On Top of a Mountain with Tyler, The Creator | Fast Company

it's your sketchbook yeah i don't show people oh my gosh i'm looking i'm like actually that's not a little that's the cover i want this so bad i want this sketch so bad [Applause] oh here we go here we are that's this that's this tyler the creator he launched his career at age 19 as part of the brash la music collective odd future a decade later the provocative vunderkind has blossomed into a modern renaissance man tyler has established himself as not just one of the most unique songwriters and electric performers on the planet but is a cross-meeting creative who designs fashion formulates ice cream flavors writes and directs videos hosts his own music festival and constantly sketches new ideas that he wants to bring alive inside his highly secretive moleskins i profiled tyler for fast company in 2018 what now seems like a lifetime ago before he had a pair of number one albums and performed frequently on network television i found tyler to be the epitome of himself tyler has a penchant for fast cars and fussy hats hot takes and fire beats we met up again at the end of 2021 for two days on top of a small mountain where he constructed a blue flintstone style french fantasy to launch his high-end fashion line lefleur i am just so happy to talk today like and i don't know how to open an interview like that but it's true because for the last like since we last talked you've had two number one records and everything you've done just keeps getting elevated um you know the production design the fashion and everything's been growing more and more cohesive and i guess that's the vision has that been the vision all along uh i just make stuff i just make stuff i like at the time and you know i think as you get older things get more refined and yeah you become more of a sniper with your things if you want but i think i've just become more of a sniper of what i'm trying to do and i think i live life yeah like i go and do stuff and it's shown in my work yeah so whether it's shown in my work through sound or through cloth or through visual stuff it feels cohesive because of that because i'm just that's what it is so right right it's basically like your lifestyle translated into your art pretty much at least that shows i'm not a liar or your whole life is a lie or my whole life is a lot [ __ ] really good at like this [ __ ] with his latest album call me if you get lost tyler created a rich travel fantasy during the global pandemic i started like writing this stuff like december 2019 and then i had i recorded three songs real quick and then we got on the plane to australia and like i was like oh man i just want to make songs um how could i articulate this you know when you hear like a song and it's like oh i know exactly what he's talking about because i do that same thing right yeah well it was i drive the costco i'm hanging out yeah literally yeah so what you just said you're driving the costco like if you ain't a rap song i want to hear about you driving to costco because that's what you love to do and i want to hear about the food you're going to buy because that's the [ __ ] that you love to eat and i want to hear about what you're specifically wearing because that is the clothes that you like to wear the car that you're specifically driving i want to hear about that yeah that's what i like yeah i like hearing about people's things that they love so that's what i did for this album so it's just me talking or being braggadocious or whatever about the [ __ ] that i love whether it's a blue this or this specific car or i'm going to this place or i'm swimming in this water or i'm eating macaroons like i want to i wanted to just hear music when i'm playing my rap music like in the car loud like oh yeah yeah that's what i'm doing because that's what i'm doing i want i just wanted to hear that but you make an album largely about travel everybody loves to travel though right not everyone that's the thing you don't think everybody actually everyone doesn't like to travel yeah everybody thinks they like to travel well no some people do but some people just are very comfortable and just where they're at that's not a bad thing i'm not implying that that's bad right i don't want to sound dismissive towards that but some people actually don't like to travel i think it dude traveling to new york in london when i was 19 years old changed everything for me yeah because i didn't leave i've never left l.a so when that happened do like everything i thought just went out the window i just started making music different and this and that like oh that opened my eyes what did you see traveling that that changes specifically like do you remember moments yeah when i when i went to new york and it was cold no no no you listen listen like my view is skewed on what cold is or like the winter so when i went to new york for the first time i needed a real jacket yeah because it was cold and i'm just like you know i'm just shell shocked so they're like you got to go get a new jacket so they're telling me what goose down is like stuff i don't know about we don't have we had a north face out here but it closed down because it doesn't get cold enough so they're telling me i'm learning about what canadian goose is and