Nowadays, no one gains cultural or social credit by quoting a line from the series. home – which disappeared from the Radar of Relevant Cultural Assets, possibly due to the same rules of chance that will one day dictate its reappearance. But that doesn’t stop me from paraphrasing a phrase that the protagonist said in some episode that my memory has forgotten: House said something like “If I ask you for a sample of the sea and you take a glass and fill it on the shore, the glass will be filled with sand.” and salt water. What conclusion do you come to, that the sea is made up of sand and salt water? But we know that at the bottom of the sea there are corals and all kinds of fish. So our sample is wrong.”
House’s argument served to remind us of good scientific practices and, in the context of the series (a kind of medicinal Sherlock Holmes, whose premise was that all patients lied because they all had something to hide), a way of saying that they were looking for disease in the wrong place.
But the joke can be applied to life in general: most of the time we don’t understand what’s around us because we’re either looking in the wrong direction or we don’t even know there’s another side. This occurred to me a few days ago, talking with my son – perhaps because he grew up in a house where music was always present, the child always showed autonomy in the art of searching for music; In recent years it ended up in hip-hop, both mainstream (Kanye West) like the classic (Nas) or slightly darker gems (MF Doom).
[“CHROMAKOPIA”, disponível na íntegra no Spotify:]
One of the kid’s heroes is Tyler The Creator, so I told him that my editor told me that. CHROMACOPYThe rapper’s last album reached 1st place on the sales charts in Portugal. “But who listens to Tyler in Portugal?” I heard myself say, as if thinking out loud. The answer was: “Everyone. “Everyone knows Tyler.” By everyone we mean: everyone you know, which – in sampling terms – means 20 white, reasonably privileged teenagers, i.e. my son’s circle of friends and acquaintances who are interested in music.
It’s not a great sample, they will tell me, but it’s better than mine; I don’t know more than five people who follow Tyler’s work. Basically, I would take the glass out to sea and collect my sample near the shore, forgetting that there are always new fish. It’s just that maybe the image I have of Tyler in my head isn’t the same one the kids have – when he showed up, with ElfIn 2011, I rapped (on the opening track, which gives the album its name) “I’m not a fucking role model / I’m a fucking 19-year-old emotional rollercoaster” and “19 years” never left me.
There was a theme on this album that turned Tyler into a kind of mini-celebrity among people most attentive to musical news: it was Radicalsin which, after warning people not to do what he’s going to rap about, Tyler raps, over a very dirty beat, “Kill people / burn shit / fuck up the school.” The theme was admirable, but it created ambiguity for me: the talent was undeniable, the lo-fi production was attractive, the provocation of the chorus made me laugh but at the same time it seemed like something for children.
[o vídeo de “NOID”:]
Not that I was surprised he wrote a chorus like that; After all, Tyler had appeared years earlier in the midst of Odd Future, a collective known for its violent images, often gratuitously (there are several rape jokes in its first chapter). verses, for example). Whoever was part of Odd Future and rapped “Kill people / burn shit / fuck school” is not and will never be a mega star, I thought – and from that day until today, even listening to everything Tyler did and noticing the successive changes in sounds of his work, remained in my head as a provocateur – and it never occurred to me that in the meantime he had been adopted by those who had barely been born when he began making music (I am currently praying to dark gods of old that the children of today, including mine, no put the damn refrain mentioned above into practice).
CHROMACOPY is at the top of Billboard’s best-selling albums for the second week in a row, and this is not the first time: in 2021, with Call me if you get lostHe also spent two weeks at the top, although they were not consecutive; two years earlier he had already spent a week at the top, thanks to Igorwhich is (quite possibly) my favorite Tyler album (and my son’s, by the way).
First you’re the new kid on the block, provocative, wild, but not exactly accepted, and one day, the next thing you know, you’re popular and all the kids want to be like you; It is not the first time nor will it be. It will be the last time this story is repeated in (let’s say) pop music. In January 2020, Igor It earned Tyler the Grammy for Best Rap Album, which he didn’t like; is that Igor There might be a guy rapping but songs like EARTHQUAKE They transcended the genre, while rescuing other traditions (such as soul).
[um vídeo sobre a gravação de “CHROMAKOPIA”:]
When he took the stage, Tyler was clear: the award left him bitter because Tyler had never felt accepted in rap music. If we want to be precise, he wasn’t strictly a rapper either, and that’s where his magic lies. His music is full of allusions to other songs, to the point that the New York Times describe Call me if you get lost as “a conversation with the pop of the 60s, the french song and acoustic soul and funk.”
One could easily add that Tyler has a great ear for melodies, something that is clear in RUNNING OUT OF TIMEof Igoror in see you againof flower boy (2017), to name only the most obvious. This without ever stopping experimenting: one of the most fascinating aspects of Tyler is that, unlike some rappers, who are mainly performers and what they value in hip-hop is the flow of the rapper, Tyler has a fondness for beats strange, combining sounds from the past with dirty synthesizers or careful arrangements: nothing in it can be reduced to a defeat and shave.
However, Tyler’s efforts to be more than a rapper don’t end now: the first time he sought to move away from the persona he initially created (a provocateur idolized by kids who spent too much time on the Internet) was with Wolf2013: Erykah Badu and Pharrell Williams were quite a guest domo23 as Lonely They sounded like Neptunes and were full of brass and jazz chords, surprising for someone who had been banned from entering the UK in 2015 because Prime Minister Theresa May was afraid of his lyrics.
[“THOUGHT I WAS DEAD”:]
cherry bombfrom 2015, had a punk-rock vibe, proving that no sound was anathema to Tyler, despite it being probably Tyler’s least loved album. the successor, flower boyIt was much more lascivious and luxurious – in Where this flower blooms rapped “Tell these black kids they can be who they are” and this wasn’t really a verse from a strangerbefore someone more mature, who knew he had followers and responsibilities.
But, at the risk of being boring, it is in Igor May Tyler reach his zenith, and I say that with all due respect Call me if you get lost. It was there where he definitively freed himself from the violence of the beginning of his career and gave free rein to all the musicality that was germinating within him. In several interviews, Tyler said that he always listened for two hours a day, for pleasure but also in search of sounds to sample. Two hours a day, every day, for years allows you to listen to a lot of different music and all this different music appears in the background on the magnificent instruments of Igor (masterpiece).
CHROMOKOPIA It also gives a new color to Tyler – if in previous albums his father was the subject of a song for the worst reasons (having abandoned his son, for example), in the new album he returns to the subject, but to make amends – in like him Tyler’s mother tells her son (who is terrified of making the same mistakes as his father) that his father didn’t want to abandon him and she was the one who forced him to stay away. Tyler declares a truce in the eternal war with his father.
That kids (and it’s always kids who pick No. 1 on the charts) are as complex and clearly intelligent as Tyler is as a hero, well, that gives us some hope in humanity.
Source: Observadora
