Tyler, The Creator: Photos From the Billboard Cover Shoot
Artistes
‘Chromakopia’ has spent three week atop the Billboard 200.
Tyler, The Creator photographed November 20, 2024 at Quixote Studios in Los Angeles.
Luis Perez
Bro, everything I thought I knew was gone. I thought I had a grasp on s–t. The songs thats been out three weeks went up more than the classic records.
Its an early Tuesday afternoon in mid-November and Tyler, The Creator is still in disbelief. Just a few weeks earlier, hed released his new album, Chromakopia, and the response was unlike any in his entire career. Its been a f–king crack in my reality, for this album where Im just crying about being 33 like a b–ch.
Three days before our conversation, hed performed a set largely dedicated to the album at Camp Flog Gnaw Carnival, a two-day music festival in Los Angeles that he started in 2012 and continues to curate. This year was the 10th edition, a triumphant moment for an event that began with seven acts and now feels like a smaller, more walkable Coachella for locals complete with music and food and rides and merch and fashionable selections from Tylers line GOLF in the Dodger Stadium parking lot.
At Flog Gnaw, Tyler took the stage atop a shipping container, wearing a green suit fit for a bellhop in a slightly bizarro Emerald City, a bust-like mask with cutout holes for his eyes and an Afro with two peaks and a valley between them an ensemble with hints of Janet Jackson circa Rhythm Nation (at least from the neck down), and which Tyler described to me as both Captain Crunch and a gay dictator. Its the uniform of the character he takes on for his new album, both haunting and militant, the latest alter ego the Hawthorne, Calif., native has assumed. After performing the first four tracks, he paused to thank those in the audience for their love and let them know that Chromakopia was No. 1 on the Billboard 200 for a third straight week. Only Taylor Swift and Sabrina Carpenter did three straight weeks in 2024. To do that, at my 10th carnival, in my f–king city, what are we talking about? The crowd cheered for him and themselves: Together, they did it.
Read the full Tyler, the Creator Billboard cover story here.
Image Credit: Luis Perez
Image Credit: Luis Perez
Tyler, The Creator photographed November 20, 2024 at Quixote Studios in Los Angeles.
Image Credit: Luis Perez
Image Credit: Luis Perez
Grooming by Nena Melendez.
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