Permission to Be Weird

Some influences change how you write. This one changed what I thought I was allowed to do.

The whole world, not just the songs

The thing about Tyler, The Creator is that the music is one component. There is a visual language, a colour sense, the design of the merchandise, the festival, the typography. It is all one piece, and it is all clearly decided by the same person.

Most artists treat everything outside the audio as admin — something a label or a freelancer handles after the real work is done. Watching someone treat the artwork and the shirt and the font as part of the art is permission to do the same.

Which is why the coffee is a real product with a real roaster rather than a merch-table novelty, why there is a browser game, and why the lion, the bluebonnet, the brisket and the coffee all connect to each other. None of that is a marketing funnel. It is the same project in different materials.

Refusing the lane

The more important lesson is about reinvention.

He was handed a very specific box early — shock value, abrasive, young — and then spent a career demonstrating that the box was not load-bearing. Every record moved. Some of them moved so far that the previous audience had to decide whether to follow.

For somebody who gets filed as Eminem coded or compared to Lil Dicky and Weird Al, that is the useful example. Those comparisons are boxes too. They are not insults, and they are also not instructions.

Weird as a method

The permission bit is literal. Before, I would have an idea and ask whether it was too strange, and the asking usually killed it.

Now the question is whether it is good strange — strange in service of something — which is a completely different filter. A browser game about lawnmowers passes that filter. So does a coffee named after a song. So does one show with a prosthetic lion head and then nothing.

Ten years ago I would have talked myself out of all of it.