Tyler, the Creator's third studio album, WOLF, turned out to be his best yet, although previous to it coming out, Tyler suffered from writer's black, and did not hesitate to tell fans and critics the LP would be trash. Yet, the album almost doubled the sales of Goblin in opening week, and received generally positive reviews. In a new series by Elliot Wilson, he recently sat down with Tyler for a live interview at NYC's Highline Ballroom, and discussed his writer's block as well as WOLF.
In the first part of their interview which was released today, the two discuss Tyler's writer's block after he finished Goblin, and how he overcame it. The West Coast native talks about growing up with very little, and now having a lot.
Tyler explained his writer's block stemmed from being bored with rapping. "I'm not even like, trying to sound pretentious or [that] I'm better than anyone else, but I'm so bored with rapping. My thing [is], I like filming, I like making videos, and I like fucking drawing, and I like making beats, and scoring, and making stupid shirts, that's my thing," Tyler said.
He continued, "So when I got writer's block I got that shit so fucking bad, like I didn't know what the fuck to rap about. Like I went through my phase of fucking, raping shit, and like, alright, I wrote about every serial killer, so what the fuck else. I had a writer's block until I was like,' oh shit, I can just rap about how much money I made last year.'"
Tyler, the Creator said it worked. Elliot went on to ask about Tyler's big mansion, which he brings up through out WOLF.
"Dude, I mention that house so much, 'cause literally, when Goblin came out, I was on my grandmother's floor," Tyler revealed. "I didn't really have much growing up, like my mom left fucking L.A. when I was 16 and up until fucking I was 20 I was living on my grandmother's floor and shit, so I never had a backyard and all that shit. So hell yeah, every fucking song, I'ma mention this big-ass house I worked fucking hard for," said Tyler.
Check out the first part of Tyler's interview below.