Tyler, the Creator was one of the many musicians to contribute a performance at the 62nd Annual Grammy Awards on January 26th, the day of Kobe Bryant’s abrupt and tragic death via helicopter (the fact of which became especially poignant when considering the Grammys took place at “the house that Kobe built”–as presenter Alicia Keys phrased it–the Staples Center). While Tyler, the Creator’s blonde wig look from the video for his only single from 2019’s Igor, “Earfquake,” has already long ago drawn comparisons to Sia and, strangely, Carol Channing, a new element incorporated into the performance conjured flashes of yet another very blanco “artist” by the name of Eminem. Riding high on the success of what few people seem to forget was his sophomore album, The Slim Shady LP (with Infinite being his 1996 debut), Eminem took to the stage at Radio City Music Hall for the 2000 MTV Video Music Awards to give the world a sample of his then freshly released single, “The Real Slim Shady,” from his third record, The Marshall Mathers LP.
If the lyrics of the song didn’t already give an indication of what he might have in store for the live conceptualization of the track, then surely the army of blonde white men wearing jeans and a white t-shirt (the “real” Slim Shady wore, true to form, a wife beater instead) lined up along Sixth Avenue instantly did. Flooding into the venue with Em as their angry white male pied piper, flashes of this imagery were undeniable in Tyler, the Creator’s January 26th rendition of “Earfquake.” This time around, a blonde head of hair was also key to “duping” the audience into wondering who the real Tyler, the Creator was, but with the “twist” of a pink and maroon suit instead of something so quotidian as what Eminem donned (incidentally, his inability to dress with half as much panache ironically plays into “The Real Slim Shady” lyric, “You think I give a damn about a Grammy?”). And while Eminem’s subject matter pertained primarily to cheap imitators of an already cheap person, Tyler’s focuses on the most common theme of IGOR, codependent, toxic, obsessive love. Yet that doesn’t mean he doesn’t get just as repetitive as Slim merely because that which he addresses is more “poetic,” primarily repeating, “’Cause you make my earth quake/Oh, you make my earth quake/Riding around, your love be shakin’ me up/And it’s making my heart break.” So, likely, did it also break Eminem’s heart to see Tyler, the Creator completely rip off his aesthetic flavor for one of the most praised performances of the night, deemed one of the few shakeups the Grammys needed to de-whitify itself. The irony being, of course, that Tyler essentially did a sendup of one of the whitest rappers around (apart from Macklemore).
Then again, could this all have been nothing but a calculatedly ironic form of payback against Eminem? You know, for that notorious slur against him on “Fall,” a song from 2019’s Kamikaze that condemned, among others, Tyler as follows: “Tyler create nothin’, I see why you called yourself a faggot, bitch/It’s not just ’cause you lack attention/It’s because you worship D12’s balls, you’re sack-religious.” The lyric (which Eminem would later backpedal on by saying he went too far) arose after Tyler tweeted his reaction to Em’s (late) 2017 collaboration with Beyoncé, called “Walk on Water,” of which Tyler noted simply, “Dear god this song is horrible sheesh how the fuck.” These were harsh words from someone who had previously cited his admiration for one of Detroit’s most illustrious pieces of trailer trash, specifically calling out Relapse as “one of the greatest albums to me.” But with that damning (and rightful) critique of “Walk on Water,” it appeared as though both parties were done with one another–that is, until Tyler, the Creator showed up onstage looking like Sia and ripping off Eminem’s rife with doppelgängers VMAs performance.
His “innovation,” paired with riding the wave of the popularity of sexually fluid rappers (the other one mainly being Lil Nas X, who also graced the stage that night for what amounted to a very elaborate karaoke performance), is part of what garnered him the win for Best Rap Album. But like Diddy, Tyler, the Creator essentially spat upon the vanilla faces of the Grammys by both accepting the award and then damning it (apparently that was one of the primary trends this year, as even Billie Eilish had the routine reticence of “modest” Gen Zers as evidenced by each painstaking moment she was “forced” to take the stage to collect her award).
So it was that his response to winning was, “I’m half and half on it. On one side, I’m very grateful that what I made could be acknowledged in a world like this, 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 rap or urban category, which is–I don’t like that ‘urban’ word. That’s just a politically correct way to say the n-word to me.” In essence, to go back to that Eminem quote, “You think I give a damn about a Grammy?”
And sure, while one knows the black man is free to rip off the white man as freely and often as possible (it’s all part of the reparations required for what Elvis Presley, as the father of modern music-related pop culture, did), why would someone billing himself as a “creator”–someone so often heralded as a visionary–want to borrow from such prime examples of the vanilla soft serve?
