Before he brought his energetic performance to the Lollapalooza stage this past weekend, Odd Future’s Tyler the Creator performed a more intimate (but equally wild) set at the Concord Music Hall for an Official Afterparty of Lollapalooza 2015. With an opening performance from the uber talented band, BADBADNOTGOOD, Tyler (alongside Taco and Jasper) gave the Windy City fan’s their money’s worth. Not only did Tyler perform a number of tracks from his latest LP Cherry Bomb, but he performed a number of mixtape records for his day one fans. And if you missed out, don’t worry! Tyler will be back in Chicago with A$AP Rocky in September at the Aragon Ballroom (get your tickets Friday).
Check our more photos, from our photographer Dan Garcia, below.
If you weren’t in Chicago for this year’s Lollapalooza, you were probably pretty jealous that fans got to see performances from both Tyler the Creator and A$AP Rocky in one weekend. Well lucky for you, the two have teamed up with Vince Staples and Danny Brown for an upcoming fall tour. The 9-date tour will kick off in Lowell, MA in September and will hit stops in Chicago, Philadelphia, New York and more, until it closes in Dallas at the South Side Ballroom. Tickets go on sale Friday at RockyAndTyler.com.
We just got back from Lollapalooza 2015 and our second year at Chicago’s premiere music festival was as great as the first! Although a storm brought a brief evacuation to the Windy City festival, no performances where cancelled and fans saw some great sets from Sam Smith, Paul McCartney, The Weeknd, Metallica, A$AP Rocky, Travis Scott (before he was arrested), Logic, Tyler the Creator, Marina and the Diamonds, George Ezra, and many many more.
Here at The Early Registration we like to pride ourselves on our music knowledge. To stay polished on our musical expertise, our new feature is a little game of musical “6 Degrees”. For those who are unfamiliar, six degrees of separation is the theory that everyone in the world is connected by six or fewer steps, so we are now taking the liberty of connecting musicians whom you would never think could be connected, in exactly six steps. This week our 6˚ piece is dedicated to Lollapalooza amazing lineup, which is coming to Chicago in just a couple of weeks. To keep things interesting we challenged ourself to connect one Lollapalooza headliner (Sam Smith) to another Lollapalooza headliner (Paul McCartney). The twist is can we do this using only other artists from Lollapalooza’s lineup this year? Find out below!
“Although its no more, those 7 letters are forever,” tweet Odd Future’s Tyler the Creator tonight. Is Odd Future (“OFWKTA”), which consists of Tyler the Creator, Frank Ocean, Earl Sweatshirt, Hodgy Beats, Domo Genesis, Mike G, Taco and many more, really done? As suggested by Tyler’s tweet, it must be. If so though, what exactly does that mean? Odd Future isn’t like One Direction, as in it’s not a group/bank that always and only travels together. It’s a collective of artists, each with their own visions and specific styles. Tyler the Creator does his thing. Frank Ocean does his thing. Earl Sweatshirt does his thing. And the rest of Odd Future does their thing as well. So while we don’t exactly know what the end of OFWGKTA means, this certainly wasn’t a good tweet to read!
Taking a page out of his good friend Kanye West’s book,Tyler the Creator has decided to alter the meaning of a negative symbol (similar to the use of theconfederate flag in Yeezus merch). For a tee shirt in his Spring/Summer collection of his clothing brand Golf Wang, Tyler dresses the white power symbol in rainbow colors and surrounds it with the phrase “Golf Pride World Wide”.
Tyler also penned an open letter to subscribers of his GOLF Media app in order to explain the meaning and creation of the shirt. He says that he wants fans to know what they are purchasing.
