Cookies and Marni. That's the agenda today as Tyler, the Creator, and I ride around Paris and shoot the shit. Tyler can be incredibly specific in his tastes. Today he wants white-chocolate cookies from a particular bakery he went to the last time he was in Paris. And he's looking for a certain gray two-piece suit he saw a black guy with a high-top wear in an editorial. He knows what he wants. But he doesn't have any other information on the bakery. We literally typed “Paris Cookie” in Google. (And found it!) And just went by the nearest Marni, which unfortunately didn't have the suit. But, to be fair, it could have been from seasons ago. He's fixated on the suit, which is surprising for a guy who's famous for his fractured attention span. I'll give you an example:
Where did you get your love of jazz from?
I don't know. It's just what my ear gravitates to. My mom played some around the house. But it's just certain things, musically, that my ears just gravitated to since a young child. And that's why?HOPE YOU GUYS DON'T GET ATTACKED!
I'm not sure who Tyler was yelling at. Maybe our crew, who was packing up after the shoot. Maybe his friend Jasper or tour manager who followed behind us in a car. Maybe the random janitorial staff who was exiting the building in front of us. It was one of many, many outbursts that day from the boy genius. All topped off with his deep, comical villain laugh and cat-that-ate-the-canary grin.
The cotton-candy-spooled world Tyler's created is like nothing hip-hop has ever seen. It's a source of constant, unstepped-on stimulation. Equal parts sensitive and irreverent. Cartoons and gay-pride T-shirts and Converse that sell out and a massive yearly carnival/festival that everyone near Los Angeles turns up for. His musical catalog is full of complicated explorations of suicide, love, angst, and dick jokes. In his videos, one minute he's glossy faced while butterflies gracefully land on his neck, while the next, he's wearing a man's surgically removed face to escape the cops. His world is lawless, limitless, and lucrative. So you can't really blame him if he's bored with the one that the rest of us are stuck in. To someone like Tyler, the Creator, all that a place like Paris, France, can offer is cookies and Marni.
GQ Style: Were you always this encyclopedic about music?
Tyler, the Creator:
Yeah. I didn't play with toys as a child. I just wanted CDs for my birthday and Christmas, and I would always just sit and read the credits. And to this day, I'll look at an album, listen to it once, just preview it, and know the track list and sometimes, depending on if I like it or not, who wrote it. Just little stupid facts about it. When the person died, maybe.
You have hard-core fans, and you're a pretty hard-core fan yourself.
One time a fan walked up to me and said, “Hey, Tyler, could you sign me?” I was grabbing pens, and he was like the fourth person. So when I went to grab it, it was a razor blade, and I was like, “What the fuck?” and I looked at his arm and he had cuts all over it. And my security was like,
Nah.
And threw him the fuck out of there.
Wow. How'd you get that scar on your left arm?
In 2010 my friend Travis bought a knife. We didn't know if it was sharp enough, so I got it and put it in my arm and carved it like that and was like, “Yeah, it's sharp enough.”