Tyler, the Creator, prefers to meet for breakfast, often arriving in his prized cherry red Ferrari F40. This vintage supercar, a limited-production model, was a long-coveted dream car for Tyler, which he finally acquired in June. It even made a cameo in his music video for “Stop Playing With Me,” the lead single from his ninth album, “Don’t Tap the Glass.” This album surprisingly dropped just nine months after his critically acclaimed “Chromakopia” (2024).
These two albums, both excellent but entirely different in style, highlight Tyler’s significant influence on hip-hop and wider culture. His unique blend of theatrical surrealism and an unparalleled ability to curate cool are central to his artistic identity. “Chromakopia” is a sprawling, hour-long immersive experience, complete with elaborate tour costumes like a green military jacket with gold epaulets, spiked hair, and a matte black mask of his own face. The album’s songs swing between flamboyant grandiosity and raw, introspective honesty, touching on topics from the anxieties of aging to the profound decision to terminate a pregnancy. In stark contrast, “Don’t Tap the Glass,” clocking in under 29 minutes, was spontaneously written and recorded during the “Chromakopia” tour. It’s a vibrant, party-ready album, celebrating a half-century of Black dance music, from 1980s talk-box funk to 90s new jack swing and 2000s Atlanta crunk.
As I awaited Tyler, I half-expected the roar of his twin-turbo V8 engine, but silence reigned. Instead, he simply walked in through a back door, alone. Taller than expected at about 6-foot-2 and now solidly built, the 34-year-old is far from the skinny teenager who first burst onto the scene. He was sporting his signature green: a green trucker hat from a Manhattan Beach diner, a green-striped polo, and green-and-white Jordan IIIs. His straight-cut Golf Wang jeans, fresh from the dryer for the perfect snug fit, were paired with clear-rimmed Cazals and lightly tinted lenses. His style is always precise and whimsical, both playful and intentional. We were seated on the back patio, where I noticed he’d chosen his more understated Rolls-Royce Cullinan. These are the types of luxury cars often featured in publications like Robb Report, which highlighted Tyler’s “cool little fleet” in 2022. Yet, for Tyler, these meticulously engineered machines hold a deeper, almost intangible value. “That’s replaceable,” he noted, referring to material possessions. “What matters is in the air around them.” He cherishes his BMW E30 M3, one of his earliest purchases, which, despite appearing like an old car to many, feels brand new to him due to his affection for it. He plans to pass it down to his future children, emphasizing, “I love and I drive and I eat in these cars. I didn’t purchase them because I’m trying to keep up an image.”
Despite his disinterest in maintaining a specific image, Tyler’s art and the immense attention it garners consistently place him at the forefront of image-making. As a versatile artist — rapper, singer, actor, filmmaker, producer, and provocateur — he has always embraced a certain fluidity in his identity. It’s often hard to discern what’s genuine, what’s satirical, and what’s purely surreal. Take “Yonkers,” the standout track from his 2011 major-label debut, “Goblin,” released when he was 20. The opening line, “I’m a walking paradox — no, I’m not!” (which can’t be fully quoted here), serves as an artistic declaration. It signifies his persistent drive to define and redefine himself, even within a few words. The black-and-white music video for the song, a piece of performance art, is even more telling: Tyler sits alone on a stool in an empty room, his eyes blackened with contact lenses, a cockroach crawling between his fingers. Later, he vomits, and then a noose appears, which he drapes around his neck. The video concludes with the shocking image of a tipped-over stool and his flailing legs.
From his earliest songs and videos, Tyler fearlessly declared himself an artist unconcerned with being misunderstood. His creations were initially for his own amusement and that of his friends, lending his work a genuine authenticity that, upon finding an audience, evolved into a rare intimacy. This connection endures. A simple YouTube comment under the “Goblin” video perfectly encapsulates this: “As a kid I thought this was terrifying, now I just see this as normal Tyler behavior.” Many of Tyler’s fans have literally grown up with his music. Over the years, he has subtly through his art and explicitly through public statements guided them on how to engage with his unique vision. And with his extensive back catalog, new generations of fans continue to discover and connect with his evolving artistry.
