911 / Mr. Lonely Is the Best Song of 2017 So Far
Tyler, The Creator is back and better than ever
“ How you doin’? / My name is Lonely / Nice to meet you, here’s my number / You can reach me 911.”
Tyler, The Creator is back with a new album entitled Flower Boy, and is promoting it as Scum Fuck Flower Boy. The album is different from other Tyler projects, but the beats are still purposely not mixed all to well for the strange sound that is Tyler, The Creator. Still, the original Tyler sound is there, but this one feels different. This album feels way more personal, and also extremely relatable.
“911 / Mr. Lonely” is one of the four singles released before the album was officially released Friday. I haven’t listened to Tyler, The Creator since I was in high school, and even then I never enjoyed his music. His voice never appealed to me — the beats seemed off and the lyrics never connected with me on a personal level. A friend was talking about how Tyler had released two new songs, and how one of them was super “dope” (“Who Dat Boy”) and the other was just, “Frank Ocean whaling on a song to try and be R&B” (“911 / Mr. Lonely”). I went home later and listened to the two new songs; one was fun to listen to, and the other made me think a whole lot.
“Five car garage / Full tank of the gas / But that don’t mean nothin’, nothin’, nothin’, nothin’, / Without you riding shotgun in the passenger / I’m the loneliest man alive / But I keep on dancin’ to throw ’em off.”
After Frank Ocean “whaling on a song,” these words are rapped from Tyler, and this caught my attention so easily because I knew how these words felt. I’ve always had a good set of friends, but after graduating high school and going to college I began to think that these people weren’t truly my friends. I hung out with friends every night at school and still felt lonely, and I to this day don’t know why I felt that way.
I think many people feel lonely even though they have tons of friends because sometimes we don’t feel wanted, therefore we turn lonely. Our brains are constantly thinking, and sometimes that turns into bad thinking. I think Tyler, The Creator is at this point during “911 / Mr. Lonely.” This song struck home with me, but the beats of a kick drum, bass, strange pauses in the middle of the beat, Frank Ocean “whaling on a song”, among the beat change later in the song make it an intricate piece of music.
“I can’t even lie, I’ve been lonely as fuck.”
This line is repeated three times. Three times is poetry, so maybe Tyler wrote a poem and threw a drum kit together to tell everyone how he’s been lonely, even though he’s been surrounded by so many people.
2017 has been filled with great music thus far, but Flower Boy seems to be my favorite because of what Tyler is expressing through it all.
“They say the loudest in the room is weak / That’s what they assume, but I disagree / I say the loudest in the room is prolly the loneliest one in the room (that’s me).”
