Milestones: Call Me If You Get Lost by Tyler, The Creator
Tyler asked the Grammys why he couldn’t be in pop, then made a Gangsta Grillz album. It won Best Rap Album anyway.
Tyler was backstage at the 62nd Grammys in January 2020, clutching his Best Rap Album trophy for IGOR and told reporters it felt like an insult disguised as a compliment. “It sucks that whenever we, and I mean guys that look like me, do anything that’s genre-bending, they always put it in a rap or urban category.” It was like they handed him an unplugged controller so his little cousin would shut up and feel good about it. That year, IGOR was slotted in the same group with Dreamville, Meek Mill, 21 Savage, and Cordae. It had no overlap with any of his contestants or their works. He just asked, “Why can’t we just be in pop?” A year and a half later, he came back with sixteen songs, and DJ Drama would introduce him as Tyler Baudelaire, AKA Bunnyhop, AKA The Creator.
A tweet from 2010 showed that when Tyler, The Creator was 19 and Odd Future hadn’t managed to put out a retail album, he wanted his own Gangsta Grillz tape; now 11 years later, Tyler came back to Drama in summer 2020, which came about, and then the vocals spread across four or five different sessions. Most of Drama’s more than one hundred and fifty Gangsta Grillz tapes from the mid-2000s onwards typically are paired with trap beats, Southern street anthems, and club records. However, Tyler laid down oboe loops and bossa nova switches. Drama then proceeds to ad-lib throughout about being on a yacht getting fed French Vanilla. So before even the appearance of Drama in the studio, ad-libs were put into tracks to rough up the basis of the tape that would go on to be conceived of for a decade by Tyler, another inspirational point of reference for his tape. This other Gangsta Grillz tape was by Pharrell’s In My Mind: The Prequel. Tyler credited Pharrell on the back cover of the tape as part of his grillz persona—“Sk8board.”
Before the album drop, on Instagram Live, Tyler shouted out everyone from Lil Wayne’s Dedication tapes and Clipse’s We Got It for Cheap series to Lupe Fiasco’s Fahrenheit run, JAŸ-Z, André 3000, and Westside Gunn “for making me wanna just rap again.” Westside Gunn’s Griselda run was the kick he needed. “Lumberjack” chops Gravediggaz to a bloody weapon (“2 Cups of Blood”), clocks in barely over two minutes, and brags about Tyler winning the Grammy and folks being mad. “Lemonhead” opens with rage, only half of the beat dropping into breezy bossa nova when Tyler starts to pile on syllables like a bricklayer on 42 Dugg. “Juggernaut,” on which he raps along with Lil Uzi Vert and Pharrell, has a line about being “so fuckin’ deadass I need some Timberlands,” just too damn stupid to be not perfect.
Tyler was raised only by his mom, Bonitha Smith, who never knew his father, in Ladera Heights, a middle-class suburb part of unincorporated LA County. He is quoted in the “Massa” as someone who called the best thing that ever happened to him when he left Los Angeles aged twenty for the first time; his greatest pride, his passport. Geneva water on the opener, swim trunks in the trunk of a Rolls-Royce, French Open, Cannes, Monte Carlo, the cover is taken from cards of old passports and travel documents from 1900 onwards (no resemblance to ODB’s Return to the 36 Chambers as everyone suggested). He nicknamed his musical persona Charles Baudelaire; the French poet who could not remain still. “Wusyaname” is the place where this obsession about taste takes the form of a pickup line, Cannes, and forgotten indie movies she never heard of. YoungBoy Never Broke Again sings the verse in this energetic melodic thing—something completely foreign to how he sounds in the rest of his discography. Ty Dolla $ign, in return, floats smoothly on top, while a whole summer afternoon is squashed together in thunderous two minutes.
