Tyler, the Creator's ninth studio LP, DON'T TAP THE GLASS, is a bold-faced, summertime appeal to move the masses. But tucked inside the rollout for the unannounced 6 a.m. release is a mournful plea for a movement that practically died, laid out in a digital liner note of sorts he posted on social media:
“I asked some friends why they don’t dance in public and some said because of the fear of being filmed. I thought d***, a natural form of expression and a certain connection they have with music is now a ghost. It made me wonder how much of our human spirit got killed because of the fear of being a meme, all for having a good time."
It's almost deserving of its own dissertation, this 21st-century remix on the old superstition that cameras held the power to steal your soul. Lord knows it's fitting that people of African or indigenous origins, who'd alternately survived being physically stolen and having their culture erased, were also worried about the potential of losing their very souls to the promise of advanced technology. But don't let Tyler — or the disembodied voice's directive to "leave your baggage at home (none of that deep s***)" on the album opener "Big Poe" — fool you. Hidden within Tyler's full-body high is a liberatory call to action. With this house-injected, funk-persistent, R&B-inflected LP, the Creator dares to reconjure those ghosts by forcing us to dance out of our constriction. And by George (i.e. Clinton), I think he's got it.
Never beholden to the genre's antiquated notions of street cred, Tyler has always reveled in boat rockin'. Or, straight-up abandoning the whole ship. Sure, Beyoncé may have released a post-pandemic dance album. (Maybe you heard it?) But it's hard to recall in recent memory a mainstream male rapper (not named Drake) who's attempted such a deliberate and bedeviled pairing. It's an aggressive challenge to the longstanding tropes of masculinity and cool negrocity in hip-hop, but done with a decidedly lighter touch than on CHROMAKOPIA, his meditation on manhood and potential fatherhood released last October.
The audacity of Tyler, the Creator's latest release might shoulder-shimmy right past you without an abbreviated crash course on the oh-so-fraught history between rap and dance. Rappers have been quickening — and cyclically lamenting — the death of dance since hip-hop became, what Grandmaster Caz calls, "the bastard child of disco." Yet, so much of hip-hop is rooted in dance culture. Certain early regional rap movements owe their entire identity (and respective BPMs) to the dance moves they became synonymous with — from the formative booty shake of Miami and, by turn, Atlanta, to Chicago's footwork (juke), Memphis' jook and Detroit's jit.
Lest we forget, an early hip-hop phenomenon called breakdancing predated rap itself. Even the nascent rap scene of L.A., Tyler's birthplace, grew out of the '80s pop-and-lock dance orgies fueled by the mobile DJs of Uncle Jamm's Army. A cool gangsta's repose eventually killed all that EDM noise and the West Coast sound got a thorough makeover. By 1990, Ice Cube was gouging his eyes out over the misfortune of seeing "another brother on the video trying to out-dance each other." Mind you, Cube fired his shot the same year that MC Hammer danced atop the Billboard 200 for 21 weeks, all while dodging rappers from coast-to-coast who chided him that "rap is not pop."
The aughts produced a steady stream of ringtone-rap infused dance crazes powered by an industry desperate to stay afloat in the slippery economy of digital downloads. For every "Laffy Taffy," which topped the Billboard Hot 100 in 2006, an equal and opposite Hip Hop Is Dead response resounded from staunch traditionalists like Nas. Movement was to be restricted to the tongue; never the hips. Even back when Diddy insisted on making us dance, he was certain to pair those Bad Boy remixes with requisite bad boys who chose to move in silence.
But time and time again, the body betrays what the mind obeys. This separation-desperation has always been suspect, especially when contextualized by the falsely contested history of electronic music's Black origins. This is the sacred terrain Tyler is dancing in and around and all over. It's evident in everything from his varying BPMs to the regional samples he chooses. "Don't You Worry Baby" lifts a vocal from the '90s booty-shake artist 12 Gauge's "Let Me Ride." On "I'll Take Care of You" he has the nerve to sample "Knuck If You Buck," a dance-floor classic in the recent canon of young negro spirituals. This kaleidoscopic collage of familiar stabs and ad-libs — the talk box homage to Roger Troutman on "Sucka Free"; the roller-rink "Set It Off" synths on "Don't Tap The Glass / Tweakin'" — is an intentionally mixed bag. Maybe it's meant to harken a total recall.
Clearly, according to Tyler's postmortem, he reads Black male stoicism as a glitch in our ever-loving system. And he's here to hack our mainframe. To recode our software. Or loosen the cool/noose, as it were. It's a frenetic message directed specifically at the hardheads. The proof is in the video for "Stop Playing With Me," released the same day as the LP. In it, Tyler's dripping in album-cover aesthetic, dressed like a retro b-boy rocking red leather and vintage Cazals, a matching Le Fleur trucker hat and gold grills. The video's cameos offer the biggest co-sign: Lebron and Maverick Carter holding court with him in one shot, the Clipse brothers Malice and Pusha T, standing motionless while conveying approval in another. Dwarfed by mammoth booming speaker boxes in the background, the setting could be a rec room, or a cafeteria or a county dayroom. Either way, it's reminiscent of the '80s, of drug wars and crack babies, of rhymes and Ritalin. It's kind of ironic: The era that made us so hard, perhaps to shield our bodies from the trauma, also made us hyperkinetic. 'Cause, truth is, you couldn't even score a girl's digits if you didn't know how to move something on the dancefloor. "This album was not made for sitting still," Tyler's artistic statement concludes. "Dancing, driving, running — any type of movement is recommended to maybe understand the spirit of it."
Of course, there's a whole musical history, beyond the confines of hip-hop, house or EDM, of Black folk in particular, using their bodies to express, to exhale, to extinguish, the joy, the burden, the pain. Turning pressure into pleasure before you explode can be as political as entering a polling booth to vote. It can also be a glorious escape from the nonsense. Choose your own liberation. Just don't forget to jack your body.
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