Surprisingly, Tyler's use of perhaps his greatest asset, the other eight OFWGKTA members, is relatively sparse. Next up is "Radicals", the most high energy track off of Goblin, which borrows it's " Kill people, burn shit, fuck school" refrain from M.I.A. Next is bonafide hit single, the schizophrenic "Yonkers", easily the most watched YouTube video involving roach-eating and suicide by hanging, and the track that put Tyler and Odd Future into the stratosphere. All this over a murky, rattling beat that gives way to flourishes of strings and brooding piano, sets the stage for what's to come. T.C.," asking questions of Tyler and reacting to some of his more shocking claims. Album opener "Goblin," a nearly seven-minute, chorus-less state of the union on the life of the 19-year old rapper/producer, reunites Tyler with his baritone-voiced therapist "Dr. The album quite literally begins where Bastard left off. That, and taking pictures of his dad's dick, raping Taylor Swift, being flirted with by a priest, being Dracula and having threesomes "with a fucking triceratops". The second in a planned trilogy that started with 2010's Bastard (and will end with 2012's Wolf) finds Tyler dealing with the alienation that comes with the spotlight, the vapid pursuit of fame, and the unique stresses that come with such attention at such a young age. A large part of the album's lyrical themes are a reaction to the success of it's own lead-off single. In 2018, the man himself claimed that he’d only keep seven of the record’s fifteen tracks, but to revise ‘GOBLIN’ retrospectively would be to do a disservice to its spirit - it remains a messy, discomfiting monument to mainstream subversion.The meteoric rise of LA Hip Hop collective OFWGKTA (or "Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All" if you're not into the whole brevity thing) over the past few months has had a unique side effect on de facto leader Tyler, the Creator's much hyped sophomore album Goblin. It’s astonishing, now, to think that a rapper hailed as a queer icon for his insights on ‘Flower Boy’ and ‘Igor’ was once brushing off justified criticism from the likes of Tegan and Sara with the same homophobic slurs on social media that ‘GOBLIN’ itself is littered with. His lyricism on ‘GOBLIN’ remains a blend of cattle-prod provocation, flirtations with horrorcore, and a genuinely unsettling appetite for the macabre. By the time Tyler chips in with his own, the track’s quietly taken on a nightmarish air. Frank Ocean, now THE pop enigma of his generation, makes a memorable contribution on ‘She’, his mellow vocals blended with a woozy beat that threatens to veer off the rails at any given minute, while the star-studded ‘Window’ does so much with so little, taking a basic but thickly atmospheric synth loop and using it as a backdrop over which Domo Genesis, Hodgy Beats and Mike G queue up to deliver softly sinister verses. The record’s a stark reminder, too, of just how much talent existed in the Odd Future pool at the time. There’s also the creeping sense, however, that early-career Tyler leaned unnecessarily heavily into shock-tactic lyricism, with the dark dioramas he draws on ‘GOBLIN’ routinely unsettling you wonder how much of it he would get away with today. There are moments of towering innovation across the record - the manner in which raw minimalism meets slick production on ‘Yonkers’ and ‘AU79’, for instance, or the swirling meeting of menace and beauty that came to characterise so many of the album’s instrumentals. By the time the rapper’s solo debut dropped, ‘GOBLIN’ served as the culmination of one of the most thrilling upendings of the musical rulebook in recent history, and one that excited and frustrated in equal measure - as much now as it did then. Even at ten years’ distance, the nature of Odd Future’s 2011 gatecrashing of the mainstream still feels like a fever dream nobody since has staged quite such a hostile takeover, with everything from Tyler’s stripped-back and shocking ‘Yonkers’ video to his performance of ‘Sandwitches’ on Jimmy Fallon with Hodgy Beats, scored through with a thrilling sense of unpredictability.
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