Tyler in Europe: An Incident.

June 5, 2011, 1 comments

A lot of things happened at Primavera Sound this year. On the other hand, nothing really happened. Or more specifically, at least according to Pitchfork, nothing noteworthy happened on their own stage during the performance of OFWGKTA, or briefly Odd Future, Saturday night starting at 1.45 a.m. This is an interesting reading of things, at any rate. Because neither Larry Fitzmaurice nor Amy Phillips were present during the show? Possibly. Obviously, Fitzmaurice was attending the Animal Collective performance that was happening simoultaneously at the festival’s main stage. But considering the fact that the Brooklyn-based opinion leader kinda likes Tyler, the Creator, and that photographer Shannon McClean was taking photos of the gig, I can’t help but suspecting that this silence is rather telling. Were they embarrassed? Or even “mad pissed”? If the latter, then good luck with welcoming Odd Future at Pitchfork’s very own festival in Chicago in mid-July.

Things did happen during that gig, towards its end, when Odd Future were performing Radicals from Tyler’s recent album Goblin. It’s not that no fan has ever invaded a stage before, or that things never before have gotten out of control during a rap concert. And considering the Odd Future posse, it’s basically their thing now, which in fact makes the whole Primavera incident not that original or even newsworthy. So what the hell then?

About Odd Future’s actual performance, allow me to keep things succinct by quoting Emilie Friedlander’s laconic evaluation of Tyler’s and Hodgy Beat’s television debut on “Late Night with Jimmy Fallon” earlier this year: “Musically, the duo’s rendition of ‘Sandwitches’ (…) was about as climactic as two teenagers shouting at constant high volume over a flabby-sounding synth sample could be. The verses were almost entirely buried in speaker blare, the refrain nothing more than a shout-out to themselves (Wolf! Gang! Wolf! Gang!). It was the way the ski-masked rappers moved that saved the spot from the annals of competent but dull major network breakthrough.” That, in a major festival setting, and over the course of roughly 45 minutes, and you more or less got the whole picture.

Still, what actually did happen between the lines was an utterly revealing encounter between this year’s single most hyped artist and his European audience, and whatever anyone has to say about Tyler these days, whether he ought to be damned or apotheosized, this very encounter was disturbing to the highest degree. Even before the group had appeared on stage, those white middle class kids were shouting, no, screaming “Wolf! Gang! Wolf! Gang!” as if those were the ones that had won the Champions League a few hours earlier. And when things finally got out of hand, during the last song Radicals, for the first time since listening to OFWGKTA I couldn’t escape the feeling that someone could understand the catchphrase “Kill People Burn Shit Fuck School” as an actual incitement to violence. Briefly, the complete absence of any kind of irony among the crowd was a deeply troubling experience.

There are a thousand reasons to be unsettled in view of Tyler’s lyrics, no doubt. There’s nothing actually funny about a “rape joke” (Andrew Nosnitzky, The Wire #327) that goes “Rape a pregnant bitch and tell my friends I had a threesome”. In fact, it appears rather hard to even refer to the very concept of “joke” when writing about such lines. Still, I do think it is possible to defend Tyler’s art – not despite, but indeed because of that kind of lyricism. “His primary mode of thought is negation”, writes Scott Plagenhoef in his review of Goblin on Pitchfork, and it is a negation that necessarily aims at stirring up exactly that type of disgust and indignation regarding topoi that his target society will be most susceptible for. Thus, every shocked reaction becomes a victory. And this artistic calculus puts Tyler’s work galaxies apart from that of other rappers such as Eminem or Insane Clown Posse (an equation suggested by Friedlander) and actually justifies comparisons with other misanthropist geniuses such as Michel Houellebecq or Thomas Bernhard, even though it might seem hard to put the respective means on the same level.

In particular the title track of Goblin is key for the comprehension of his work. “I’m not a fucking rapist or a serial killer, I lied”, he raps, and the application of the word “lie” in this context is utterly revealing. Tyler himself is well aware of what he’s doing. Unfortunately, his fans apparently are not. After their successful stage invasion, for obscure reasons some of those pale youngsters just stood their for minutes and gave the audience the middle finger, without laughter or any other sign of amusement. Others couldn’t stop screaming out their emotions of sheer, unadulterated triumph that repeatedly crossed the thin line to insanity, while a minority considered it an appropriate idea to destroy the PA. All in all it was a truly bizarr, unaccountable scenery.

To be clear, no one needs to feel sorry for Tyler, neither for his presumably fucked-up fatherless childhood nor for all the downsides of fame that he might be facing now. After all, he was the one who encouraged the crowd to conquer the stage at Primavera, just like he had done in London on May 1st, and he seemed to enjoy himself and the mess he was responsible for. Yet I do believe that there might be a need to protect his art – not his person – from his fans, cause after the incident in Barcelona all this weirdly feels like a major, and potentially dangerous, misunderstanding.

They don’t get it / It’s not made for them / The nigga that’s rappin’ in the mirror / It’s made for him / But they do not have the mindset that’s same as him. (Goblin)