by Adam Yawdoszyn
I met Tyler the Creator on the back of a bus in 8th grade. In late 2011, at the ripe age of 13, I watched the “Yonkers” music video. I was disturbed. The shock from watching Tyler “eat” and throw up a cockroach and then subsequently hang himself left me nauseous for the whole morning. “Yonkers” is a perfect depiction of what Tyler the Creator meant in 2011; too revolting and outlandish to be real, but packing such a punch that you couldn’t help but watch.
In many ways, it was an artistic microcosm of our middle school experience. On first look, Tyler seems to be shoving his faux-edginess in your face. Everything from the cockroach to the casual homophobia to the line about stabbing Bruno Mars is overtly offensive. Bubbling just under the surface, however, is a troubled kid (Tyler was 20 at the time, my age now) who’s struggling with depression, anger, and the feeling of being misunderstood. “Yonkers” is a portrait of adolescence as I, and almost everyone I know, experienced it. Tyler poses as too cool for school, but is ultimately just trying to handle his own emotions.
“Yonkers” is no anomaly. The artistic collective known as Odd Future, whether by chance or pure brilliance, has managed to seemingly perfectly trace the trajectory of the lives of late 90s kids. In early 2012 Loiter Squad, a sketch comedy series featuring the Odd Future boys, launched and gave the most preposterous of the Odd Future personalities, including Tyler, Jasper, and Taco, a platform from which to broadcast all of their ridiculous and offensive jokes. My friends and I ate it up. Everyone I knew had seen it, and we all turned a blind eye to how terrible some of it was either for the sake of humor, edginess, or just fitting in.
Then, in the summer of 2012, Frank Ocean came out as bisexual. Immediately there was a shift in the paradigm. As my peers and I tried to ignore the coming transition into high school, the brash and offensive Odd Future, through Frank Ocean, was becoming the heart of social progress in hip-hop, R&B, and arguably music as a whole. At a time when life was demanding us to be mature, our favorite rap collective was seemingly growing up. From the soft spoken Frank’s warmly poetic coming out letter to the homophobic Tyler’s publicly loving acceptance of his good friend, in the span of a few days Odd Future quietly began their shift from a revoltingly problematic group of troublemakers to a tightly knit crew that somehow represented acceptance.
The transition was far from smooth. Just as my friends and I entered high school unready for the social changes, Odd Future kept on with their undesirable antics. Loiter Squad would run until 2014, and the think pieces about how problematic Tyler the Creator is have continued through to this day.
But the music didn’t stop tracing the outline of our maturation. In our last summer before the next stage in our lives, Frank Ocean dropped Channel Orange. It was the soundtrack to that summer, from the early blossoming of young loves to the adventures of groups of friends. Through a David Hockney-esque colorful image of southern Californian life, Channel Orange created a fantasy for us to indulge in during the last days of a transitional stage of our life. Then, just as soon as he championed the spotlight of our attention, he disappeared, leaving us to endure the maturation of our high school education without his soothing words.
They were innovators who challenged themselves and made music that at times could have easily been revered in experimental electronic cliques.
The first couple years of high school passed without much notoriety from Odd Future. Earl Sweatshirt dropped a solid album, Syd’s band The Internet started garnering attention, and Tyler kept up with his act, but the collective had taken a backseat in the public eye.
In 2015, Odd Future quietly took massive steps forward. First, nearing the end of my Junior year, Earl Sweatshirt released I Don’t Like Shit I Don’t Go Outside. As trap began to rise to prominence and hip-hop was moving more and more towards pop, Earl’s album stood out as separate from the norm. I Don’t Like Shit is often as dark and cold as its name suggests, and is notable not only as the most cohesive of Earl’s full length projects but also as the culmination of the depressive energy that was subtly present way back in “Yonkers.” While friends of mine were beginning to uncover their mental illnesses under the weight of school-induced stress, Earl was portraying his own depression and addiction related issues through his album.
As if I Don’t Like Shit wasn’t enough, Earl followed it up a month later with Solace, a digital only EP consisting of a single ten-minute track that should one day be considered one of hip-hop’s greatest epics. Where I Don’t Like Shit shows you how Earl is feeling and allows you to relate, Solace forcefully brings you down to his emotional level. With its depressively sparse raps and a sound collage beat that harkens The Caretaker’s An Empty Bliss Beyond This World, Solace may be the most emotionally riveting work of hip-hop since Kendrick Lamar’s “Sing About Me, I’m Dying of Thirst.”
After making it through the mentally taxing and sadly revealing trials of junior year, we were rewarded with Ego Death. The third full-length album by The Internet pushed Syd and co. into the limelight of the “check out this really cool band I like” kids. Its smooth and sexy funkiness punctuated the calm relief of summer break.
Ultimately, what 2015, and Solace especially, would come to prove was just how talented the Odd Future kids all were. These were not your average hip-hop and R&B artists. They were innovators who challenged themselves and made music that at times could have easily been revered in experimental electronic cliques. As Odd Future’s cultural presence slowly shifted from terrible to acceptable to wonderful, their artistic presence stayed on a steady trajectory towards brilliance. This group of teenagers had come into their own artistically, and they had a vision.
Never was that vision more evident than in Frank Ocean’s second LP, Blonde. Just days before I began my college education, Frank’s hiatus ended. Within 30 seconds of the opening track, a cavernous beat and auto-tuned vocals had made it all worth it. Blonde is an unprecedented artistic achievement in modern music. As without a doubt the most anticipated release in my time following music, it met all expectations. As one of the largest changes in pace by an artist of such stature, it succeeded. Blonde’s praise seems ubiquitous; no group of people doesn’t like this album, and the atmosphere it captures is unique. Blonde is what moving too fast feels like; it is what nostalgia feels like; it is what love feels like; it is what night feels like; it is all of these things and none of these things because the feelings that it captures are too complex to be contained by any one statement. Blonde is breaking up with your high school girlfriend and going to college. Blonde is sleeping in your childhood bedroom on the first night of a cold Thanksgiving break. Blonde is late nights alone in a dorm room. Blonde is early mornings on walks with good friends.
The artistic collective known as Odd Future, whether by chance or pure brilliance, has managed to seemingly perfectly trace the trajectory of the lives of late 90s kids.
But more than anything, Blonde is the most successful album ever at capturing the feeling of losing your childhood. On it, Frank Ocean manages to articulate what it’s like to longingly look back at everything you ever were while being confident in everything that you are and hopeful for everything you will ever be. Blonde is what my freshman year of college felt like, and what I imagine many of my peers’ felt like too. When we were taking the first steps away from our childhood lives and into some sense of adulthood, it was there to paint the way. It is an unbelievably mature portrait of the self, from humble history to unresolved romance to fragile masculinity to secure independence to the staggering magnitude of minuscule successes. Blonde feels like it was written for me, while feeling like it was written for all of us. Just as Channel Orange ushered us out of middle school and into high school, Blonde ushered us out of high school and into college.
With Blonde, Frank Ocean remains the loving arbiter of our transitional maturations, and as the Odd Future legend has continued to grow with Tyler the Creator coming out on the excellent Scum Fuck Flower Boy, the collective has shown that they will further artistically codify the paths of our lives.