Everything on this album is a brag with a confession hidden in it. On “Corso,” Tyler confesses to trying to take someone’s girl, does not regret it, then confesses she chose the other guy, cries on a jet, and stops mid-verse to say he does not even like the word “bitch,” just that it sounds cool. On “Massa,” complaining about an eight-figure tax while getting upset over someone dismissing his art from their lunch break. “Manifesto” goes furthest. It features Tyler saying he was getting canceled before canceled was a Twitter word, mentioning having tweeted Selena Gomez as a teenager, protesting outside of his early shows, the UK banning him from entering the country for three years over his lyrics. A woman’s voice says at the top of the track, “You need to say something about that,” and Tyler responds with a hostile, slightly wounded tone. Odd Future alumni, Domo Genesis, enters with a contribution of racial discrimination, and jointly the two artists turn the song into something closer to an argument with the room than a public address. Tyler tells Black kids to do what they want, and he does not package it as advice.
Lil Wayne on “Hot Wind Blows” raps as if he is actually on the yacht Drama keeps yelling about—he matches Tyler bar for bar, and neither one of them is working hard to keep up. Tyler had praised 42 Dugg’s “We Paid” publicly as the “core of rap music” before bringing him onto “Lemonhead,” and Dugg’s verse proves why. Seeing “Earfquake” performed by a live band motivated Tyler to make “Lemonhead” in the first place, and that live-room impulse stayed in how the beat breathes. The guests span from Pharrell and Wayne (guys Tyler grew up idolizing) to Dugg and YoungBoy (guys who came up listening to Tyler), and nobody got shoehorned in. YoungBoy’s verse on “Wusyaname” might be the most relaxed three minutes of his entire career.
Passports and flexing no longer mean anything halfway in: with “Sweet/I Thought You Wanted to Dance,” the runtime goes over ten with two songs sewn at the seam. Brent Faiyaz sings the first half as Tyler, fully infatuated, head-over-heels, leaves all guard aside; the beat melts sideways into a reggae/lovers rock jam, and Fana Hues takes over, and Tyler raps, wishing they had better timing, says he’ll save a dance for her. Right after comes “Momma Talk,” an interlude with Bonita Smith (just talking; she used to beat up kids over her kid, she claims. An early version of “Sweet”’s chorus had shown up on the outro of Flower Boy‘s “I Ain’t Got Time!” four years earlier, meaning Tyler has been sitting with that one longer than most keep a phone.)
No Drama, no ad-libs, no bravado, no guests—Tyler tweeted after release that he recorded “Wilshire” on a “shitty handheld mic, one whole take, 2nd attempt.” He told Converse in 2022: “I was so sad that I didn’t want to record in the booth…I did that whole song, the eight-minute song, in one take just sitting in a chair. And I said, keep it. Because at that moment I said, I won’t ever feel like this again for this situation.” The plosives pop on the P’s all through it, and Tyler pointed that out himself, said he thought it was fun, nobody leaves those in. The song tells the full story of falling for someone who was dating his friend, and neither of them wants to cross the line, but both keep coming back anyway until the boyfriend gets suspicious, and she tells the truth. They fight, she breaks up with the boyfriend, Tyler picks her up, and they drive around while she cries for an hour on his shoulder. Then she ends things with Tyler too, and he calls himself a bad person, keeps his private life private, people are weirdos—eight minutes and thirty-five seconds on a hundred-dollar mic.
He even grabbed Best Rap Album during a hike. It was received through Instagram Live. Tyler was recorded thanking him that he “could just make an album where I can just flex all goddamn day.” It was cut together in his living room during the pandemic. He put a Madlib beat on one of his albums. Tyler actually puts one on “Safari,” another track off Call Me If You Get Lost, which, for the second time along with co-producer Jay Versace, shouldn’t sound anywhere near as good as it’s allowed to. Call Me If You Get Lost became his album to hit number one on the Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums chart in 2021-2022 after its vinyl release and 2023 with a deluxe edition, Estate Sale, which has never been done by the same album before. Tyler literally makes the rap album of the same quality the Grammys claimed his last album was, winning the award twice.
Standout (★★★★½)