multi-hyphenate with Grammys on his mantle. The point is, you do have to sit back and think about it. Tyler has been in this high place for the better part of a decade now, locking in his status as a maker of important albums after the release of 2017’s diaristic “Flower Boy” and 2019’s plush “Igor.” Now, after taking a quick detour to renew his vows with the craft of rapping on 2021’s “Call Me if You Get Lost,” Tyler is back with “Chromakopia,” a sprawling, self-produced album that finds its hero getting comfortable in auteur mode.
Making rap music on the plateau of prestige must feel wonderfully strange — totally liberating and quietly perilous. On one hand, you have the smarts, abilities and budget to create anything you want. On the other, the mood is always going to be masterpiece-or-bust. When it goes right, the world gets “Speakerboxxx/The Love Below” or “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy” or “To Pimp a Butterfly.” When it goes wrong, Childish Gambino is nominated for a Grammy. Great power, great responsibility, so on and so forth, but here’s what it really is: When trying to make something important, rap auteurs sometimes forget to make something vital.
Tyler’s ability to sidestep that rule helps explain why he continues to do so well for himself in this elevated space. His early years as rap’s most magnetic enfant terrible still seem to prevent him from ever wandering too far into the fog of self-importance. So during the wheezing click-clack of “Rah Tah Tah,” one of the most forthright tracks on “Chromakopia,” when Tyler raps about being “the biggest out the city after Kenny, that’s a fact,” try to resist the impulse to reach for your L.A. rapper stat sheet. Instead, let’s remind ourselves that we’re listening to a 33-year-old who grew up in Los Angeles, transposing mischief into music, and that, ultimately, his feet remain planted there.
Maybe we need to astral project our sneakers to L.A., too. “Chromakopia” lacks both an aesthetic center and a prevailing mood, but at least the album’s cinematic zigging and zagging feels like a natural result of growing up in Hollywood’s shadow. The album’s margins are where Tyler sounds most invested anyway. On the opener, “St. Chroma,” he raps in hot whispers over the chilling sound of marching feet, sounding either panicked or furious depending on how long it takes your ears to adjust. It’s as if the Ying Yang Twins got lost somewhere in World War II. Then, on the album’s other side, there’s “Like Him,” an uncluttered piano ballad about the absentee father that Tyler has written about so often, sung in a meek falsetto that’s worlds away from the rich, gravel bucket baritone he reflexively raps in. “Mama, I’m chasing a ghost,” he sings delicately. “Do I look like him?”
In between, there are finely-tuned songs about non-monogamy (“Darling, I,”), and a pregnancy scare (“Hey Jane”), suggesting that our narrator won’t be ready to become someone’s father until he’s finished being someone’s child. Those roles aren’t mutually exclusive, of course, but that narrative tension might be as close as “Chromakopia” gets to an overarching lyrical theme. Everything else goes a little blurry beneath Tyler’s clotted layers of rhythm and melody, which frequently sound as if Timbaland and the Neptunes were emulating Hans Zimmer’s grandeur from within the confines of Peewee’s Playhouse. If that sounds more interesting on paper than it does in your ears, so it goes. Masterpieces don’t get made unless someone tries.
