Tyler, The Creator

Tyler, The Creator (born March 6, 1991, Hawthorne, California, U.S.) is an American rapper, producer, and fashion designer known for his often subversive artistic style. After starting the popular hip-hop collective Odd Future, he launched a successful solo career, in which all of his studio albums have debuted in the top five of the Billboard 200 chart. The Grammy Award-winner capitalized on his fame to promote his own clothing lines and annual music festival. Demonstrating an auteur creative approach, in many cases he writes, produces, and performs his own music; directs his music videos; and designs the clothes for his fashion brands.

Early life and Odd Future

Tyler, The Creator was born Tyler Gregory Okonma to Bonita Smith, a health spa worker, and a father of whose name is not publicly known. Smith raised Okonma in Hawthorne, California, a city in the southwest Los Angeles metropolitan area. When he was young Okonma taught himself to play piano and was profoundly inspired by the music and videos of Pharrell Williams. The moniker Tyler, The Creator began as a name for Okonma’s profile on the social media platform MySpace, where he posted art and his early beats. After he turned 16, his mother moved to Sacramento, and Tyler stayed in Los Angeles with his grandmother, where he slept on the floor and often ate only through the generosity of his friends. In interviews he has said these experiences taught him crucial skills, including money management and how to form and maintain a community.

Indeed, about the time his mother moved, Tyler cofounded a collective of young Los Angeles musicians, skateboarders, producers, and artists called Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All (often shortened to Odd Future and sometimes abbreviated as OF or OFWGKTA). Several successful musicians emerged from this group including Syd, Earl Sweatshirt, and Frank Ocean. In March 2008 Odd Future member Casey Veggies released his first mixtape, Customized Greatly Vol. 1, which includes the Tyler-produced track “Odd” and two feature verses from Tyler on “Why Don’t We Fall In Love?” and “I Don’t Know.” The tracks represent some of Tyler, The Creator’s first published work. Later that year Odd Future released its first mixtape as a group, The Odd Future Tape, featuring Tyler on more than half the tracks.

Discover the fascinating events that shaped the world, straight from our editors.

SIGN UP

By clicking “Sign Up”, you consent to the Britannica Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.

In March 2010 Earl Sweatshirt released the mixtape Earl, which was largely produced by Tyler. A few months later, Odd Future released a second mixtape, Radical. Soon afterward the music collective attracted mainstream media attention, leading to sudden fame for the young rappers. MTV listed Odd Future’s next release among its 10 most anticipated albums, and that fall the collective performed live shows in New York City and London.

Two years later Odd Future offered one final work as a collective, the studio album The OF Tape Vol. 2 (2012). Members of the group including Tyler also parlayed their reputation for making viral videos into a deal for their own sketch comedy television show called Loiter Squad, which aired on the network Adult Swim and lasted three seasons (2012–14). By 2015 the group had disbanded, and its various members went on to pursue individual careers, although they would still occasionally collaborate.

Beginnings as a solo artist

In 2009, a little more than a year after Odd Future’s debut, Tyler, The Creator released a debut solo mixtape, Bastard. Framed as a session with a school therapist named Dr. TC, the album begins with a self-descriptive rap over sparse piano, then launches into lo-fi soundscapes accompanied by aggressively delivered introspective lyrics. The extreme violence and graphic sexual content in Tyler’s lyrics led many early listeners to categorize the music as “horrorcore,” a label he rejected. Some critics also accused him of promoting misogyny and homophobia, although some of Tyler’s lyrics contain references to queer sexual experiences. Amid Odd Future’s rising fame, Pitchfork magazine named Bastard one of the top 50 albums of 2010.

The media attention garnered from Odd Future and from Tyler, the Creator’s solo pursuits led British independent label XL Recordings to sign Tyler to his first record deal. In February 2011 he released the single “Yonkers” with a black-and-white music video that depicts Tyler eating a cockroach and staging a suicide. Several days later he appeared for the first time on television, performing the single “Sandwitches” alongside Odd Future member Hodgy Beats on NBC’s Late Night with Jimmy Fallon. In an anarchic performance, the two rappers wore balaclavas amid a horror-themed ambiance, with Tyler spontaneously jumping on host Jimmy Fallon’s back at the end. Such publicity generated buzz for Tyler’s first studio album, Goblin, which debuted later that year at number five on the Billboard 200 chart. As witty in its rhymes and obscene in its content as Bastard, Goblin was described in the magazine Slant as “a masterpiece for those capable of stomaching it.”

