Tyler, the Creator, proves the power of risk-taking and brand-building at Day N Vegas
It was show-and-tell time for Tyler, the Creator.
Having paused to take a breath about half an hour into his headlining set Sunday night at the Day N Vegas festival, the Los Angeles-based musician and designer began going through the glittering chains he was wearing around his neck, identifying which of his albums had inspired each piece: Here was a chain for his latest, “Call Me If You Get Lost”; here was a chain for “Igor,” which came out in 2019.
And here was a chain for “Cherry Bomb,” the opinion-splitting 2015 LP whose mention drew a big cheer — and a playful come-on-now look from Tyler — on Sunday.
“Y’all crucified me for that album,” he reminded the crowd at the Las Vegas Festival Grounds. “Five years later: ‘“Cherry Bomb” changed my life!’”
For fans, artists and organizers, the spectre of the Astroworld tragedy loomed over the first day of the Day N Vegas hip-hop festival.
He was pretending to resent it, but Tyler’s ahead-of-the-curve quality is part of what’s made him a star. When he emerged more than a decade ago as the ringleader of L.A.’s punky Odd Future collective, his restless production style and inflammatory lyrical provocations marked him as a proud rebel; now, hip-hop is filled with charismatic weirdos who bear clear signs of Tyler’s influence, including many of the other acts who played at Day N Vegas over the weekend, such as Rico Nasty and Lil Uzi Vert.
SZA and Snoh Aalegra, who preceded Tyler on the main stage, sang quirky, idiosyncratically phrased R&B jams that shared Tyler’s devotion to lush, hand-played textures; Post Malone, who headlined Saturday night in place of Travis Scott, sauntered onstage in a pair of denim shorts that would’ve been hard to imagine on a rapper before Tyler shook up hip-hop’s visual language.
Uzi came onstage 30 minutes after his scheduled start time Sunday and saw his sound cut in the middle of one of his bleary emo-rap songs — a demonstration that not every troublemaker enjoys the industry leeway that Tyler does.
Indeed, Tyler, 30, these days has real fame and fortune to go along with all that admiration. “Call Me If You Get Lost,” which came out in June, debuted at No. 1, just like “Igor” before it; the earlier LP went on to win a Grammy Award for rap album. Rather than following any established route to success, though, he’s paved his own way, building a kind of Odd Future cinematic universe with clothing lines and TV shows; if not for the COVID-19 pandemic, he’d surely have performed this month at his annual Camp Flog Gnaw festival at Dodger Stadium instead of at Day N Vegas, which was presented by the same promoter, Goldenvoice.
“Call Me If You Get Lost,” expected by many to fare well in Grammy nominations set to be revealed next week, reflects his insider/outsider status: It’s modeled on DJ Drama’s classic “Gangsta Grillz” series of boisterous mid-2000s mixtapes yet offers stark personal thoughts on the alienating effects of celebrity and on a fraught romantic relationship with the lover of a close friend. The album feels like an embrace of mainstream hip-hop values even as Tyler seems to be questioning whether that form can support the type of stories he wants to tell.
At Day N Vegas, where Tyler brought a version of the 90-minute show he’s been doing this year at festivals like Lollapalooza and Outside Lands, he performed on an elaborate set that resembled a pier, complete with a life-size boat and a giant video screen showing photorealistic nature-scene backdrops; before the end of his first song, huge columns of fire were erupting around him — one indication of his eagerness to fulfill a traditional idea of superstardom.
Moments later, he whipped out an asthma inhaler and took a few puffs. The gesture was as endearing as it was strategic.
Kendrick Lamar headlined the first night of the Day N Vegas festival with a set featuring child dancers and spanning his four albums.
Sunday’s show drew heavily from “Call Me If You Get Lost,” with vivid renditions of the swaggering “Lumberjack” and the sweetly wistful “Wusyaname”; before “Massa,” in which he recounts going through puberty in his early 20s — “I was shifting, that’s why ‘Cherry Bomb’ sounded so shifty” — he asked the crowd if he could provide “a small biography.”
But like Kendrick Lamar, who headlined Day N Vegas on Friday night with a career-spanning retrospective ahead of a highly anticipated new album he’s expected to drop soon, Tyler also looked back through his catalog. He did “See You Again” and “Boredom,” both from 2017’s “Flower Boy,” gleefully puncturing the crowd’s singalong on the latter by telling fans they sounded like “trash”; he did “Yonkers,” his breakout single from 2011, back when he seemed determined to out-glower Eminem (and then to make fun of anybody who took him seriously enough to be scared).
“This song is so stupid,” he said with a laugh as the horror-movie beat kicked in.
Near the end of the concert, Tyler told the audience he wanted to perform his favorite of his tunes, cautioning that “it’s not the most user-friendly”; it was “New Magic Wand,” a furious noise-rap spasm about wishing he could make the girlfriend of a secret crush disappear. The song featured more pyrotechnics; afterward, two stagehands in yellow slickers appeared and swept away whatever mess the fireworks had left behind.
Then Tyler climbed into his boat as his DJ struck up “I Thought You Wanted to Dance,” perhaps the prettiest cut on “Call Me If You Get Lost.” Eventually he rapped a few lines. But he spent most of the track just swaying to its gentle groove.
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