On ‘Chromakopia,’ Tyler, the Creator Is Best Without a Mask
On his seventh studio album, the California rapper-producer probes—and embraces—his worst impulses as he tries to cope with rap superstardom.
Tyler, the Creator spends most of “Take Your Mask Off,” the emotional centerpiece of Chromakopia, chronicling the stories of fraught characters who are trapped in lives they don’t want to live. There’s the well-off, middle-class drama kid who turns to gangbanging and ends up facing a decade in the pen; the homophobic Christian preacher who’s in the closet and “fuckin’ them boys”; the stay-at-home mom watching life pass her by, who “can’t even get alone time to think about killin’ [her]self.” The song’s hook may be empathetic—“I hope you find yourself/And I hope you take your mask off”—but Tyler’s recaps are more judgmental. He sounds offended that these people are cramming themselves into lies, wasting their time on Earth. It seems like another fervid plea from a lifelong rebel who’s never been afraid to be himself.
But then, in the final verse, he turns that piercing gaze on himself. Over melancholic synths and drum kicks that play like Pharrell, Heatwave, and Stereolab thrown in a blender, Tyler goes through a list of second-guesses and stresses that stretch back at least a decade. He wonders if his fashion line is too expensive for his target audience, questions his decision to pursue an affair that almost ended his lover’s marriage, and interrogates himself for not wanting to have children. “Boy, you selfish as fuck, that’s why you scared of bein’ a parent/Boy, that therapy needed, I dare you to seek it, but I’ll lose a bet,” he raps, and you can practically see spittle hitting the mirror. A younger Tyler would have blamed others for these feelings or retreated into nostalgia or romance. But here, the 33-year-old polymath takes his own advice and strips himself down. It’s an uncomfortably tender moment, a provocateur’s worst fears frozen in sepia tone.
These conflicts are at the core of Chromakopia. The former Odd Future ringleader won over the music industry on his terms across the first decade of his career, and has spent the five years since 2019’s Igor on an extended victory lap. But every party has its downswing, and as he advances through his 30s, more cracks are appearing in his rebel facade. When you’ve made it to the top, what else is there to rail against other than yourself? Chromakopia is Tyler’s “what now?” album both narratively and sonically, a widescreen rendition of the spoils and issues gnawing at the corners of his last project, the flossy mixtape throwback Call Me If You Get Lost. It’s the first Tyler album in a while to feel like a thematic and musical composite of his previous work instead of something truly new and subversive, but it’s still undeniably impressive to hear him find interesting ways to bare his soul and keep the party jumping.
Part of that disconnect comes from the character at the album’s center, St. Chroma. (It’s a potential reference to Chroma the Great, the conductor from the 1961 children’s fantasy book The Phantom Tollbooth who teaches the novel’s young protagonist to take responsibility for his own actions.) On the surface, Tyler’s Chroma, with his realistic face mask and exaggerated, Buster Keaton-like mannerisms, literalizes the idea of performing for your audience as a means of escape. But while Igor and Call Me tied their respective personae, the blond-wigged Igor and the jet-setting Tyler Baudelaire, directly to their stories, Chroma’s association is looser—a nifty visual aesthetic that doesn’t add much narratively. Instead, Tyler’s mother, Bonita Smith, is the voice of reason here, buzzing in his ear about the ups and downs of creativity and love à la Jiminy Cricket. And unlike those last two albums, Tyler only ever refers to himself as Tyler on Chromakopia. For an artist prone to dealing with success and trouble by creating elaborate set pieces and acting his way through it, the St. Chroma concept feels thematically superfluous, the kind of thing a creative director might suggest just for the hell of it.
It’s more intriguing to hear him try to reconcile the tension between his two main songwriting modes—Gangsta Grillz-era flex raps and the measured storytelling of Igor or Flower Boy—unstuck from Chromakopia’s tenuous concept. At its best, the album plays up the friction between styles and creates a more complex version of Tyler than he’s ever shared. Hearing him brag about having a “crib so big, it need a doctor and a sippy cup” before revealing he won’t tell friends or lovers where it is on “Rah Tah Tah” tracks with the twitchiness that leads him nervously checking “triple-locked doors” on “Noid.” On “Hey Jane,” which is named after an online abortion pill service, Tyler tells the story of an unexpected pregnancy told from both his and his lover’s perspectives—a narrative that stems from what’s revealed to be a letter two tracks later on “Judge Judy,” which details how the couple’s situationship dissolved. “Like Him” recontextualizes Tyler’s relationship with his absentee father, a man he’s been cursing for the better part of 15 years, through a piano ballad about the ways they might be similar. It ends with the emotional gut punch of Tyler’s mom revealing she deliberately kept his dad out of his life. There are flashes of both Kendrick Lamar’s Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers and Kanye West’s 808s & Heartbreak in the album’s reconciliation of personal failures and toxic celebrity culture with the gratefulness of making it out of the trap alive. But Tyler’s twee sensibilities give it the air of a Golf Le Fleur-ified remake of the 1950 show-business film noir Sunset Boulevard.
