(“Wow, life’s a cute b***h full of estrogen,” he rapped on the title track. Influenced by the grab-bag eclecticism of Pharrell Williams and his own tirelessly messed-up inner monologues, his official debut, Goblin, came out in 2011. Raised in Los Angeles County, Tyler (born Tyler Okonma in 1991) started experimenting with music in his early teens, co-founding the Odd Future collective in 2007, a group whose members included fellow iconoclasts Earl Sweatshirt, Frank Ocean, and Syd Tha Kyd. Within a few years, he’d evolved into one of hip-hop’s genuine polymaths, a self-contained brand who not only rapped, wrote, produced, and art-directed, but designed clothes and created television shows whose vision-violent, surreal, sarcastic, and disarmingly introspective-captured the id of an audience who didn’t know how to relate to their feelings but weren’t going to keep them in any longer.

When Tyler, The Creator first started gaining national notoriety around 2008, it would’ve been easy to dismiss him as cheap shock-a snotty kid willing to push every button (mass murder, rape, cannibalism) just to get a little attention.

Tyler the creator songkick