what these jackets are and what heat tech is all this stuff yeah i don't know what any of that is and just that moment how much random information i got about [ __ ] duck feathers at like 19 or 20. like 19 it just was like oh i didn't know this was a thing they had salt because it was snowing so they had salt and stuff and i'm like what the hell is this for and they were telling me i'm like i'm from l.a i just didn't know so at that moment and i've always been a curious kid but like when you're just thrown in a place that's just not your environment the information you learn as soon as you land is just ah and i love it i love that bring it like this a bit yeah and scoot it that way just a tad bit push it in closer just a little bit more keep going i feel like being here like i feel like i get to be like literally a little bit in the album it's like what you wear in the album i feel like it's the smell of the album right like this completed painting that goes along with fashion and it goes along with performance and everything else do you ditch a lot of ideas like when you're doing this i mean all this snowballs i have so many i i just go through so much [ __ ] i take a bridge from that and put it here because it works better with this structure so you don't you don't mind like as a writer i hate throwing writing away i don't know dude you could come back to it like i don't i don't get married to things like it's like oh no this will work better here you know it's it's okay to move on and switch things up and come back to it later i started i started cu again that came out 2017. i started that in 20 what 14 right when i first met callie uh gone gone thank you off the igor that original beat in drum pattern was for wolf sometimes i'm not ready for things like yeah man i'm i'll probably be i'll probably go through a weird denim phase a weird japanese like denim phase in like four years i'll probably go through an all black wearing eyeliner phase in six seven but i said this early on i was like dude i'll definitely you know sometimes i'm just not there yet i wore all black three weeks ago to an event and it was nice and i was like i'll do that probably in two years and really dive into it [Music] in the rolls yes is it weird riding in this car when you drive one uh not really it's kind of just like uber i steal my style from old men in like france and like the illest like five-year-olds you just see walking by once you hit like 57 you really don't give a [ __ ] anymore so and you have so much experience of how things fit on you if you're not a dick [ __ ] i wore the sample version of this at the grammys i feel like i've seen you in like yeah igor i love sweater vest so much this color palette this this brown with this cream and it's blue you'll see a lot throughout like i kind of designed everything to kind of go with brown i want people to come here and see it because like just when you just buy stuff off the internet it's just a white background next to some other people also bought this that like i don't want my shirt next to a line that i don't even [ __ ] with just so people could subconsciously one day even associate it by it because i didn't make it for that so this is super important because you get to see the world that this lives in and the smell that goes with it and the people that's in it and the music yesterday you said if it was a skill i could get better at i wish i could get better at singing but the thing is yeah my voice isn't yet suited for the way i want to sing for the vocal phrasing that i attempt my voice is too deep and raspy which invertedly i think it ended up making it special you do have a great rich full of character voices right like people it's like what do you want to always have to and it's you right and it's like you can't hear your voice and not hear you yeah and people always say that but right you've heard that no i know what i could i could do this all day i sound good when i rap just over drums but even that like the low tone in my voice sometimes that frequency doesn't sound good with certain songs because it clashes so it might sound out of tune and it's like i always got to do bass reduction like [ __ ] sometimes i wish sometimes i wish i just had a nasally jay-z eminem like [ __ ] voice even that just sounds good over anything like wayne's voice cuts through on any beat he goes on mine doesn't bro i just sound like a [ __ ] monster on everything but sometimes yeah untrue but yeah when you want to sound like a monster you that's awesome yeah you mentioned recently you were reconsidering like obviously you're tired of the creator and you were like reconsidering potentially like adopting your surname more which is i believe if i pronounce it right it's a konma a coma okay so it's like and excuse this stupid joke but i had to do it yeah in school because teachers wouldn't do it couldn't yeah they didn't know how to pronounce it correctly so i would say oh he ain't die he in a coma he's in a coma right right so your surname is a coma [ __ ] me for that joke [Laughter] one i'm curious when you adopted the stage name to begin with like why you did that and then two i mean are you really considering you know re-adopting your surname well my stage names at all my stage name was from i made a myspace