#39

#39. Tyler, The Creator - EARFQUAKE (#23, 2019)

3rd of 2019

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The biggest stars in the world of music are the ones who are able to adapt and evolve. Maybe you can find your own niche and just continue to work with that, but it quickly slams the door on public intrigue. Foo Fighters continue to sell a lot of albums, but it's been a long time since their music has been a cause for concern outside of their fanbase. I imagine that as a creative, it can be a stressful situation where you're presented multiple potential paths for your career only to find out all of them were wrong and you actually had to do something completely different.

One of the most interesting things about Tyler, The Creator's career is that we're still talking about him. There's an alternate future where he's just a curious recollection and a signpost of the era that he came up in. 'Remember back when Tyler, The Creator and Die Antwoord were big?', something like that. The rise of Tyler, The Creator and Odd Future came about from a new era of online communities. The whole 2000s era on the internet is a somewhat pocketed niche because global adaption of it took a long time to really get around (in hindsight, there wasn't always a good reason for everyone to even be online). YouTube had been around for quite a while, but it still felt like a carry-over from the era of jokey flash cartoons and the like, so a lot of the most popular videos on there were snappy memes. It quickly caught on that music videos were the real ticket and it became a big association with the website.

Tyler, The Creator released his first album in 2009, entirely self-produced and with guest verses all self-contained within Odd Future. It got him some attention, but what really blew things up was in 2011 when he released his single "Yonkers". For many, their introduction to Tyler was this unsettling video where he eats a cockroach, throws it back up and hangs himself. He immediately stands out with his deep voice and off kilter flow where he evokes so much violent imagery and puts so much emphasis on the word 'f**k'. It's horrorcore, shock rap, whatever you want to call it, and it works. I never knew what to think of it at the time but it was undeniably compelling. This slight vault into the mainstream brought a lot of attention to Tyler's Odd Future collective, which I might not have even noted if not for the glaring fact that this is where we get the rise of Frank Ocean. By the time he released his debut album, he was a star, but it felt like Tyler was lagging by comparison. There just wasn't an especially big market for his brand of rap that was never going to get played on the radio. His albums would still sell reasonably well, but he was in that Foo Fighters zone, having never really struck a notable chord in years.

The reality is that Tyler's music had been changing over the years. I have this mental idea of what his music sounds like in the early 2010s and what it sounds like now as being completely disparate, but it's not entirely true. Those early albums all have hints here and there of the neo soul direction he'd end up taking his music into, and it makes me wonder if not enough people realised it, or rather realised they might want it at the time. The big shift made itself clear on 2017's "Flower Boy", probably his most acclaimed album to date. Here you have to throw away most of your pre-conceptions and welcome a very different version of Tyler than you likely first heard from him. It's just a much more chilled out album, with multiple guest spots from Rex Orange County and Frank Ocean steering it that way. Ironically, the lead single "Who Dat Boy" was more in the vein of horrorcore again, and actually became his first ever top 100 charting single in Australia. I'm gonna pin it down to him signing with Columbia Records, a partnership that continues to this day. It didn't initially produce major breakout hits, not until "See You Again" gradually became an absolute monster hit which has recently passed 3 billion streams on Spotify (for context this is in the top 10 for all rap songs). It did however, set the scene for Tyler as the huge commercial force we've come to know him as going forward.

Tyler has a bizarre chart stat which I suspect has never been emulated. With thanks to the big boost in attention through "Flower Boy", Tyler's next album "IGOR" came with a lot of hype, and managed to debut 4 songs in the Australian top 50. Maybe I'm overlooking someone, but I'd be hard pressed to think of any other artist whose first ever showing in the top 50 was with so many songs at once. At this point Tyler basically only charts new songs when he releases an album, and he's amassed a decent handful. Notably in 2025, he finally managed something that could properly be considered a crossover hit, when "Sugar On My Tongue" managed to hang around for a decent while and reach the top 20. To date, his highest charting single still remains as "EARFQUAKE", which instantly arrived at #11 when the album came out, and then managed to climb to #9 in its second week. He looks so weird in that week's top 10 next to the late Avicii & the Jonas Brothers.

I'm a big fan of "IGOR". It might be an unpopular opinion but I find it a little more well-rounded than "Flower Boy", though I'll admit that it does largely feel like it's an extrapolation of the song "Boredom" stretched out to a full album. Still, it's a good exploration of Tyler's talents as a writer, performer and producer. He produced the whole thing himself, and while there are guest features, he's got a knack for switching up his delivery and sounding like a guest artist on his own songs. It's largely become his modus operandi going forward, though "CALL ME IF YOU GET LOST" and "CHROMAKOPIA" have a song each with additional producers. Tyler has become one of the few artists I'll absolutely check out a new album from as soon as possible.

It's not something I'd ever really thought about before, but "EARFQUAKE" doesn't really have any verses. It goes straight from one hook into another, and then back to the first one. All you really get is Playboi Carti's uncredited verse, which is largely indecipherable, as well as a bridge that could almost be considered a verse. In that sense, this song is pure ear candy. You've also got Charlie Wilson helping out with some vocals and adding that necessary gravitas to make the song truly soar. There's this scattering synth that comes in underneath him that doesn't come back around for the second hit, and it's probably my favourite moment of the song overall. Tyler has become such a detail oriented producer that it's something that only ends up sounding better the louder it is.