Tyler’s early artistic endeavors were characterized by a joyous defiance, pushing the limits of both genre and acceptable behavior. Though he abstains from alcohol and drugs, his music has consistently explored extreme emotional and existential states, delving into themes of sex, drugs, murder, and general chaos, all within the safe confines of his imagination. He chose rap as his medium, a genre often misconstrued as solely representing strict sincerity. This misconception has even led to rap lyrics being used as adverse evidence in legal proceedings. Tyler himself faced real-world repercussions in 2015 when then-British Home Secretary (and future prime minister) Theresa May banned him from entering the country due to lyrics she deemed homophobic and violent.
A decade later, Tyler moves freely across the globe, his art having matured and broadened considerably. His recent commercially successful music, with his last four albums all topping the Billboard 200 chart, showcases his unique first-person narrative layered over innovative rhythms, melodies, and samples. He creates something far richer than a mere autobiographical account. On stage, he designs lavish, immersive worlds, such as the “Chromakopia” tour’s fantastical mix of industrial harshness and vibrant psychedelic visuals, navigating them with peculiar grace — marching, jerking, and even twerking to his beats. Off-stage, he champions Black creative expression through visuals for his own music and through over a decade of television and web productions. These range from the irreverent sketch-comedy show “Loiter Squad” (2012-14) to the animated series “The Jellies!” (2017-19), which tells the story of a 16-year-old Black boy raised by jellyfish.
This December, Tyler will debut in Josh Safdie’s feature film “Marty Supreme,” a period drama set in 1950s New York, where he plays a relentlessly ambitious table tennis hustler alongside Timothée Chalamet. His fashion brand, Golf Wang, established in 2011, combines bold colors and whimsical graphics with skate culture, streetwear, and unconventional takes on American prep. Last year, he even designed a capsule collection for Louis Vuitton and launched a Converse sneaker line inspired by the brand’s heritage. In all his ventures, Tyler remains true to his distinct artistic vision while increasingly bringing others into his creative orbit. Safdie, 41, marvels at Tyler’s integrated approach: “He’s so vertically integrated. There’s no difference between the windows at the Golf store and a piano interlude on [his sixth album] ‘Igor.’”
Tyler Gregory Okonma was born in Hawthorne, a working-class city in southwest Los Angeles. His lyrics often tell a personal story of a childhood defined by his mother’s profound love and his father’s absence. His mother, who now owns a health spa in Los Angeles, was only 20 years his senior and fiercely supportive of his creative freedom, even for spontaneous weekday trips to Six Flags. She occasionally features on his albums, most recently in “Chromakopia” interludes where she offers both encouragement (“You are the light… It’s not on you, it’s in you”) and gentle reminders. From a young age, Tyler possessed an intense curiosity for the world, especially music. At seven, he’d immerse himself in Brandy’s “Always on My Mind” (1994) and Sade’s “Kiss of Life” (1992), among other soulful female artists. He recalls telling his mother, ‘Oh, I love when it slants. The cloud, the cloud, it slants!’ – a form of synesthesia where sounds evoked visual experiences. “I didn’t know what chords were at the time,” he explains, “I didn’t have the language but, to me, that’s what it felt like.”
He began developing his creative language through both real-world and virtual communities. Tyler and his friends would bike six or seven miles to Manhattan Beach, composing lyrics along the way and marveling at the oceanside homes. Lacking a smartphone, Tyler would commit lyrics to memory or jot them down on his pants with a marker. By age 13, he had a Myspace page where he displayed his drawings, T-shirt designs, and early musical compositions. “I didn’t know what else to put, so I just put ‘Tyler, the Creator’ because of all the little things I was creating,” he says. More than two decades later, he reluctantly accepts the name, acknowledging the humor of a comma in his moniker but also its profound honesty.
Tyler was a good student at Westchester High, where he immersed himself in the music of Eminem (“Marshall Mathers LP,” “The Eminem Show”) and N.E.R.D. (“In Search of…,” “Fly or Die”). In his senior year, he connected with classmate Lionel Boyce in a theater class. Boyce, now known for his role as Marcus Brooks in the FX series “The Bear,” credits Tyler with inspiring him to take his artistic aspirations seriously. “He had a very distinct sense of humor that I understood,” Boyce, 34, recalls. “But there were kids who didn’t get it. They’d get upset: ‘What are you saying?’ The point of it is not to be got. That’s always been his baseline.”