page when i was 13 and i had three of them one was regular for friends another one was for something else and then the third one was just ideas i'll put drawings and like uh photos i would take in like my beats i'll upload them on there and then i start using that more because random people from kentucky and random [ __ ] would be like cool beats bro and so i just kept the type of creator thing going and then you know i'm 17 in high school and around la that name's getting around and i kind of just kept it as my stage name it's really dumb but it stuck with me so it just works um but yeah my full name tyler okoma and all caps just looks really cool so you might see more of that i don't know i'm getting older and i think when people get older they start realizing [ __ ] and liking things they didn't like you just start changing so i think my version of that is looking at my name and saying oh this is actually cool i mean you mentioned like a feeling like a very african name right and like it does and it feels great because you don't hear that name a lot in the us obviously yeah and i didn't know my i didn't know my pops so when when i was a kid not only did i um like i don't know anyone on that side of my family so take that back i don't know when he's anyone on my dad's side um so my mom didn't have that last name i had this last name i didn't know anyone else that had a name even similar to it so it's literally i was just like it was so foreign to me even in my household even in where i was comfortable at like it followed me and i was just like what is this so um i always thought my last name was weird but whatever i started [ __ ] with it more around 2016 and then i start putting it on my album covers all songs written or produced by tyler okoma and i think i'm gonna keep that going i really [ __ ] with that name now it looks really cool in all caps when igor is nominated when igor won i feel like you made a statement that just like took the air out of the room like i think you cut through man i wasn't trying to be no [ __ ] hero political it wasn't like that the dude asked a question that's why it came out well in recent days there's been a lot of news about the voting process at the grammys has any of that affected the way you're looking at winning this award today uh i'm half and half on it um on one side i'm very grateful that uh what i made could just be you know uh acknowledged in a world like this um but also it sucks that whenever we and i mean guys that look like me do anything that's genre bending or that's anything they always put it in a rapper urban category which is and i don't like that urban word it's just a politically correct way to say the n word to me you're nominated again obviously same category like you know it's awesome to be nominated i'm sure but how do you how do you feel about about like a rap nomination versus like a general album nomination and also how do you find a rap album right now make the [ __ ] this does feel like a wrap-up i feel like this one's more fair no yeah i make the rap album um dude i'm just it's just cool to uh be thought of for accolades like that when i'm just doing what i'm doing it feels like you you're able to basically like appreciate the grammys as like the pinnacle of like musical awards but like i don't know centrifuge out some of the races one one of them yeah one of them because awards don't always mean a physical like thing yeah i always tell people dude chief keef has a song called finito that's a [ __ ] hit but it wasn't like on billboards and he didn't get an award for it but like man that [ __ ] is it's like a street hit i think that's what it's called um and it's always funny how those things work like that song is huge in this circle or this bubble but it may not have hit a grammy or a billboard or a chart thing like that i always find that really interesting so you can get awarded in different ways and for me the grammys is definitely one of those and again that's cool yeah you've also been performing in bigger stages too it just feels like you you are taking the opportunity right now to just like go out there and do it which is obviously intentional um but doing a performance is that is it because it's you know it's an extension of your art like it's another way to make because i love being able to perform on these things and do things that i love being able to do what i did at the grammys because everyone is usually the rain comes down and it's like the moment it's like no i'm on fire and i'm gonna do a wig we're gonna bring 80 [ __ ] that look like yeah i'm gonna have boys to man and charlie wilson come and we're gonna sing over a trash can like you know the new jack swing air and we don't have a house and i'm a jumping fire and then the next one i want wind i just want wind i just don't want to get to my destination because the wind's blowing uh yeah i'll do maths at the american music awards because these people probably don't if they do listen to me they probably don't listen to album cuts so yes i'm gonna do an album cut that's serious and not surface level exciting on the amas i'm gonna be serious and i'm not gonna move and yell and have fire we're gonna stand in snow and be controlled and still and have people say why the [ __ ] did they tell this