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With a song or two like the king me, bitch lead single “Who Dat Boy” exempted, Flower Boy is a collection of some of the gentlest, prettiest, most complete music he’s made to date. It’d be a shame if you didn’t visit, though. On Flower Boy’s opener, “Foreword,” he apologizes to the women he’s strung along just so that he didn’t have to spend any more time alone with his thoughts than necessary:Īs ever, our skepticism is our own, and Tyler is off in a world of his own making. There are plenty of other tweets and Instagrams and sound bites and pull quotes gesturing at his sexuality out there to find if you’re willing to look, and more hints to find on the new album itself. GLAAD once denounced him as “ violently anti-gay.” But he also swoons over ’95 Leonardo DiCaprio, and he apparently tried to tell us he was gay in 2015. He said the F-word or another like it at least 213 times on his 2011 debut, Goblin, which, as GQ writer Alex Frank helpfully pointed out, is an average of 14.2 times per song.
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It’s jarring enough to write all of this off as another idea he’s gaming out for attention given his antics, especially given his willful, documented misapprehension of the specific differences between active and cultural homophobia. He’s been kissing white boys since 2004, and the jawn in his passenger seat looks like River Phoenix. Two songs later, on “I Ain’t Got Time!” - a song that dances on the finish line while looking back at the field - he makes a huge leap from simply confiding to actively flossing. He peeks out of it, he retreats back inside, he thinks about how he might’ve made the shed bigger or differently or not at all ( as he suggested to Larry King in 2014) if he had it to do over. It doesn’t seem quite right to say the 26-year-old is “coming out of the closet” on his fourth official album, because first of all, it’s a shed.
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The question of who Tyler’s singing to is what sent his longtime friend Mike G to Twitter after the album leaked last week to volunteer that “the homie not gay, he just like dudes.” For the record, Tyler never explicitly says that he’s into dudes on “Garden Shed,” he just thinks aloud about it. The person he’s singing with is Grammy winner Estelle of “American Boy” fame, who performed at San Diego Pride this year - that’s easy. His first verse is the overfull pause before the two (Tyler and the unnamed person) shut up and finally just kiss each other already. He mixes metaphors, sharing that he can smell - in his equally inarticulate, would-be lover’s eyes - that there’s still more nothing to be said. The rapping on Flower Boy’s “Garden Shed” is similarly taut, and the singing is bad but gorgeous, too, in its own clumsy way.Īs if projected on a bed sheet over a moonlit backyard, Tyler spills his feelings all over his good flood pants. The exchange itself came and went - a sort-of confession washing out into vague hopelessness, swiftly reined back in with camp. (Tyler’s been marketing the album as Scum Fuck Flower Boy.) “Smuckers” was surprising enough both Lil Wayne and Kanye West appear, rapping like their younger, goofier selves in Tyler’s odd hinterland of keys, horns, and purposefully shitty mixing.
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That exchange, on “Smuckers,” a perfect ( perfect) song from Tyler, the Creator’s 2015 album Cherry Bomb, unwittingly sets the table for the song you’re going to hear about most off of his latest, Flower Boy, out Friday.