CHROMAKOPIA - Tyler, The Creator: Review
Review by Lavender:
Tyler, The Creator really needs no introduction. The rapper, fashion designer, and one-time TV-comedian has been a pop culture staple since the early days of his edgelord rap collective Odd Future. He first broke through as a critical darling on 2017's Flower Boy an album that embraced pop sentimentalities and personal vulnerability in a far more digestible way than Tyler had ever done before and was rightly a massive success. It's what happened following that record where I get off course with Tyler's fans and rap fans in general though.
To many his follow-up album IGOR in 2019 is seen as his true masterpiece, something I couldn't disagree with more. My middling review of the record got me in a LOT of trouble at the time and yet I stand by pretty much every word of it. In fact, I even prefer Tyler's follow-up CALL ME IF YOU GET LOST which dropped a few years ago and delivered an equally strong collection of features with a much more consistent sonic palette and production style. That brings up to CHROMAKOPIA which is clearly framed in the reflection of IGOR, which admittedly made me skeptical. While I'm sure most Tyler fans will still call me a hater for not liking it ENOUGH, I'm happy to report that CHROMAKOPIA is a strong entry for Tyler.
That started with the lead single "Noid" which I still like despite several lyrical pitfalls that I really could do without. Tyler mostly manages to stay on topic about how being famous leaves him nervous and paranoid as the song cycles through multiple distinct and fun sonic phases. On the record, it comes side-by-side with an absolute banger in "Rah Tah Tah." The song has these sneering synths and distant bounding drums that hit so hard. Tyler's weird vocal inflections and celebratory munch-bars are hilarious and I can't get enough of the song.
As a matter of fact, for someone who has typically been more of a fan of Tyler at his most poppy and sentimental, the bangers on CHROMOKOPIA absolutely steal the show. Many people are projecting "Sticky" as the album's breakout his and it's easy to see why. Tyler teams up with Sexyy Red, GloRilla, and Lil Wayne for a parade of pummeling verses about staying true to themselves and flexing what makes each artist special. I'm not overthinking this one it's a goddamn banger and all I could really ask for is more Sexyy Red. My favorite song on the record falls into a similar category. "Thought I Was Dead" is one of the hardest Tyler songs I've ever heard. It's a bombastic, explosive victory lap where Tyler and ScHoolboy Q team up to feast over a sick instrumental piling on refrains that have been stuck in my head all week.
The only banger of the bunch I come away from just lukewarm is "Balloon" with Doechii. I have similarly mixed but more positive feelings on the opening and closing tracks. "St. Chroma" kicks the album off and as you'd expect it sets things up thematically. But with a weird whispered first verse and a surprisingly short second verse with a just okay hook in between it really feels like a track that only exists for the introduction. Closer "I Hope You Find Your Way Home" is better adding some context to themes expressed earlier on the record and bringing the record to a pleasant close.
So that's the half of CHROMAKOPIA that Tyler fans will be pretty familiar with, but the other half of the record is quite the pivot. Tyler has certainly gone deep into narrative-heavy songs on albums before but more than half of this record are songs explicitly designed first and foremost to tell stories. As you'd expect they're a bit of a mixed bag, but make no mistake there are some amazing highlights. "Take Your Mask Off" is the standout of the entire bunch, an absolutely beautiful swaying sunny piece of sheer bliss. The track tells numerous stories of people putting on various masks to hide who they really are and each one is interesting in its own right. What a great song.
In fact, the entire second half of the album really kills it with the narrative cuts. "Tomorrow" is Tyler's answer to Charli XCX's "I think about it all the time" where he muses on whether or not he should start a family. The song even has a reference to seeing a friend with children that inspired the feelings it's kind of funny how similar they are. I also love "Like Him" where Tyler uses snippets of his own mother talking to set up how much he's like his father he never knew. Even if it's a bit compositionally dry it's a pretty interesting song to experience regardless.
That leads us to the middle of the record where some of the most talked about and most divisive songs on the record appear. "Darling, I" works to dip your toes into this style wading into Tyler's own anxiety about falling in love to quickly. The only part of the song I don't really care for are Tyler's whining vocals which sound especially brought once you've heard an actually great singer in Teezo Touchdown right alongside them. "Hey Jane" is an improvement where Tyler plays out his reaction to an unexpected pregnancy seemingly in real-time. Lines about how he doesn't know the girl in the song well enough to have a child like "We haven't boat tripped, We haven't argued" are great individual moments of songwriting. But for the second verse he shifts the narration to be from her point of view and even playing off lines from the first verse. It's a very cool moment.
I'm less fond of the much more novel "I Killed You," which is a shame because it's a lyrical interesting depiction of the black community's relationship to their own natural hair. For all the song's well-observed meditations it lacks much in the way of actual appealing elements of a song and I can't really imagine any individual part of it sticking in my head or ever making me want to listen to it casually. The wheels only completely fall off once we reach "Judge Judy" though. The song is about a girl Tyler meets named Judy who he eventually loses contact with and later learns that she passed away from cancer. Despite the subject matter, the song doesn't even really seem like it's trying to take itself all that seriously which crystallized on an extremely deflating hook performed in this weirdly childish way.
CHROMAKOPIA is a bit of an experiment for Tyler, engaging headfirst in narrative-driven songwriting far deeper than on any previous record. While the results are mixed, these songs also have a persistent dosage of bangers lined in alongside them that help greatly improve the quality of the listening experience. Tyler has long been one of the most interesting rappers around, for better or for worse. But in CHROMAKOPIA he engages in an experiment that is both interesting and for the most part well done. 7.5/10
For more hip-hop check out my review of JPEGMAFIA's I Lay Down My Life For You
