Tyler, the Creator review – hero's welcome for rap's heartbroken dandy
‘Fuck Theresa May!” The chants from the crowd begin after just one track of Tyler, the Creator’s first London show since 2015. They’re not voicing their disdain for her inability to sell an EU deal to parliament but the fact that as home secretary, she barred Tyler from performing in the UK due to his lyrical content which, it was claimed, promoted terrorism and homophobia.
While his button-pushing use of the word “faggot” no doubt grated, the ban was ludicrously draconian and didn’t countenance that even his most offensive songs were cartoonish and played with persona. Tyler clearly believes there was a racial element at play: “It’s been four years since they let my dark skin in this country”, he tells the crowd.
By 2015, Tyler had already modulated from snotty to goofy, and he has softened even further in the interim. New album Igor, his most commercially successful yet, is full of unrequited love and neo-soul lamentations, and thousands of people sing its lovely, submissive hooks back to him: “Don’t leave, it’s my fault”, “This time I think it’s for real”, “I’m your puppet”. It seems sillier than ever that his lyrics could have incited terrorism.
Gone, too, is the nerdy streetwear he made so influential: Tyler is now dressed in blond wig (strangely reminiscent of May, actually) and a yellow suit that goes from primrose to daffodil as it gets soaked in sweat. He performs against a steadily more impressive series of floaty tasselled backdrops, even playing a white piano, looking, per the Dr Dre line, like he robbed Liberace. Other touchstones are generations of black dandies: his jitterbug poses recall Little Richard, Rick James, André 3000. But ferocious pyro explodes from the floor for Who Dat Boy, as he and the crowd gloriously devolve to his old moshpit mode.
Though there is an affecting vulnerability to his conversational singing voice, Tyler is still strongest with this more malevolent rap material. There is more complexity to a track like 2013’s IFHY, as he tussles with love and violent jealousy; the goth energy to Igor track What’s Good chafes nicely against the silken drapes. But throughout, Tyler has a blithe star quality that can’t be taught, or indeed repressed. Welcome back.
• At Brixton Academy, London, until 18 September.