30/06/2017

Tyler, Is Back: How ‘Who Dat Boy’ Fits In To The WOLF Conspiracy Theory

Earlier this morning, Tyler, the Creator dropped his first video since those accompanying Cherry Bomb, his 2015 album.

It follows the trend of Tyler dropping new music in a regular two-year pattern, and came after a week of Tyler teasing his fans with a daily countdown.

The release consists of two tracks: “Who Dat Boy” and “911/Mr Lonely”. The video features a longer look at the first tack, and a snippet of the second – in a form that is becoming a trademark of the Tyler brand.

The video is thought to also allude to when a potential album from Tyler will drop. The video opens with Tyler working on something with a soldering iron, which then explodes in his face to reveal this shot:

The poster, for Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 Romeo + Juliet, shows only ‘Juliet’ – French for July. The clock’s hands, stopped at 3 and 7, are read as a potential date: 3/7, the 3rd of July.

This is nothing compared to the deeper subtext of the video, and where the real story begins. The story of Tyler’s first three albums, BASTARD, GOBLIN, and WOLF, has been well documented in the music press and by Tyler’s fans. His latest album, Cherry Bomb’, was seen as Tyler stepping away from this narrative, and looking back on it from afar.

This new video is a dramatic return to the world of WOLF. First, the similarities:

TWO FACE, TYLER

Compare this still from ‘Who Dat Boy’, with the injuries he suffers in 2013’s ‘IFHY’

Check out the parallel here from ‘She’ (2011), it’s the same police officers. Tyler himself acknowledged this in a (since-deleted) re-tweet.

WHITE TYLER

The clip features the ‘birth’ of ‘white Tyler’, who has been featured twice before. Once in ‘Tamale’ (2013), and again, dying at the hands of a lynch mob in ‘Buffalo’ (2015)

So How Does This Fit Into The Theory?

The theory has a missing link between GOBLIN and ‘Sam (Is Dead)’, which was thought to be answered in an ‘Earlwolf’ album that never eventuated:

“At the end, we see him shooting himself three times, leaving three dead Tylers on the floor.

The track title suggests that Tyler has already killed Sam. The three Tylers on the floor seem to represent Ace, Tron Cat, and Wolf Haley.

This leaves us missing the middle part of the story. After GOBLIN, but before “Sam (Is Dead),” Sam was murdered. How did this happen?”

Tyler is now completing this missing link. Sam is the one we see in ‘Who Dat Boy’. The caption for the ‘IFHY’ video reads: “Wolf Performs Sams Song, Sam Performs Wolf Song” – indicating Wolf is acting out Sam’s song, with the doll figurines, and imitates this injury that occurred in real life to Sam. Sam becomes ‘white Tyler’, or ‘White Sam’, and we see him again in Tamale before he dies in ‘Buffalo’, which fits nicely into the gap in the original theory. 

This leaves the final scene, the clip for ‘911’.  The jarring juxtaposition of these clips and the mysterious movie trailer posted by Tyler in 2013 for ‘Wolf’ indicates that this is not a real fil – instead, these clips are all scenes making up a larger film, and appear out of order. The release date of ‘201_’ in the movie trailer is not a gimmicky tease, instead it indicates that the film is being released throughout the 2010s: it is a culmination of every video Tyler has released.

Thus the final clip, of ‘911’, is an epilogue, an after-credits scene. It shows all of the characters – Ace, Tron Cat, Wolf Haley, and Sam –  of the trilogy together in Heaven, after all suffering their various fates. The obvious lack of depth in the set and the fantasy nature of the cherry blossoms, plus the weird stances and actions of the characters, all hint that this is a dream-like afterlife. “Call 911”, they sing, after just being murdered by Tyler, who sings in the full version:

“Five car garage
Full tank of the gas
But that don’t mean nothin’, nothin’
Nothin’, nothin’, without you shotgunnin’ the passenger
I’m the loneliest man alive
But I keep on dancin’ to throw ‘em off”

“Oh my God, that boy is so fuckin’ lonely
Writin’ songs about these people
Who do not exist, he’s such a fuckin’ phony”

The five Tylers: Ace, Tron Cat, Wolf Haley, Sam, and Tyler himself, ‘these people who do not exist’, who each have a spot in Tyler’s ‘five car garage’ (in his head), but ever since coming to terms with who he is in ‘Sam (is Dead)’ and killing them all off, he’s become ‘the loneliest man alive.’

 

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