Tyler soon brought his friends together to form a loose collective of aspiring artists—rappers, singers, producers, actors, filmmakers, skateboarders, and fashion designers—originally known as Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All, or simply Odd Future. This desire to form a crew was partly a reaction to the previous generation’s pressures, which often led to affiliations along gang lines in Los Angeles. Tyler and his friends were self-proclaimed nerds and outcasts, finding strength and identity in their numbers.
Witnessing Odd Future’s early performances, Tyler’s presence was undeniable. He radiated the confidence of an older sibling (he has a younger sister) combined with the rebellious spirit of a born iconoclast. He fondly remembers performing “Odd Toddlers” from his 2009 album “Bastard” with fellow Odd Future members Hodgy and Left Brain. “I think I pulled my pants down, got into the crowd and tried to mosh with the moms,” he recounts, adding, “But it was so free. Wasn’t even trying to be good. It was just *being*, at the highest level.” However, it would be inaccurate to view Odd Future solely as a platform for Tyler’s rise. It was truly a collective of distinctively gifted artists with diverse, sometimes conflicting, creative visions. Boyce, Frank Ocean, Syd, Earl Sweatshirt, and others fueled each other’s artistic energy. While Tyler’s voice was often the loudest, it was never solitary.
At the restaurant, Tyler sat facing away from the street, observing the other diners. He seems to relish being recognized and challenging conventional expectations of where and who a celebrity should be. “I really be outside, man. Like, for real,” he asserts. I shared that numerous students in my UCLA hip-hop poetics lecture had reported seeing him over the years: cycling in the South Bay, cruising Sunset Boulevard in his McLaren, or playing tag with friends in a Brentwood park. “That’s me,” he confirmed. “That’s gonna be me forever.”
Tyler’s method for navigating a public yet private life lies in his clever use of selective self-disclosure. In “Wilshire,” a nearly nine-minute, single-verse track from “Call Me if You Get Lost” (2021) without any hooks, he delivers an open letter to an unnamed love interest involved with his friend. The narrative is rich with intimate, even mundane details—”dirtyin’ my bakin’ pots, tennis at my mama spot”—and expresses deep regret for letting infatuation strain a friendship. Yet, he skillfully omits the lover’s identity. He applies a similar tactic to questions about his sexuality, a long-standing subject of fan speculation. For over a decade, his lyrics have explicitly touched upon queerness. In “I Ain’t Got Time!” (2017), he rhymes, “Next line will have ’em like, ‘Whoa …’ / I’ve been kissing white boys since 2004.” On “Wilshire,” he proclaims, “Men or women, it don’t matter: If I seen ’em, then I had ’em.” By openly discussing his sexuality, articulating what others might only whisper, he claims the freedom to live authentically.
This unique blend of transparency and mystique likely explains the broad and dedicated following he commands. It’s unusual for an artist 15 years into their career to be at the pinnacle of popularity, yet Tyler has achieved just that. His fanbase spans from middle schoolers to baby boomers, a testament to his wide appeal. Tyler, however, has his own theory: “I don’t know if youth culture exists anymore,” he muses. “I think a 42-year-old and a 15-year-old could have the same humor and style.” He reflects on his teenage years, captivated by Soulja Boy’s “Crank That” (2007)—a track many older hip-hop enthusiasts scorned, with Ice-T even claiming it “single-handedly killed hip-hop.” Now, Tyler observes, “it’s like, people be on Twitter, 25 years’ age difference, talking about the same thing.”