guy to come perform on here this [ __ ] is boring even on tyler standards this isn't even a good performance and you know what that [ __ ] was so silky it is it's controlled it's dead it's that and it's the snow and then the car comes at the same time and i get to take that step off the steps on that snare it's so sick and like the i mean i mean that song is amazing also because like it's a crescendo of emotion right where the whole the whole the whole song is basically like a shift until you don't realize where you are at the end right and then for that performance you do like the zoom in right and so it ends with you to camera like looking at the audio i'm sitting there with the we've ever ever heard so i'm saying no do this we got to do this do this zoom in and you know the camera guys there they're used to cutting and cutting and getting the audience stay here and i wasn't angry at that i'm just saying but just stay here on me and zoom in no don't move it the attention span of everything now has even gone in the media into mediums like a tv performance or things like that like where they're like no we can't lose the viewers so we have to do this and i'm like but this piece is going to live forever i don't give a [ __ ] about the viewer this piece is going to live forever i'm in this it's just me we're going to make this good i want this good for my standards good i don't care about in the audience i don't want to get little cha-cha's [ __ ] reaction okay we don't need to change the thing we stay [ __ ] here and keep going in until the [ __ ] moment i'm like stop and we're gonna get that and then we're gonna zoom out when that thing comes i'm gonna get on the back of that goddamn moped and we [ __ ] it out and it's gonna exist and that's what it is that's the idea [Music] you willing to talk about virgil i mean right like people see this in a few weeks but wait it's just this when i first met virgil i think 2012 the kanye of course and then like i'm like when he was doing like the pyrex and like uh ventril stuff i was just like oh right it was like taking over i was just like screen printing i was just like oh this is gross but again me and rocky thought we hated each other so anything that they were on i was just instantly like no i [ __ ] that right and then once you start doing the the more recent stuff off white stuff i was just like no it's just not for me but i still knew him i would kind of mock it like uh whatever and then um you know i was seeing him here he was always super nice so yeah he was a super nice guy yeah and then time goes on we just started getting a cool relationship and then he got the louis vuitton thing and i was so hyped i was like oh he went there a guy that looks like me did that fire he didn't want to congratulate that him and yay hugged on the thing i was i remember posting that as soon as it happened i was like this is just so beautiful like damn he went there and what he was doing there springing all these different worlds and he had lucy and clark there and like just all these people and i was like this is so ill um so been cool in 20 and 20 2019 it was when i like decided like oh dude i think i'm going to do this the floor thing and what who who really pushed me to do it was my boy death hines solange and virgil and i was like yo man i think i want to do this thing like just make really nice stuff it's a separate world i don't know exactly exactly what it is but i know i want to make pants like this and pieces like this and trunks and just cool [ __ ] like something different than what you've been doing for what i've been doing yeah he's like oh uh what what do you need i'm like well i don't even know where to here give me a week bro he put me in contact with people in italy and here and there emails on calls like face to face times with people i don't know introducing me like and this was the week that i was going to say hey virgil what you helped me with what you got me started with what your helping hand did i finally get to show you what you did like i was like [ __ ] i wanted him here so bad to see like hey look what i did because i wanted him to just say fire and i want him to be like no like and i always go out of my way to whoever helped me and i always got my way to say like no you don't understand thank you and it was this week where i was gonna finally just send that invite and say hey the day the next day i was gonna send it by like hey i'm doing something this week come see because he helped me get this here this material this mate this sweater is because of him and i'm just like ah all this [ __ ] is i'm just like dude [ __ ] but now i just gotta go super duper cuz he was about ideas and things like that so like now it's like okay i just got to keep pushing it forward and he was always so supportive playing igor and calling to get lost on his stuff we would share ideas and just random stuff it was a few days before i talked to him like um yeah i was like man the lv human-made shit's my favorite that red and white hat he was like no i'm gonna make that one for you because i love fuzzy hats and it was that so i mean i don't saw his last show but like he has a ton do fuzzy heads i was just like they're like feel inspired by you to some extent i was like yo i'm gonna be in paris i