TYLER, THE CREATOR’S “FLOWER BOY” OPENS THE GARDEN SHED TO INCLUSIVITY IN HIP HOP
By @Eugene3005
American rapper, record producer, music video director, designer and creative director Tyler Okonma, known by his stage name Tyler, The Creator’s fourth studio album Flower Boy is a journey of self-acceptance, honesty and realism in a hip-hop culture saturated in pretentiousness and dishonesty.
The album is somewhat of a far cry from Tyler’s previous releases, which were exhibitions of beautiful glitzy, jazz and blues inspired production overlaid with brash and sometimes overaggressive raps. Good music for the most part, just very polarizing. This album, however, almost feels like a new awakening for Tyler, who’s growth and new found maturity are clear to see on this project. Case in point; Tyler finally decides to open the lid on his sexuality and thus inevitably reignited the outdated spark that is homophobia in hip-hop.
Homophobia has been a long raging problem in hip-hop for a while, almost until homophobia and hip-hop were seen to go hand in hand. Needless to say, this has a detrimental effect on the millions of impressionable young minds that are influenced by the genre daily.
From legends like Eminem and Jay Z to contemporary superstars like the Migos and even Tyler, The Creator himself, it can be argued that homophobia in our genre has been perpetuated by many. Why is this the case, however?
Hip-hop started as an avenue for the oppressed and under-represented in society to express themselves freely, without fear of being held back or being told to hold their tongues. It was the pastime of young men often of minority groups such as the Black and Latino communities who had been denied opportunities and even simple infrastructure, thus they rerouted their pride through ostentatious dress and braggadocio.
For most of these men, their manhood was all they had and often when that’s the case, the worst thing you could do is paint anyone else as something less than virile or strong.
Old-fashioned homophobia provided easy targets even our most righteous minds had a go at: A Tribe Called Quest’s vile anti-gay track “Georgie Porgie”narrowly missed inclusion on the classic Low End Theory. Public Enemy’s Fear of a Black Planet includes “Meet the G That Killed Me,” which, in under a minute, posits gay sex as a slippery slope toward intravenous drug use and AIDS.
An industry witch hunt for closeted mainstream rappers would last as long as the mid-2000s, but the tone and texture of homophobia in the business began to change as record sales dwindled, and with the rise of lucrative endorsement deals that laid A-list rappers’ millions at the whim of corporations sensitive to the slightest hint of consumer backlash. Suddenly, 50 Cent, who famously told Playboy, “I don’t like gay people around me, because I’m not comfortable with what their thoughts are,” is a supporter of same-sex marriage; and T.I., who snarked, “If you can take a dick, you can take a joke,” after Tracy Morgan was blasted for a stand-up bit about stabbing a fictional gay son to death in 2011, changed his tune, too. (The only rapper remembered for standing up for his gay fans before everyone got suspiciously “woke” was Kanye West. True to form, 50 Cent snapped back with gay jokes about him too.)
As time progressed into the late 2000s and early 2010s, the winds of change blew in hip-hop, just like they did in popular culture in general. Most influential artists advocated for their fans to be whoever they wanted to be, and tried, through their music, to give them the confidence to do so. However, the ugly underbelly of the genre that was formed by its pioneers never failed to appear every once in a while.
As a result, being a rap fan that identified as anything other than male and straight was to wade against a current pushing back at your very being, to be constantly driven by your heart to decisions your mind ought to reject. Artists accept your patronage, but twist the knife by peppering music with insults and slurs, and interviews with attempts to create distance from hate and discrimination even as they flirt with the very linguistics of the stuff. When J. Cole uses “faggot” three times in a song, he says he did it to “spawn better conversations” about homophobia in hip-hop. Travis Scott called a hometown audience “a bunch of queers” for being too quiet at a show and explained that he was just “a little turnt up.”
This uncertain climate is the era in which Tyler, The Creator released Flower Boy. An album which, because of these uncertain times, was a talking point as a result of everything but the music. This is a shame, considering that Tyler released some of the best music of 2017.
Flower Boy does a phenomenal job of meshing the jazz-inspired production that mimicked the sounds of legends like Roy Ayers with the mesmeric voices of contemporary R&B vocalists like Kali Uchis and Estelle. All this tied in with playfully beautiful piano chords and introspective rap verses gave the album a journey-like feel. An odyssey of self-acceptance that Tyler seemingly completes at the end of the 14 tracks. It was a fitting “coming of age” for one of hip-hop’s most polarizing figures.
