A few pages deeper in the article, Sanneh observes an Odd Future concert. A year-old fan climbs onstage. The crowd yells for her to take off her shirt. She refuses. I just say faggot and use gay as an adjective to describe stupid shit. Sure, there is something charismatic about his unbridled adolescence. Odd Future makes juicy, relatable content for moody teenage boys. Tyler rants about how much he hates school; he fights with his family; he wrestles with chronic masturbation habits.
But as someone who no longer makes bombs out of Snapple bottles, I fail to see how any middle-aged journalist would find these topics interesting or insightful. He is a kid who is pushing buttons to get famous, not to provoke thought. He asks us to ponder rape, suicide and jerking off as much as Charlie Sheen provides insight into winning. And the music itself? The bare beats are cheap knockoffs of Pharrell Williams.
Goblin grinds on for an excessive plus minutes. Burn shit! Some people think it should have stayed there. But Odd Future, last week described by the New York Times as " the flashpoint for reigniting the culture wars in hip-hop ", might change that.
They're often compared to Eminem , an artist Jay-Z could have been thinking of when he wrote: "The rapper's character is essentially a conceit, a first-person literary creation.
Unless you want to throw up. These are rape and murder fantasies graphic enough to send the vomit rising along with the bile. Unconscionable at any time, they're particularly hard to stomach right now, following the passing of an anti-abortion bill in the US House of Representatives last week which sought to narrow the definition of rape.
The Super 3 is into woozy textures and pillowy keyboard settings, and the music he makes is a far cry from anything else you'll find on the Odd Future Tumblr. Voyager is mostly an instrumental album, and there's barely any rapping here at all. There's a serious sci-fi bent to the proceedings that's more Gorillaz than Sun Ra. Voyager is the one Odd Future album I can play around my daughter without fear of warping her brain.
It's strictly background fare, and it's not even especially pleasant or interesting, but its existence within the context of Odd Future says a lot about the group. Tyler, for one, is a massive and vocal fan of N. Jet Age's inclusion also signals that Odd Future is something more than an insurgent rap crew. It's a fully imagined aesthetic art project, one with room for a lot of musical ideas. Radical , a mixtape that showcases every rapper in the crew, is a rare indication that Odd Future don't live entirely within their own self-created universe, that they get the same rap radio stations as the rest of us.
Here, they take a break from their usual hall-of-dark-mirrors production to rap over actual rap hits like Gucci Mane's "Lemonade" and Roscoe Dash's "All the Way Turnt Up", as well as a few older, nerdier choices. And though they stick to the same gleefully terrifying subject matter as always, it's nowhere near as immersive as their best work. At its worst, Radical shows that these kids have a long way to go as rappers. Earl and Tyler may be the strongest voices of the crew, but they're still nowhere near able to steal "Lemonade" away from Gucci.
But at its best, Radical is a fun reminder that these are still just kids bullshitting each other in a basement somewhere. On "Swag Me Out", all the kids jump on the party-noise loop of the Beastie Boys' "It's the New Style", kicking adorably dumb punchlines and chanting the song's title over and over for seven minutes. The whole tape is a minor work as far as these guys go, but it's a fun listen and a low-impact introduction to their world.
And if you have the slightest interest in hearing these guys rail mercilessly against establishment kingmaker rap blogs Nah Right and 2DopeBoyz, there's a whole lot of that here. Rolling Papers peaks high with "Super Market", a skit-song in which Domo cuts off Tyler in a grocery-store line, leading to an epically ridiculous battle-rap throwdown that ends when Tyler leaves on an evil walrus named Rufus and Domo turns into a zombie.
For the most part, though, Rolling Papers is a perfectly competent, entirely pedestrian piece of Wiz Khalifan stoner-rap. Deep-voiced, sleepy-eyed Domo doesn't have the magnetic bloodlust of the rest of the crew; most of the time, he just wants to puff away in peace.
The production is dazed, MF Doom-esque psych-rap-- good for vibe, not close attention-- and Domo's voice, usually deep in the mix, works just the same. If you're in the right mood, Rolling Papers wafts past nicely. If you're not, things get boring fast. Plenty of people thought Wiz was biting, and it's a testament to Odd Future's increased profile that those charges seemed even a little bit reasonable. Wiz's Rolling Papers will probably be better than this one, though.
Since releasing The Dena Tape , Hodgy Beats has sharpened up his technical rapping skills, but he's still a supporting-actor type, best used as the guy who comes in to calm things down in between a couple of manic Tyler verses. But thanks to Left Brain, he's the star rapper on what might be the single best-produced Odd Future album. Left Brain's beats on BlackenedWhite are truly powerful. Synths blare and roil, drums drop out at unexpected moments, warped melodies flit in and out at bizarre moments.
And then there's "Fuck the Police", a chaotic near-masterpiece that would've fit in just fine on Waka Flocka Flame's Flockaveli. It is all uncharted territory for him, indeed for hip-hop; it is impossible to quantify, but it feels as if he is influencing this sexual culture as much as it is influencing him.
You could say the same for Frank Ocean. Is this resistance, even subconsciously, borne out of fear of rejection by their audiences? The album as a whole has a rhythm, is a rhythm; there are blues in the sense of different sadnesses, different shades, from inky midnights to duck-egg mornings, and of course he plays the blues, too.
Tyler meanwhile now sings as well as raps, and Igor, adding to the cosmic-boogie leanings of previous records, is essentially a neo-soul album. This permissiveness, where everything can be cool if you say it is, has dissolved irony, and Tyler is the perfect example of that too: his fondness for jauntily dapper suits and golf clothing is sarcastic and sincere all at the same time. Heartache in golf shoes: how Odd Future brought fresh energy to rap.
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