Explore Britannica Premium!

The trusted destination for professionals, college students, and lifelong learners.

SUBSCRIBE

Stardom, Golf Wang, music festival, and controversies

Now a full-fledged star, Tyler leveraged his new fame to engage in other creative endeavors. In 2011 the rapper founded Golf Wang, a clothing label that sold streetwear featuring bright colors and youthful graphics. In 2012 he started a music festival, Camp Flog Gnaw—both “Golf Wang” and “Flog Gnaw” are anagrams of Wolf Gang, derived from Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All. The festival originally starred Odd Future members but eventually became a who’s who of musical talent.

Tyler’s subsequent studio albums, Wolf (2013) and Cherry Bomb (2015), both garnered positive reviews and strong sales. By now, his work featured such high-profile artists as Kanye West, Lil Wayne, Erykah Badu, and Pharrell Williams. However, Tyler was increasingly criticized for his inflammatory lyrics. In 2015 the outcry generated by the feminist organization Collective Shout, which protested the objectification of women in his songs, prompted Tyler to cancel his tour of Australia. That same year he was temporarily banned from the United Kingdom because of the lyrics in Bastard.

Flower Boy, Igor, Chromakopia, and additional recordings

In response to the controversy, Tyler’s fourth studio album—promoted as Scum F*** Flower Boy—was retitled Flower Boy upon its release in 2017. Critics noted a relative lack of incendiary lyrics and more self-reflection. Flower Boy became Tyler’s most acclaimed and commercially successful release yet; the track “See You Again,” featuring the singer Kali Uchis, earned more than 2.5 billion streams on Spotify. The album’s focus on the rapper’s personal feelings and the introduction of jazz elements earned Tyler a Grammy nod for best rap album.

Alongside Flower Boy came a collaboration with the Converse shoe brand that spawned an offshoot of Tyler’s Golf Wang clothing line, Golf le Fleur (le fleur meaning “the flower” in French), which came to include high-end apparel as well as fragrances and nail polish.

In 2018 Tyler unveiled a Christmas album that was released to accompany The Grinch, a Hollywood animated film adaptation of Dr. Seuss’s How the Grinch Stole Christmas. In a post on the social media platform Twitter (now X), Tyler described making the EP with “7 year olds in mind but also wanting the parents to listen.”

For his next record, Igor (2019), Tyler fashioned an alter ego, donning colorful suits, dark sunglasses, and a sharply cut blonde wig. On the album, Tyler sings more than raps over lo-fi textures, warped synths, and layered production to tell a story about being the odd man out in a love triangle. Igor debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 chart and netted the artist a Grammy Award for best rap album. The track “EARFQUAKE” was certified platinum five times by the Recording Industry Association of America.

Call Me If You Get Lost (2021) features the artist playing a new character, Tyler Baudelaire. The album saw Tyler return to rapping, leaving guest artists to do most of the singing. Additionally, the album was narrated by DJ Drama—known for his 2000s-era mixtape collaborations—contributing to a nostalgic sound. Call Me If You Get Lost topped the U.S. charts upon release and won Tyler his second Grammy for best rap album.

He followed up with Chromakopia (2024), for which he embodied yet another character, named St. Chroma. The album, which mixes synth-heavy beats with smooth jazz undertones in a manner reminiscent of Flower Boy, is full of intimate reflections on love, aging, and fatherhood and punctuated by recordings of Tyler’s mother. According to Billboard, Chromakopia’s initial sales were the best of Tyler’s career to date. In 2025 Tyler released Don’t Tap the Glass, another chart-topper that clocks in at 28 minutes and features a dance-heavy sound with elements of techno, disco, and Miami bass.