FLOWER BOY

From poor-taste shock MC to mainstream super stardom, Tyler The Creator has done a lot of growing up. Nigel Williamson celebrates his genius

When Tyler The Creator landed at Heathrow in 2015 to play the Reading and Leeds festivals, he was taken into detention by immigration officials, shown copies of the lyrics from his first two albums and told that he was being deported back to America under anti-terrorism legislation.

He was subsequently handed a letter which set out the charge against him in more detail and suggested somebody in Whitehall had been analysing his songs in the kind of forensic fashion you would usually only find in the reviews pages of Mojo or Rolling Stone.

“Your albums Bastard, in 2009, and Goblin, in 2011, are based on the premise of your adopting a mentally unstable alter ego who describes violent physical abuse, rape and murder in graphic terms which appears to glamorise this behaviour,” it read.

True, his lyrics were peppered with words like: “faggot” and four-letter obscenities. Yet Eminem, a white rapper who had also built his early career on a cartoonishly violent and foul-mouthed alter ego, was never prevented from performing in Britain, which led Tyler to wonder if there was an element of racism in the ban. “I’m dark-skinned, so, all right, I get it,” he said. “They did not like the fact that their children were idolising a black man”.

He also denied vehemently all charges against him – or at least claimed that he had moved on from them. “I’m not homophobic and the ‘hating women’ thing is nuts. It’s based on things I made when I was super-young, when no one was listening,” he insisted. Most adolescent indiscretions, he pointed out, are: “shared with about three other people in your home town”. It was his misfortune that he had shared his with the world.

Are we still friends?