Tyler, The Creator isn’t one to hold his tongue — and he spoke his truth during an appearance on Mavericks with Maverick Carter. A trailer of the interview, featuring Tyler’s thoughts on meme rappers, went viral yesterday. But the full interview with Carter dropped today, and some of Tyler’s ire also went toward invasive fans. During the 26-minute conversation, Tyler slammed the “weirdo” fans who “sometimes” make him exhausted from the music-making process.
“These niggas get on my fuckin’ nerves, bro,” he laughingly tells Carter. “The internet’s crazy, these kids hack everything..they wanna know who your sister is, what you ate for dinner…mind your fuckin’ business. Go the fuck outside and listen to the damn art or the music. Because of the internet, people don’t know personal boundaries anymore, and it’s normalized…[but] it’s like ‘we don’t know each other.’”
He adds that the dynamic isn’t just relegated to musicians but anyone in the public light. “Because you like a song, or because you like a movie, that gives you permission to be a fuckin’ weirdo?” He offered a stern warning for fans whose “hobby is being weird stalker niggas” of entertainers: “Bro you will get shot.”
He also offered a compelling criticism of the modern cult of celebrity. He fights back against the “you signed up for this” adage often levied against entertainers, noting that innovations such as phone cameras and home address databases have offered fans access that didn’t exist when he started making music in 2009. “2011’s social landscape is so different from now. It wasn’t iPhones everywhere…walking around and living and meeting people was much different up until 2016 when our phone became a thing,” he says, adding that he never anticipated how technology would drain his right to privacy over the years.
Elsewhere in the conversation, he dished on his positive relationship with his mother and love for DJ Quik. He told Carter that he wrote his first bars at seven years old to the first half of Black Eyed Peas’ “Positivity” (calling Will.I.Am a “genius”), says he feels like his songwriting has grown symbiotically with his musicality, and admitted that watching Painkillers gave him a new perspective on Eminem’s Recovery album, which he had previously dissed.
