If the album plays like a tribute to rap’s good old days, Tyler, who emerged as part of a youth movement himself, is not the type to look down his nose at hip-hop’s current ruling sound. As DJ Drama exclaims at one point, “Shit like this make me wanna turn my baseball cap to the side!” I trust that hip-hop scholars will be digging through Call Me If You Get Lost for days and weeks identifying all the Easter eggs. Along the way he weaves in source material from the hip-hop archives: hijacking Prince Paul’s heaving-machinery beat from Gravediggaz’s “2 Cups Of Blood” for “LUMBERJACK,” crossbreeding Streets Disciple-era Nas with Method Man & Redman’s “Da Rockwilder” on “Manifesto.” Sometimes it’s less a direct reference than an homage, as when the gang vocal on “Runitup” calls back to early Three 6 Mafia. The aesthetic he has adopted here is deeply classicist - R&B hooks, spoken interludes, sprawling fantasias built from breakbeats and old soul samples - all of it filtered through the kinds of tones and textures that have long been a bedrock of his music, those bleary synth melodies and rich jazz chords he’s been plucking out on his keyboard since the beginning. Tyler is not sing-rapping through Auto-Tune. Cole album might be if Cole loosened up and had some fun. Samples from various ’90s legends betray a reverence for the golden age of boom-bap, too. The sheer grandiosity of it all - the elaborate cinematic production, the insane cast of guest rappers - reminds me of “the old Kanye” in all his splendor. You can hear that all over Call Me If You Get Lost too. But if Tyler spent the aughts gobbling up Datpiff classics, he was also immersing himself in the decade’s tentpole rap blockbusters, from The Marshall Mathers LP to Tha Carter III. Like Kendrick Lamar recruiting Kid Capri to shout all over DAMN., Drama’s presence is a clear message to listeners about how they are to contextualize this music, as well as a reminder that Odd Future emerged at the end of the peak mixtape era. He brought in DJ Drama to play hypeman, bombing the album with enthusiastic asides in the grand Gangsta Grillz tradition. In particular Call Me If You Get Lost calls back to the rap music Tyler grew up on. It’s hip-hop all the way down to the molecular level - a pure expression of love for the genre and its traditions. But with the exception of the 10-minute retro-soul-gone-reggae centerpiece “Sweet / I Thought You Wanted To Dance,” Call Me If You Get Lost is a nonstop barrage of beats, bars, and atmosphere-setting interregna. That much was true even when he was making shock rap, and it’s become ever truer as his music and public persona have evolved. IGOR‘s follow-up sounds like the result of Tyler saying, “You want rap music? I’ll give you rap music.” There will always be layers of musical complexity in every new Tyler release - he’s such a visionary producer and a voracious listener that his albums can’t help but capture his love for a vast spectrum of music. If Tyler is nominated again for his new Call Me If You Get Lost, this line of reasoning will not apply. When I hear that I’m like, ‘Why can’t we just be in pop?'” “I don’t like that urban word - it’s just a politically correct way to say the N-word, to me. “It sucks that whenever we - and I mean guys that look like me - do anything that’s genre-bending or anything, they also put it in a rap or urban category,” Tyler told reporters at the ceremony. While expressing gratitude for recognition at such a high level, he also pushed back on the rap categorization, calling it a “backhanded compliment” rooted in racial stereotypes. Tyler would tell you as much, and on the night he won his Grammy for Best Rap Album, he did. If anything, the album was the sound of Tyler going pop and doing it in style. Often, as on the album’s transcendent single “EARFQUAKE,” he did so by bursting into song. The album was a tour de force, voyaging through synthetic funk and soul, brisk organic post-Daft Punk bombast, hard discordant trap beats, and so much more as Tyler unpacked his feelings for a man who became his lover only to go back to his ex-girlfriend. Not that it contained zero rapping whatsoever, but Tyler, The Creator’s 2019 stunner veered further than ever from the queasy, aggressive, jazz-tinged hip-hop he made his name on in Odd Future’s salad days. Don’t let the Grammys fool you: IGOR was not really a rap album.
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