Breaking Rules Is Fucking Cool Again

Tyler, the Creator and Hodgy Beats “Sandwitches”

The first minute of this track sounds so frustrated and lonely. It’s just this kid alone in a room leading a chant, willing his audience into existence. Tyler could get some other people on mic, fake a crowd, but he doesn’t. He’s made an active decision to make this intro sound uncomfortable and awkward. He wants you to think about him being alone in that room. It makes sense of what comes afterward: Spilling bile, acting out, raging against anyone with a happy life. These words come out of feeling bitter and isolated, so yeah, he should sound lonely and pathetic.

A lot of Odd Future songs don’t rise above sounding ramshackle, childish and hateful, but “Sandwitches” is excellent and hints at a greater potential. Tyler and Hodgy both have excellent voices for rap — the former has a surprisingly gravelly tone for someone so young, the latter has more treble and expressive range. Tyler’s lyrical style and cadence remind me a lot of Eminem — their sense of humor is similar and they bot tap into that angry-boy-acting-out thing that people eat up. (It never moves me; I just wasn’t that kind of kid.) Hodgy is more exciting to me. He’s more nimble in his phrasing, less predictable in his wordplay. If Odd Future is indeed the second coming of the Wu-Tang, then he’s the Ghostface of this crew.

They’re a long way from touching that first wave of Wu records, though. Tyler’s Goblin is set up to become most people’s first real album-length exposure to Odd Future, and it’s kind of a mess. A lot of the songs are straight-up awful. Others are marred by cheap, stupid lyrics. He’s deliberately hateful and trollish, but then sulks when people call him out. The entire record sounds depressed. It can be too much to take, particularly when he gets very indulgent both lyrically and musically, but overall, it’s a fascinating document of a particular type of anger and misery.

Buy it from Amazon.