Tyler, The Creator’s Anxieties About Fame Are Starting to Feel Universal

Tyler is speaking to the Times on “NOID,” the first single from his upcoming album Chromokopia. The song is part of Tyler’s straight-to-the-point album rollout, where the music and visuals—not his characteristic outspokenness—have taken centerstage. 

Last week, Tyler dropped “St. Chroma,” which featured him whispering over militaristic stomps. A week later, he dropped “NOID,” admitting he was “paranoid” about how stardom made him a target. “I can’t even buy a home in private / home invasion got my brothers dyin’,” he raps about the ever-present threat of celebrity burglaries.  

The black-and-white video serves to hammer Tyler’s consternation home. He flails about in a dark void, is chased by autograph-seeking fans, and has a frantic, gun-toting Ayo Ebidiri run up on him. The self-directed video offers almost three minutes of visuals for fans to decipher frame-by-frame. And likely before their analysis is done—or before he reveals all at his upcoming album listening event—Chromokopia will be here.

The short runway to his new album is becoming Tyler’s trademark. The Dissect Podcast’s official X account pointed out that 2019’s IGOR dropped 10 days after his rollout began, and 2021’s Call Me If You Get Lost dropped 11 days after the first announcement. Chromokopia is slated to drop 12 days after “St. Chroma.” It’s surprising that quietly dropping music feels like a unique rollout, but the music industry has made publicity stunts feel like a prerequisite for new releases—in 2024 alone, we’ve seen more pre-release beef than Midwest farms. Nonetheless, Tyler reminds us that there’s no need for cheap promo when your fanbase just wants the music. 

He’s been open that he doesn’t think we need to know anything else anyway. In August, he lamented to Maverick Carter, “The internet’s crazy, these kids hack everything…they wanna know who your sister is, what you ate for dinner…mind your fuckin’ business. Go the fuck outside and listen to the damn art or the music. Because of the internet, people don’t know personal boundaries anymore, and it’s normalized…[but] it’s like ‘we don’t know each other.’” And here comes an album with a lead single with a Ngozi family sample that apparently translates to, “When you come to my house, please be respectful. Because I don’t like talking too much. Talking too much breeds gossip.” At least he’s consistent.

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While many theories abound, some fans believe the Chromokopia album cover is a visual reference to David Bowie’s Heroes album. Before the term “album era” was a thing, Bowie was revered for adopting different personas for each album. Tyler has done the same and presents his creative choices in layers for Chromokopia. In 1977, Bowie told NME that the quotation of “Heroes” on his album cover serves to “indicate a dimension of irony about the word ‘heroes’ or about the whole concept of heroism” — an idea that Tyler could be redressing as a commentary on celebrity worship. Bowie’s cover is a call to artist Erich Heckel’s painting Roquairol, which British outlet Why Now described as “a disturbing portrait of artist Ernst Ludwig Kirchner in a state of nervous collapse.” Again, Roquairol’s tension, referenced by Bowie, also works on “NOID,” with Tyler venting, “Nervous system is shook, way before nineteen.”

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Bowie’s biographer interprets that the Heroes cover shows Bowie “raising a flat palm as though he has just mimetically lifted the final mask of artifice from his face.” But instead of holding a mask, Tyler is wearing a brown leather mask. His veil could be fairly interpreted as a reference to the charade of modern celebrity. The mask looks like Tyler, but it’s a slight variation concocted to conceal his true identity. The song title, “NOID,” further hints that to the world, he’s not the Tyler Okonma that his family knows. He’s whatever character someone imagines him as. Like he told Carter, we don’t know him. 

“NOID” isn’t the first instance of a rapper pushing back against celebrity overexposure; one can look to Cardi B’s Invasion of Privacy or Eminem’s “The Way I Am,” for instance. But “NOID’s” arrival dovetails with an influx of fans starting to agree with him that the modern construct of celebrity is unhealthy. Whether fans are pondering the power networks that enabled Diddy’s monstrous allegations or rolling their eyes at Trump-supporting stars, we’re all starting to agree with Kanye West, one of Tyler’s idols, that “no one man should have all that power.” Tyler agrees from inside the celebrity bubble, following up his previous comments about overzealous fans with a single that examines the weight of artists being treated like Heroes.