Tyler is among the pioneering artists who mastered the internet’s digital power to craft a persona that is both avatar and authentic individual. Consequently, much of his maturation is publicly chronicled across social media. His Twitter feed, spanning 15 years, reveals strongly held yet sometimes fleeting opinions, minor disputes, transient interests, and deeply personal disclosures. On July 29, 2010, he famously tweeted, “The only two people approval I want in this world is Pharrell Williams and my mothers.” Williams’s work—his production duo, The Neptunes (with Chad Hugo), and his rock/rap group, N.E.R.D. (with Hugo and Shae Haley)—provided Tyler with a blueprint for a sound that seamlessly fused aggressive rap flows, emotionally raw singing, and intricate melodic instrumentation. “Oh, he’s had my approval since I met him [14 years ago],” Williams responds to Tyler’s tweet. “Our job as human beings in this world, certainly my job, is to spot the light in people. Tyler is one of those people that has the light. He can sing, he can dance, he can act.” At 52, Williams continues to produce contemporary music, including Clipse’s recent hit album “Let God Sort Em Out,” while also serving as the creative director of men’s wear for Louis Vuitton. He sees Tyler as a kindred spirit: “We share very similar DNA. We’re the same archetype.” This archetype—the cultural polymath, the sonic trickster, the cool nerd, however one defines it—also encompasses their often uncredited, relentless work ethic. “His work is his friendship,” Williams explains. “To know his work is to be his friend. This is all I’ve ever known of him.”
While Williams radiates a grounded presence, Tyler remains a joyfully unpredictable force, ever-responsive to his environment and captivated by spectacle, often initiating it himself. Our four-hour breakfast was frequently punctuated, not by his phone (which he never touched), but by his own thoughts. Both grand and subtle sensory stimuli intruded upon his consciousness: a house finch landing on a nearby table, the vibrant yellow blazer of a woman entering the restaurant, the thick consistency of the maple syrup. Above all, it was the music that commanded his attention—a playlist leaning heavily into 1990s and early 2000s R&B. At one point, Tyler rerouted our conversation for a three-minute reverie on André 3000’s brilliant “The Love Below” (2003); at another, he pondered the proliferation of female-fronted R&B groups from the mid-90s to early 2000s, like Groove Theory, City High, and Lucy Pearl.
All these observations are, for Tyler, expressions of his profound love. In this sense, he embodies a modern take on the classic flâneur, the “gentleman stroller of the city streets” described by French poet Charles Baudelaire, who finds art in everyday life. It’s tempting to connect Tyler with Baudelaire, author of the scandalous, surreal “Les Fleurs du Mal” (1857)—”The Flowers of Evil”—which led to an obscenity trial in Paris. The opening track of “Call Me if You Get Lost” (2021), “Sir Baudelaire,” seems to embrace this comparison, with Tyler styling himself as “Tyler Baudelaire,” a “true connoisseur” recognized by concierges at elite hotels worldwide, with a passport full of stamps. However, Tyler’s actual reference points are the Baudelaire children from Lemony Snicket’s “A Series of Unfortunate Events” (1999-2006). These resourceful orphans, across 13 novels, navigate life from innocence to experience, much as Tyler himself has matured.
Yet, Tyler undeniably possesses a poetic sensibility. In his 1863 essay “The Painter of Modern Life,” Baudelaire depicted the ideal artist as “a kaleidoscope gifted with consciousness, responding to each one of its movements and reproducing the multiplicity of life.” Driven by insatiable curiosity and a deep appreciation for beauty, such an artist seeks the energy of crowds while creating in solitude. “He is an ‘I’ with an insatiable appetite for the ‘non-I,’” Baudelaire wrote, “at every instant rendering and explaining it in pictures more living than life itself, which is always unstable and fugitive.” Through his ever-evolving and elusive art—from the shocking stunts of his youth to the deeply personal lyrics that paradoxically make him even more enigmatic—Tyler demonstrates a profound way of engaging with the fluid and transient aspects of himself and the world around him. His artistic output functions as both a public spectacle and a deeply personal sanctuary. “I’m in a place because of all the chaos [in the world] where I find a settled peace in the things I love,” he concludes. “Yeah, that’s where I’m at.”
*Hair by Ronnie McCoy III. Makeup by Grace Ahn for Day One. Set design by Spencer Vrooman. Producer: Connect the Dots. Lighting tech: Harris Mizrahi. Photo assistants: Fred Mitchell, Luis Ramirez. Digital tech: Adam Corbett. Tailor: Hasmik Kourinian. Set designer’s assistants: Christian Duff, Roland Cano, Bryan McGovern Wilson. Stylist’s assistants: Jose Cordero, Ruby Bravo, Damien Lloyd*