His Odd Present

With his fifth studio album, IGOR, Tyler, the Creator shows us where he’s been headed all along.

- Craig Jenkins

MUCH LIKE THE story of the doomed Greek Titan and fire thief named in its subtitle, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus is a cautionary tale about the dark side of ambition. The mad Dr. Frankenstein’s grisly experiment in replicating the gift of human life brings him pain, failure, and death. Prometheus’s reward for granting humanity the gift of fire was exquisite torment and the grief of knowing his blessing led to a great deal of warring and suffering. You can get what you want if you try, to paraphrase the Rolling Stones, but you’re in for a mess if you haven’t considered the consequences.

Odd Future’s game plan at the top of the decade seemed to be to topple the existing idols and stomp on the broken pieces. If you made it into a room to see the collective perform live in the year it released Earl, Rolling Papers, Bastard, and BlackenedWhite, you were treated to a carnival of youth rage whose point, if you could see past the veneer of chaos and gore, was that the way we run things is wrong and there’ll be hell to pay if we don’t change. The kids were all right; we’re closing the decade in more of a mess than we started it in. What they didn’t see coming is what happens after you incite a revolution. Eventually, iconoclasts have to learn how to be icons and work harder than their predecessors or be brought low by a new generation of feisty youths like themselves. It’s poetic: Be better or be broken.

Tyler, the Creator—a founding member of Odd Future—has been working on himself, from the ironic psychiatrist’s-couch breakdown of 2011’s Goblin through the crude but occasionally sobering deep thoughts of 2013’s Wolf, the abrasive venting and late-night longing of 2015’s Cherry Bomb, and the late-stage revelations of 2017’s