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Tyler, the Creator Confronts an Odd Future
Chromakopia is more interested in critiquing masculinity than celebrating its own aggression.
Leading the audience at Los Angeles’s Kia Forum through electric renditions of “Wusyaname” and “EARFQUAKE,” the 33-year-old rapper, producer, and designer framed his catalogue as a link between worlds, a fiery blend of L.A.’s more introspective and soulful musical traditions and their coarser counterparts. / We need a little dookie booty” — is the rip-roaring phone message from Frank Ocean’s family friend Rosie Watson in Blonde ’s “Be Yourself,” containing a warning not to smoke weed and end up “sluggish, lazy, stupid, and unconcerned.” But as Smith’s interjections come to unpack her own problems, the exchange resembles the weary motivation offered in Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes’s 1922 “Mother to Son”: One minute, “Sticky” is mining HBCU marching-band aesthetics; the next, the Jungian “Take Your Mask Off” is serving the same sort of conscious, cautionary tale as Common’s “Between Me, You & Liberation” and TLC’s “Waterfalls”; “Balloon” is bursting traditional gender roles open in a joyful Doechii duet.
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