Flower Boy and Sexuality: A Culturally-Guided Misinterpretation

Up to this point, I have probably listened to Flower Boy front to back about fifteen times, absorbing every pop of synth and every syllable of lyrics dropped through each run through.
Prior to the release of Flower Boy, Tyler, The Creator was fairly absent from my discography, where he once was the sole rap artist until one or two singles from Childish Gambino made its way onto my playlist. However, with the release of “Who Dat Boy” weeks before his new album, I went through a renaissance of sorts with Tyler, The Creator.
Anxiously awaiting his next album, I was both riding the standard media hysteria leading up to it as well as going back to listen to Tyler’s past works, mainly off of Wolf and discovering gems off of Cherry Bomb.
Tyler continually appealed to me as I examined and experienced his past projects because of the contextual growth in his songwriting and character. With each album, there was an expansion of thematic depth and a narrowing in to the artistic perspective of Tyler, The Creator.
Writing hard raps on Goblin, specifically Tyler’s meteoric single “Yonkers”, and then adding some “softer” pieces with Wolf such as “IFHY” and a look into Tyler’s psyche in “Rusty”, Tyler’s growth practically manifests into the central motif of Flower Boy, stated specifically on the track “Where This Flower Blooms” with imagery comparing Tyler’s character to a tree blooming and branching out given time.
Media coverage leading up to Flower Boy appeared focused less on this theme of growth and more promoted a literal narrative relating to some lyrics off of the album that allude to Tyler coming out. However, viewing Flower Boy solely as a project for Tyler, The Creator to reveal his sexuality, which he does not necessarily do on the album, neglects the over arching theme of the album being Tyler shifting his artistic focus, as is evident by the overall mood of the album as well as the lyrical content.
The one track that seems central to the sexual narrative of Flower Boy is “Garden Shed”. In the track, Tyler raps basically about how he was hiding inside a Garden Shed and is, to an extent, coming out of the shed with the song. And later, on the track “November”, Tyler references a fear that people in his life will abandon because of what he raps about in “Garden Shed”. And of course there’s the line in “I Ain’t Got Time!” where he says he’s been “kissing white boys since 2004”, but to isolate these details as the central point to Flower Boy ignores the greater themes laced both through the album and through the idea of sexuality explored in “Garden Shed” and such.
Of course, in a cultural era where the concept of sexuality is itself being expanded and explored, subject matter relating to one’s embracement of their sexual identity is emphasized by societal context and thus interpreted through that lens. But identity is not myopic in that black and white sense, and a greater understanding of that is displayed through the entirety of Flower Boy.
Flower Boy kicks off with a simple beat with “Foreward”, which itself captures a machine attempting to function with the dot-like noises from the synthesizer. Tyler in this song expounds on thoughts concerning where he is moving with his life both personally and with his career. The song ends on a verse from Rex Orange County basically amounting to the question “what is my place in this world?”
Later on the track “Pothole”, Tyler uses the image of a car fish-tailing to capture a sudden turn in both his career and his ambitions. Driving is a key theme to Flower Boy, too, with a focus on specific brands of cars as a definition of status and really a definition of self, all of which culminates towards Tyler recognizing the function of materialism in his life on the “Mr. Lonely” side of track ten, saying “I know you sick of me talkin’ ‘bout cars/But what the fuck else do you want from me?/That is the only thing keepin’ me company”.
Stylistically, Flower Boy seems to be Tyler fish-tailing from shock-based content to more introspective and softer, but profound pieces. In that essence, Tyler is coming out from his own introversions, and the garden shed, which houses the tools necessary to groom one’s yard, almost represents Tyler externalizing parts of himself he was previously hiding, whether that be his sexuality or using sexuality as a metaphor.
Most importantly, Flower Boy culminates to an instrumental with “Enjoy Right Now, Today”, which without lyrics almost challenges the listener to hear only the harmonies of the notes and experience the present. If we look at Flower Boy’s thesis to be structured on a “problem-solution” layout, the problem Tyler presents is that he does not know where his life is heading and the album is an investigation of the emotions that come with that, with the solution presumably being to live with the present and let time’s natural flow carry us to the future. He raps heavily of this on “November”, where Tyler speaks about his fears that his identity will cause everyone and everything he knows to turn against him. That’s one interpretation.
Ultimately, Flower Boy is a harmonious illustration of Tyler, The Creator growing as an artist and a person. To exacerbate the theme of sexuality of the album makes us miss the greater point being presented throughout the 47-minute runtime. Flower Boy, at its essence, is attempting to verbalize concepts of identity and purpose in order to understand the question “what is my place in this world?”