don't know where to go i have a few spots but like what's some other spots who said give me two days he sent me a pdf would you like he just went out of here energy like he went out of his [ __ ] way for everyone and like it took me it even took me a while to realize that and the relationship we had over the last two years was just so sick the stuff that i could just share with him like oh we can even talk about this being as dark as we are like that's just so sick and like ah i just think he would have [ __ ] loved this but he'll he'll be here in spirit and like i'm just happy that this could exist knowing that he helped me push this forward for real it's like it's a it's amazing that you didn't just have a relationship he actively he like he put problems on the table and made it happen many people literally like until level invested right in in this good-hearted i didn't even i remember i remember being weird like why he [ __ ] with everybody like years ago not in a bad way but i mean from the outside he got along with everybody i met him once dude like everyone really was my human being my hate and pretentious ass couldn't fathom that someone could have such an open heart like that and it took me a while to understand that and i'm just like you are actually a [ __ ] angel like you're an angel bro like ah he left his imprint he did that he did that he hit giant i mean it's a giant he did that did it stant i hate that i have sunglasses on right now because it feels so you know like you can't see like i'm crying i'm not sitting here i was like i'm tearing up no i saw your body language you had said something you went down yeah i caught that it's fine we're human it's okay something that struck me about your latest album is that you would become more overt and i feel like some of your messaging like your last album is inspirational like you look at you look at run it up which is i think you described it like the song of victory which is like how i categorized it yeah but but you know you talk i guess you talk to the listener right like directly you're you're directly trying to inspire live from the 310 uh the green goblin and ben ties that's my green card uh no no lots they send photos i send wires like man the fact i'm at a place where i could just like see a car i like and just be like yeah i'll take it like i'm not gonna see it just here's the wire like that's so [ __ ] amazing i'm so blessed um i know a lot of station photos i've seen why uh gumball's screwing me down can't [ __ ] okay rap help us see clear when the lighting was dim dim we ain't nothing to you but we something of them it's crazy like i had a friend of mine who said like he i hope no one gets angry at this he said he doesn't know the martin luther king i have a dream speech but he said he knows every jay-z lyric bro jay-z is like his god like his hero like the things he was saying he lives by and that gives him that and like with rap music like i grew up on it so i just remember looking up at these figures like dude these are gods these are gods to me these are the heroes to us so when i said uh rap help us see clear when the lightning was dim like man when [ __ ] is not like when shit's not going well like man this music really uplifts these people and us we're nothing to you but we're something to them like man y'all might disregard us but like man these guys are like gods to us i hope no one takes that line out of context i don't think how dare he even say that to a white man say martin luther king is not important like jason it's like bro i didn't say that like you're missing the point people are gonna be like i hate this [ __ ] a side note on that song which is much more superficial when you say i just might sound at all i believe you oh i like i fully like you say it i'm like i fully believe him right now dude i just spend all of his people just empty just just to see this bro i don't think like i'm not even gonna tell you the number yeah that i spent but it's like it's it's fine because i want to see the idea by spending all it's not even money it's more just like i'm gonna go for like i'm gonna [ __ ] it a hundred and ten percent i'm gonna do it i'm adrenaline he was just talking about this song i quit my i quit that [ __ ] fedex job i was just like [ __ ] it dude i didn't know what i was gonna do and i went to new york and just was like [ __ ] it like sometimes you just gotta spend it all and it's not money it's whatever it is you have that in helping them [Music] hey you guys can start again i'm done with this [ __ ] interview thanks so much everyone here is so great and if i could give all of you hugs and other things actually i'll give everyone a hug once we're done you guys are [ __ ] rock stars

Channel: Fast Company

Views: 897,495

Keywords: Fast Company, Innovation, Business, Technology, Design, Entertainment, Tyler the creator, Los Angeles, Rap, hip hop, Igor, Cherry Bomb, Call me if you get lost, run it up, Golf Le Fleur, Malibu, California, The Grammys, design, clothing design, Tyler Okonma, co.design, Massa, Le Fleur, Music, pop music, Virgil Abloh, Virgil, RIP virgil, fashion, Fashion brand le fleur, Tyler, branding, Earfquake, rap albums

Id: ywlWU6nDDRA

Length: 27min 38sec (1658 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 27 2021