It’s a weird look for a kid who supposedly represents hip-hop’s vanguard to be so caught up making beats whose sole purpose is to imitate and/or impress Pharrell. But too many other experiments wind up like “48,” a tribute to diminishing-returns-era N*E*R*D. herself doesn’t make anymore, while “Trashwang” is a skittering trap-parody cut featuring Trash Talk that approximates the anarchy of vintage Odd Future. There’s a wild dexterity to some of the production: The antic “Tamale” is the sort of M.I.A. While a duet between Stereolab’s Laetitia Sadier and Frank Ocean sounds promising on paper, it comes at the end of the nearly eight-minute song suite “PartyIsntOver/Campfire/Bimmer,” which, by the time you’ve reached the Beiber-rejected closing third, feels like it’s about 16 BPM and slowing. All that is alive and compelling here (say, the RAMP-smooth soul-jazz posse cut “Rusty”) begins to dissolve as we pass the 70-minute mark. But for much of the rest of Wolf‘s woefully uneven, wildly indulgent, 18-track slog, that rep drags him, and us, back down. As good as “Awkward” is, like much of the album, it feels like an audition Tyler flaunts his range as a producer and MC, clearly vying to transcend the shock-and-awe rep that has preceded him. “You’re my girl, whether you like it or not,” he pouts, Frank Ocean cooing backup. It’s tough to parse these characters, though Sam is a bit of a Bastard throwback, with a murderous bent and a habit of punctuating his lines with, yes, the word “faggot.” This friction generates one of Wolf‘s highlights, “Awkward”: Amid an epigrammatic love story born of a mall date, Tyler pitch-shifts his voice down to his Wolf-guise growl and gets goofy on a girl whose eyes are the color of weed, delivering entreaties for hand-holding over analog-synth ambiance. ![]() The album loosely charts a discursive story involving Tyler’s alter ego, Wolf, and his id, Sam, in pursuit of a shared love interest, Salem. There’s a tangible distance from the petulant rage of an older provocation like, say, Bastard‘s “AssMilk” - the girls on Wolf are all alive and willing, at least. He’d also grown weary of that I’m-a-rape-you steez, so there’s none of that here (it’s cool bro, Rick Ross got you covered). And so we get a quick inventory of what Goblin‘s success has wrought: a four-story house, European-model pussy, QT with Bieber. It would be disingenuous to front like he’s still sleeping on a couch. Last year, Tyler prepped SPIN for the evolution we should expect on his third solo outing, Wolf: Now that he’s found success, he’s gotta rap about what he’s reaping. And at their molten center sat Tyler, who in a span from late 2009’s full-length debut Bastard to 2011’s Billboard-charting Goblin emerged as a roach-swallowing emcee terrible seething in self-loathing, an Eminem-weaned skate rat doling out harsh tokes just for the delight of watching the olds squirm, not so much rap’s savior as its smirking Antichrist. They were the punkest thing to happen in popular music since Jesus was a boy. Back in 2010, hip-hop was largely a bunch of old rich dudes resting hard on their old-rich-dude laurels, whereas the Odd Future crew boasted all manner of teenage lewdness they were fuck-you heroes with a surplus of talent and not enough dough. It’s easy to understand why the Internet swooned so hard when Tyler, the Creator first floated along and pricked our bubble.
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