The Mr. Morale comparison feels especially apt, considering how Tyler is dealing directly with his hypocrisies. Claiming your faults on record is a tricky tightrope to walk: Do it well, and you sharpen your pen and make yourself relatable; do it poorly, and you’ve only erected a monument to your faults to hide behind every time someone complains. In this way, Chromakopia flips Mr. Morale’s defensive and traditionalist conceit on its head—Tyler isn’t interested in starting a family, to put it lightly, and couldn’t care less about cancel culture. But some of his old habits still cause similarly harsh clashes.
Moments like the tongue-in-cheek omission of the word “bitches” from a line on “Rah Tah Tah” and the nuances of “Hey Jane” and “Judge Judy” show he’s blossomed into a more careful writer, but he isn’t above indulging thoughts of women trapping men with babies on “Noid.” He’s gone from simply telling Black kids to “be who they are—dye your hair blue, shit, I’ll do it too” to embracing his Black heritage and nappy hair, but he’s still critical of the ways in which Black men are set up by (and play into) systems built to subjugate them. As a (slightly) reformed chaos agent who’s bragged about being banned from entire countries, it’s a visceral unpacking, somehow both vain and compassionate. He’s less interested in immolating a self-image than he is in getting closer to becoming the person brave enough to admit he’s scared of fatherhood and his graying chest hairs, maturing to the point where he can at least acknowledge his bad impulses without hiding in plain sight.
Chromakopia’s music, which is entirely self-produced, composed, and arranged by Tyler, is an equally chaotic bag. He prides himself on creating traditional rap songs out of nontraditional parts, with gauzy synths, glockenspiel, and clock ticks brushing up against drums and samples. The pristine wackiness of his beats remains dazzling. On “St. Chroma,” synths and chirpy vocals courtesy of Daniel Caesar swirl around a looped platoon march, before everything boils over into a blast of digital clangs and Tyler’s beloved piano chords. The song’s raps are delivered in a raspy, whispered flow, emphasizing a quote from his idol Pharrell that he drops near the end of the first verse: “Give a fuck about traditions, stop impressin’ the dead.”
The only traditions Tyler is interested in exploring are his own, which is to say Chromakopia is the first Tyler album where he’s actively retreading older sounds as opposed to strictly blazing a new path. The scuzzy guitar strokes (sampled from legendary Zamrock band Ngozi Family’s “Nizakupanga Ngozi”) and thudding drums on “Noid” recall the frenzied march of Cherry Bomb opener “Deathcamp.” “Hey Jane” and “Take Your Mask Off” expand on the honeyed synth-funk vibes of “Find Your Wings,” while “Darling, I,” one of a handful of chintzy, high-pitched ballads, sounds like Igor’s “Running Out of Time” turned inside out. “Thought I Was Dead,” with its trilling horns and cowbell clacks, is like Wolf’s “Tamale” rearranged by DJ Paul and the leader of an HBCU marching band. But still, it’s easy to overlook these moments when Tyler is copying himself musically because, 15 years later, his sound remains so singular.
When he does land on something fresh, the results are mixed. I appreciate the cacophony of a song like “Sticky,” which turns Young Buck’s “Get Buck” into a Dr. Seussian twerk anthem, but the kitchen-sink layering of sounds and Glorilla’s great guest appearance made me want to run that Memphis rapper’s latest album Glorious back more than anything else. “I Killed You” puts Tyler’s peppy sense of reinvention to better use, using West African dunun rhythms, bass plucks, and guitar strums to highlight the anxieties of reclaiming pride in his natural hair. “Balloon,” which features a feisty verse from Florida rapper (and Tyler disciple) Doechii, has a digital giddiness to it that wouldn’t sound out of place on an episode of the YouTube kid’s show Gracie’s Corner if it weren’t for all the talk of her and Tyler fucking on the third member of their polycule. It’s no surprise that the guy who’s recently been making candy-colored renditions of Texas beats for Houston rapper Maxo Kream would try his hand at adapting other regional scenes, but his innovative streak doesn’t extend outside of his pet sounds this time.
There’s a bittersweet moment on closer “I Hope You Find Your Way Home” where Tyler brags about having his own Louis Vuitton collection—before adding that the company didn’t send him anything from the collection to actually wear. His boastful tone turns quiet quickly as he stumbles over that part of the song, like we’re hearing his surprise in real time. “I’m so embarrassed,” he mutters, deflated only for a moment before he picks himself up: “but happy it happened.” It’s the perfect microcosm of Chromakopia’s examination of a rap firebrand-turned-superstar who finds himself dwarfed by his own insecurities. Tyler is sick of running from himself but, unfortunately, that doesn’t guarantee he won’t stop trying. He genuinely holds himself accountable in some ways (it’s incredible to hear a AAA rap album deconstructing rap hypermasculinity and societal views on pregnancy and monogamy) and crosses his fingers behind his back in others (he calls himself a troll and a hypocrite on “Thought I Was Dead,” all but sticking out his tongue at listeners). What Chromakopia lacks in musical innovation, thematic consistency, and satisfying conclusions, it finds in the frustrating bliss of sincerity. It turns out we’re better off with the man behind the mask.
