Tyler Okonma, better known by his stage name Tyler, The Creator, is a muti-talented American rapper, record producer and music video director from Los Angeles, California. He is the leader of the alternative hip hop collective OFWGKTA. He has rapped on and produced songs for nearly every OFWGKTA release. He gained fame from his single "Yonkers", which Kanye West called "the video of 2011" on Twitter.
Early life
Tyler, The Creator was raised by his single mother, who is of Nigerian and European-Canadian descent. When he was 7 years old, Tyler was known to take the covers out of an albums case and create covers for his own imaginary albums including a tracklist with song times before he could even make music. His parents consistently took his weekly allowance to help replace the album cases. At the age of 14, Tyler taught himself how to play piano.
Tyler attended thirteen different reformatory schools during his twelve years of education, including schools in Sacramento and the Los Angeles areas. Tyler is currently nominated for an MTV Music Video Award for Best New Artist and Video of the Year for "Yonkers".
In that video y’all directed called “Yonkers,” you eat that cockroach, then you vomit it back up, then you’re bleeding out your nose, then you’re hangin’ yourself.
Yeah.
Is there something deeper behind it? What do those images mean?
Well, a lot of people think that stuff is deeper than it really is. Some people just think too much. Like, my manager knows I wanna be a video director, so he was like, “Hey, just write a video, write the treatment for it, and we’ll shoot it.” So I was like, “All right, fuck it. I’ll eat a cockroach, I’ll throw up, and then I’ll hang myself . . . It’s, like, no subliminal messages or secret meanings or anything. I just personally think the shit would look really cool, so I did it. I just like doing shit that I think is cool, and people happen to like it, so I’m pretty, like, fortunate for that. So I’m gonna just continue to be myself and do what I like. Again, people are just so quick to judge shit ’cause they don’t understand it. But I understand what I’m doing, and that’s all that should matter.
I’m sure you know people say y’all’s lyrics are dark or are negative. What do y’all think fans should get when they walk away from listening to y’all’s music?
Well, our fans relate to our music, but most of the time the people who say that our music is dark and weird and shit like that—it doesn’t relate to them so they judge it based on what shocks them the most instead of the whole project. So the fans walk away as fans who are relatin’ to the shit, knowin’ what the fuck I’m talkin’ about, and then the other people can just sit there and claim what we’re doing is dark and Satanist or other bullshit that I don’t even like readin’ about. Because I’ll be readin’ shit where peo- ple say, “He’s not lyrical, and rap is supposed to be lyri- cal and have passion,” and I’m sitting there like, “He’s rappin’ about his life and how he misses his brother [on the song “Nightmare” from Goblin]. How is that not passionate?” But I guess those people just don’t relate to anything we’re saying, so they’re quick to judge.
twitter@fucktyler
www.theoddfuture.com
