These intersections of cocksureness and anxiety are this album at its best. He picks up the theme on the far tougher and more frenetic “Corso”: “My heart broken/Remembered I was rich so I bought me some new emotions/And a new boat ’cause I’d rather cry in the ocean.” Tyler lingers over feeling here, and it’s affecting and surprising: “They say, ‘Bros over hoes,’ I’m like, ‘Mm, nah, hey’/I would rather hold your hand than have a cool handshake.” It’s a startling narrative about coveting a person who you can’t have (because they’re in a relationship with one of your friends) that reads as many things: an elegantly drawn story, a gut-kick emotional excavation, a track with boom-bap urgency tempered by wandering-in-space effects.

The eight-and-a-half minute long “Wilshire” is where the two collide. There’s a second, parallel narrative at play, too, on “Call Me if You Get Lost,” which in places reads like two separate albums born of the same circumstances tugging at each other - one about how carefree and privileged Tyler’s success has made him, and the other about how all of those spoils don’t add up to much without love. A tauntingly good hip-hop album, or a rewiring of pop DNA: “Call Me if You Get Lost” has it both ways. But it also demonstrates the pop potential of Tyler’s now-signature approach to hip-hop, the way his post-Pharrell embrace of chords and melody is in fact in conversation with 1960s pop, French chanson, and acoustic soul and funk. It’s as thoroughgoing a rap album as Tyler has released - rarely has he been this keen to flaunt his bona fides. 1 album in the country - is the logical rejoinder to both of those obstacles. And the boisterous, sometimes scabrous, and persistently energetic “Call Me if You Get Lost” - currently the No. It was also a testament to the way he harnessed the power of the internet and built a vision from whole cloth, selling it to millions without much intersecting with the systems constructed to do that. Speaking to the press backstage, he expressed frustration at the narrow ways in which Black artists are celebrated at the Grammys, calling his nomination in the rap category, for a deeply musically diverse album, “a backhanded compliment.”īut the attention focused on that comment overshadowed what he’d said onstage when he received the award, which was that he was grateful for his fans’ support, because, he confessed, “I never fully felt accepted in rap.”īlockaded on both sides, Tyler nevertheless emerged victorious, an acknowledgment of the sheer force of the vision he’d built for a decade as the de facto macher of the Odd Future crew. In January of last year, Tyler, the Creator’s “Igor” won the Grammy Award for best rap album.

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