In 1861, Charles Baudelaire – a rakish poet who changed hairstyles as often as hotel rooms – went for a walk in Paris. He passed cottages, shuttered shops, fields of wheat at the city’s edge, the spiced black smoke of hashish bars. Baudelaire was hounded by creditors, but these journeys had a more essential meaning. In his poem Le Soleil, he mentions tripping over the potential ahead, wandering with guided aimlessness through the stink and glitz of French life. There are several translations and this one is my favourite: “Scenting in every corner the chance of a rhyme, stumbling over words as over paving stones, colliding at times with lines dreamed of long ago.” He got lost. By falling into the shock of the present, the past began to cohere. I wonder what Baudelaire would make of a man who’s taken his name – taken the past – and shoved it under a trapper hat, the wheels of a Rolls Royce, as an excuse to reiterate he wanted to have sex with Selina Gomez “just in” Bieber.
For Tyler, The Creator is sick of concepts to the degree that his latest concept is about not having one. Across Call Me If You Get Lost, his sixth and probably most emblematic album, we are invited to hit the gas. We move forward in space, but backwards in time. You can see it in the video for ‘WUSYANAME’, the start of which may paint references to the jagged outcrops of Camp Flog Gnaw, setting for 2013’s imperious Wolf, otherwise known as the record that proved he could spit hard in the upper tier of American hip hop. That album and this are brothers, the point being one is older, more talented and just better with ladies, fellas and key changes. But neither can we forget the story between them: the Grammys interview, the open closet, the Cherry Bombing near-derailment. CMIYGL is a road trip that has been packed with almost everything we’ve been through with Tyler in a decade or more. It feels like a culmination that never strains with the weight of accomplishment. Ironically, for an LP that traces the past so finely, you could play this to anyone who hasn’t heard the man’s work and expect them to latch onto something.
