You’re Not Gonna Feel This Way Forever
When you’re a teenager, everything that happens in your life is important yet none of it matters. You’re living in each moment and experiencing everything to the fullest extent possible; the world revolves around you and your friends and you just know that things will always be this way forever.
When I was 16 I was a self-centered sad sack writing in a notebook: meeting the love of my life every week and desperately praying that I could escape Tallahassee, Florida some day. When Tyler, The Creator and his friends were that age, they started a rap crew that championed being losers, goofballs and outcasts and as a result were championed by kids who thought of themselves as such and, with some help from the Internet Outrage Industry, became one of the biggest collectives in music.
Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All started with a lanky, loudmouth making grimy, heavy beats and rapping all his insecurities with his other weirdo friends; they were the perfect underground rap act that somehow tripped and fell into the mainstream. They made the best of their time there by basically taking the influence they wielded with young people and turning their collective into a full blown corporation: selling merchandise, starting a carnival and music festival, selling out shows, making a TV show; truth be told, we were probably close to getting Odd Future toys in McDonald’s happy meals. They’d accomplished more before 21, then most adults will their whole lives and it was great to see even as I faded in and out of like with them.
I got into Odd Future near the beginning. I was put on to Tyler’s “Bastard” by friends at a messageboard; I thought it was hilarious yet grim, full of teen angst and attention-seeking. I felt the same about Earl Sweatshirt’s self-titled debut — although I thought of him as a much better yet still very fresh rapper.
The violent imagery and rape references were troubling in the same way they were troubling when Eminem did it in his prime, it was a blatant, juvenile attempt at being shocking and, although that doesn’t excuse it, the attention it got always felt counterproductive. Part of their ascent came from blogs and wordpress aficionados wagging their fingers at them and giving them the promotion they couldn’t get from the main hip-hop blogs.
Speaking of which, the intro before the intro to “Bastard” goes as follows:
“Yo, fuck 2DopeBoyz and fuck Nah Right
And any other fuck-nigga-ass blog that can’t put an 18 year old nigga
Making his own fucking beats, covers, videos and all that shit
Fuck you post-Drake-ass cliche-jerking, LA-slauson rapping
Fuck-nigga-ass Hypebeast niggas, now back to the album.”
This is a pretty good summation of what the energy of Odd Future was like: aggressive, rude, out of pocket kids who were DIY and wanted recognition from everyone. It was great and as a kid from the south who came of age during the snap era, I could identify with screaming “fuck 2DopeBoyz and fuck Nah Right”.
I followed the kids musically for the longest after these two albums: the Late Night with Jimmy Fallon performance, the Yonkers video, the “Free Earl” saga, OF Volume 1, Frank’s sort-of-but-not-really “coming out” note, Channel Orange and the never-ending cycle of hand-wringing.
Then Frank Ocean showed up and made it cool to like someone in Odd Future. Unlike the image set by the crew, he was quieter, more certain and verbose. His music had an oddball quality but was soulful and engaging in a way none of the others were. He was a good transition point for me when Odd Future’s image started to feel like a schtick that was getting duller and duller. It was nice to see at least one adult in the group.
I don’t think I came back around Odd Future as a whole until OF Volume 2 and the Loiter Squad TV show. Loiter Squad in particular showed that these guys were smarter and more thoughtful than they wanted to let on. When Earl was finally “freed”, I thought it would be Odd Future transforming into Voltron ready to wreak havoc, but what we got was a lot more interesting. We got a dude who was growing up and wasn’t ashamed of it; a guy making really insular, lonely and gnarly rap music that seemed to want to push people away instead of bring them in. Earl definitely missed the Odd Future boat by being away for their ascent and also no longer being a kid who would enjoy such things; it still feels like Earl is wrestling over whether that was a good thing or not. The “free Earl” thing probably did more bad than good looking back, and his heart has never been into hanging with all those guys in the same way since he came back.
When’s the first time that you realize you’ve outgrown your friends. When I got to college, I kept in touch with kids from my high school that I never could’ve predicted and fell out of touch with ones I swore would be my friends forever. Sometimes it’s time and distance that get in the way and no matter how much you wanna commit to making things work they fall apart. Other times, well, you get interested in other things; you slowly move away from one another when you develop interests in other things. It’s one of the sadder things about adulthood but only in retrospect. As it’s happening, it doesn’t really affect you much — it’s just an internalized quiet acceptance until you realize that you miss your friend. This happens again after college and will happen periodically through your life. It turns out growing up wasn’t just a buzzword your parents yell at you whenever you come home after curfew or get busted doing stupid shit, it’s a mentality fostered by a relentlessly cold world that will take you all sorts of places and a lot of times those places are away from whoever you thought you were when you were 16.
Odd Future has been done for awhile. Sure Tyler tweeted about it recently but it’s been alluded to in the past. Odd Future is basically dead and this is as it should be. We were all 16 once but we didn’t have it on display in front of millions. We just got to grow up and mature without worrying about playing God for generations of young teens coming up.
They’ll be the ones who’ll take it the hardest: they’ll keep the golfwang spirit alive and probably make any opposing words towards them sacrilegious (like what we’ve done with Nirvana or The Beatles) or maybe we’ll just forget about them like everything else we’ve forgotten. That’s life in the internet age: OF’s peak was in 2011 yet it already feels 20 years old.
Growing up is a hassle man. It comes with a whole bunch of responsibilities you didn’t ask for. You have to pay all kinds of taxes. The things that used to excite you when you were younger start to leave you cold or worse, convinced that those old days were the best time to be alive and it’s this generation that’s the problem. Adulthood is not a goal to reach, it’s an inevitability. It’s the U.S. Marshalls chasing down Harrison Ford in The Fugitive. It’s coming for you and it doesn’t care if you didn’t murder your wife. You can live in a bubble for only so long until your day and when that happens, only you alone can deal with the transition.
If I could talk to my younger self, I’d let him know that someday the bands and rappers you love will get boring to you, you won’t be into the same shows and books you are now, your life plans will change dramatically many times over and you and your friends will drift apart in different directions; but you know what, through it all it’s gonna be fine because you’re going to make your own way and enjoy new things and new people that will have significant importance in your life.
It is what it is. Earl made a great new album, we’re all anticipating the new Frank Ocean; all the little subsets and group acts are doing their thing and building their own fanbase and Tyler made an album that I wasn’t crazy about but at least he’s happy and doing his thing gleefully. I haven’t seriously cared about Odd Future in years but I’m still happy for all those kids. They built something crazy out of some spazzy teenage basement tapes — the reunion tour will be wild when it happens. For now, We’ll always have the “Oldie” video and all those overpriced Supreme hats. Farewell and remember, fuck Steve Harvey.
