Since Tyler, the Creator’s solo career began at the tail end of the 2000s, the 28-year-old rapper and producer has been perfecting an outré and utterly compelling performance style. It hinges on a delightful, occasionally gruesome tastelessness usually associated with camp icons like John Waters. Inaccessible indie-rap operas are framed as free-associative conversations with a therapist; pop tracks double as murder ballads; a staunch and widely criticised obsession with slurs culminate not in any kind of apology, but in a gorgeous and gob-smacking coming-out record, 2017’s Scum Fuck Flower Boy.
Igor, 2019’s dizzyingly produced and emotionally wounded breakup record, drove home the scope and ingenuity of Tyler’s art, the album’s unlikely blend of horror score sonics and top 40 songwriting a fitting next step in the musician’s journey. On Monday, on the second night of Beyond the Valley festival in the Gippsland town of Lardner, Tyler stepped onstage for his first Victorian show in six years, delivering an inspiring and thrilling career-spanning set that capitalised on Igor’s gaudy, theatrical heart.
Tyler’s journey back to Australia has been a messy one. His 2013 tour, in support of that year’s album, Wolf, was vehemently protested by the activist group Collective Shout due to perceived misogyny in his lyrics. (Tyler’s response was to call out one of the protestors by name on stage.) When, two years later, a follow-up tour was announced, Collective Shout swiftly launched a petition to immigration minister Peter Dutton to have the rapper banned from entry to the country. The tour was subsequently cancelled.
When Tyler takes the stage in Lardner, though, all memory of Collective Shout – who dialled back their protests this time around – seems to have melted away. Clad in a spectacular powder-blue suit and Warholian blonde wig, the rapper carries the same chintzy but magnetic appeal of a talk-show host or a self-help speaker. He slides on stage in front of a glittering curtain backdrop as Igor’s Theme, the dark and kaleidoscopic fusion of soul and electro-pop that opens the album, blasts from the speakers. He dances in a kind of shuddering and sliding back and forth across the stage in a manner that is both chaotically loose and viciously exacting – and wholly unique.
Despite telling the crowd early on that, due to jetlag, he’s “gonna need you to make up for my lack of energy”, Tyler is as jacked-up and lively as he’s ever seemed onstage, particularly during the suite of Igor songs that comprises the first half of his set. Even when Tyler’s in-ear monitors stop working, the show goes on, the rapper choosing to simply mouth the words to Earfquake, an Igor track that became his first true chart hit, and dance while the crowd sings back to him. It’s a silly and entirely riveting last-minute save.
The rest of the set consists of a kind of vaudevillian rap. Those closer to the stage can see Tyler’s face morphing into his trademark hyper-emotive, panto-style expressions. A snarl when he screams “I fucking hate you!” during IFHY, which quickly turns to a mournful pout upon the counter, “But I love you”. Starry-eyed innocence when he declares to a lover “I’m your puppet” on Puppet. Pure, wide-eyed exuberance during the pounding, percussive drop of fan-favourite, Tamale.
Tyler is alone onstage for the entirety of his set, a choice that heightens the overblown aspect of what he is doing. Before performing Earfquake, he sits in front of a piano and performs a protracted introduction like a cabaret singer, and mimes playing a violin during the jarring synths of Flower Boy turn-up anthem, Who Dat Boy? A pleasant side-effect of him performing to a track – that is, without a band – is that his sumptuous, spectral productions, when blasted from such enormous speakers, sound more engrossing than ever. The fizzing synthwork of Igor’s Theme, Yonkers’ crunchy beat, and the mournful R&B of Boredom, all sound revelatory, their crevices and textural variances emerging in the open space. The show wouldn’t be nearly as much of a success if he hadn’t spent the last decade redefining pop production in his own avant-garde image.
Indeed, the spectre of pop stardom has always hung over Tyler’s career, and it seems that in his Igor suit, slightly divorced from his Tyler, the Creator persona, he is finally able to playfully indulge in what his art might look like if he was filling out stadiums and reaching the top of the charts. The Igor set is the purest, most surreal distillation of the bizarre camp aesthetics Tyler has always played with, backed up by some of the most radical and galvanising production of the last decade. It was a long wait for Tyler’s return, but it’s fitting that he’s helping pull Australia into the 2020s: few other rappers or producers so accurately represent how far pop has come, and how far it will go.