Many are anticipating a reaction -if there will be one- from GLAAD. The anti-defamation organization has previously spoken out against Tyler, specifically when he won the MTV Video Music Award for Best New Artist in 2011. On their official blog, Tyler was berated and painted as a homophobe for his use of slurs, though he had repeatedly explained that his intentions were not to hurt LGBT people when he used them. A quote from GLAAD’s Senior Director of Programs said that “given Tyler’s history of such remarks, viewers and potential sponsors should refrain from honoring homophobia and in the future look to a more deserving artist.” In other words, he didn’t deserve the award in their eyes. GLAAD blog writer Matt Kane also suggested that Tyler should have never been nominated- not because of the quality of his video, but because of his language.
This ordeal of miscommunication and finger pointing brings a much bigger question to the table: Should artists be questioned and accused for their art? And where is the line drawn between hate speech and free speech? Or better yet, sensationalism vs. combating prejudice in the media. In a 2013 interview at a New York radio station, Kanye Westmade a comment that “black people don’t have the same level of connections as Jewish people. Black people don’t have the same connections as oil people.” Is that a generalization? Yes. But according to the Anti-Defamation League, this was “classic anti-Semitism”. Though it may not have been the best thing to say, it’s definitley not anti-semitism, which is defined as a “hatred of Jewish people” by Merriam-Webster. The statement from the ADL seems less like a group standing up against hatred and more like nitpicking in order to continue the bad guy trope that keeps websites like TMZ in business.
Read Tyler’s letter below and check out the rest of his Golf Wang collectionhere.
via Noisey
Will Lampley really liked Cherry Bomb. Follow him @willcDPR.
These are the highlights of this past week in music! Well actually… the past two weeks in music since we missed last week while were out of the office for Coachell! So with two weeks of music, this week’s installment is definitely stacked. Hopefully you can bump these tracks on your way to work to brighten up your Monday mornings, and to stay up-to-date on today’s music.
This week we have new music from Vic Mensa and Kanye West, the return of Mike Posner, Run The Jewels and more. Get started at the jump below to check out our favorite records of the past week.
After initially having a physical release date of April 28th, Tyler, the Creator’s new album Cherry Bomb has already started to hit stores across the United States. Tacked onto the end of the album is a new Kali Uchis assisted ballad-with guitar solo and all. The love song references the synesthesia that Tyler shares with buddies Pharrell and Kanye West .
The Mad Decent Block Party has announced its 2015 lineup of artists and its stacked! Music’s biggest block party kicks off July 31st in Atlanta and hits stops in New York, Los Angeles, Canada and more until its final stop in Chicago on September 26th. Mad Decent‘s 2015 artists include Jack U (Diplo and Skrillex), Major Lazer, Tyler the Creator, Vic Mensa, Towkio, Cashmere Cat, T-Pain, Zeds Dead, iLoveMakonnen and many more! You can get your tickets and check out market specific lineups at MadDecentBlockParty.com.
Check out the 2015 Mad Decent Block Party lineup and dates/locations below!
Over the years, my relationship with Tyler, the Creator and Odd Future, the collective he helms, has become strained. I’ve simply grown out of them thanks to a large number of back-to-back mediocre projects and lack of progression. However, while I may not be a big fan of the other members of the group, I still have hope in Tyler and Frank Ocean. After his last album, Wolf, I was extremely impressed with the progression he made in his production and rapping, which made me excited to see if he would further hone his crafts on Cherry Bomb, his new album. Well, let’s just say he honed one craft and let one sit at the wayside.
The main progression Tyler made on this new album is obviously the production. Pulling from a number of jazz, funk, rock, and R&B influences, along with artists like the Neptunes and Death Grips, Tyler puts together his most diverse set of production yet. We see Tyler pull out punk-rock guitars from Black Lips’ Cole Alexander on ‘DEATHCAMP,’ noisey and distorted production on ‘CHERRY BOMB’ inspired by Death Grips, lush production on ‘FUCKING YOUNG / PERFECT’ inspired by the Neptunes, and jazz on ‘FIND YOUR WINGS’, which featured legendary jazz, funk, and soul producer Roy Ayers.
The Early Registration 