The album officially released on the 21st of July 2017 and despite leaking three weeks prior, it did well, charting at #2 on the Official Billboard Charts in its first week with 105,000 copies sold. Flower Boy received critical acclaim and is often lauded as one of the best albums of 2017 in all genres. This praise culminated in a Grammy nomination for the “Best Rap Album” at the 60th Grammy awards. Deserved recognition for an album widely regarded to be Tyler’s magnum opus.
Despite Flower Boy being interpreted by many as a confession of his homosexuality, Tyler has seen constant controversy for alleged homophobia based on lyrical content in his past. His debut studio album “Goblin” was filled with lines such as “I’m stabbin’ any bloggin’ faggot hipster with a Pitchfork” and “(Can we get backstage man?) No, faggot, it’s sold out.”
Flower Boy, as well every one of his studio albums to this point, also featured fellow Odd Future member and close friend Frank Ocean, who has been openly bisexual since 2012, a point which Tyler has cited multiple times in defense of himself. But in 2015 the U.K. went as far as banning Tyler for 3-5 years - a ban that is yet to be lifted - claiming his lyrics “encouraged violence and intolerance of homosexuality.” When asked about his use of gay slurs in an interview on The Arsenio Hall Show, Tyler responded, “When I say that word I’m not thinking of someone’s sexual orientation. It’s just another word that has no meaning.”
In the light of this, Tyler’s lyrics and subsequent “coming out” story on Flower Boy seem to mirror hip-hop’s long and tedious acceptance of the LGBTQ community.
On the Estelle-featured track “Garden Shed,” he raps: “Garden shed, garden shed, garden shed, Garden shed for the garcons, Them feelings I was guardin’” which has been annotated as by many as a metaphor for coming out of the closet; which in this case is a garden shed. Furthermore, lines like, “F**k global warming my neck is so frio, I’m currently looking for ’95 Leo” as in a 1995 version of popular actor and then-heartthrob Leonardo Di Caprio, only solidified the hunch of Tyler’s newfound openness about his sexuality on the album.
However, it was not until the 9th track on the album; “I Ain’t Got Time”, where Tyler pseudo-aggressively raps, “Next line will have them like woah!, I’ve been kissing white boys since 2004”.
The reaction to that startling confession was huge. The moment the song hit the headlines, there was an uneasy fear within internet comment sections and twitter timelines as to how Tyler’s predominantly hip-hop loving audience would react. The same unease and and uncertainty that the genre had felt for the past few years, where the younger audience of a more liberal school of thought were afraid to challenge the opinions of the old guard, the founding fathers of hip hop, who in turn were almost too proud of their exclusivity towards people of the LGBTQ community.
Fortunately, the more liberal opinion prevailed and the news of Tyler coming out was reacted to positively with thousands of tweets and messages lauding his courage. An openly gay superstar rapper was a utopian concept during the birth of hip-hop in the late 1980s and early 1990s and this paradigm shift in the culture was what hip-hop needed in order to inspire younger artists who will continue to push the genre forward.
Over the last year and a half, this culture shift has caused a domino effect in hip hop, with openly gay and bisexual artists reaching prominence, an unheard of phenomenon in the genre’s non-inclusive past. Acts like Brockhampton, whose charismatic lead singer/rapper, Kevin Abstract doesn’t hesitate to mention and even flaunt his sexual orientation on songs, have been able to grip the mainstream hip-hop scene with ease in this newer, more accepting rap landscape.
As a musical composition, Flower Boy achieves a lot, it is a work of art that shows how far hip hop has come sonically and thematically. Not only does Tyler create a beautiful album, he also shares a beautiful theme that we should all try to emulate; the theme of being as confident in ourselves as we can be and not letting outside influences and social norms to hide our true selves from the world.
Sources Cited:
Jenkins, Craig. “Rap Is Less Homophobic Than Ever, But It Has a Long Way to Go.” Vulture, 13 February 2017, www.vulture.com/2017/02/theres-still-homophobia-in-rap.
Garcia, Marcelo. “From Eminem to Offset, an analysis of hip-hop’s history of homophobia” The Highlander, 28 January 2018, https://www.highlandernews.org/31887/eminem-offset-analysis-hip-hops-history-homophobia
Artwork by https://instagram.com/theshaneramos?utm_source=ig_profile_share&igshid=1d8sgb6h4cmmk
