The album contains a few examples of truly transcendent, mature music (most notably the Erykah Badu collaboration “Treehome95”), but such tracks are tantalizingly scarce. If he were in control of all these emotions, the results might be trenchant and stunning, but he’s too caught up in self-pity, too eager to cast himself as the monstrous villain he thinks people expect him to be, a quality that makes Wolf hard to listen to and even harder to unequivocally enjoy. This instability makes Tyler a fascinating figure, one of the preeminent young voices of the Internet age, torn between a compulsive need to share and self-loathing for the weakness he exhibits by doing so.

Acting as his own producer, with a measure of authority that older MCs couldn’t imagine exercising, he bristles against the idea of playing to his audience, which means songs stretch on for way too long, confrontational attacks go too far, and self-lacerating attacks cut too deep. The production is routinely strong, but things are weighed down by Tyler himself, who forcefully refuses to provide a palatable anchor to over an hour’s worth of material. Like Goblin, the album is a mixed bag of feelings and reactions, alternating between nastiness and innocence, exhilaration and exhaustion. It’s a situation that’s clearly informed Wolf, an eminently sensitive work that inherits its unevenness from Tyler’s wildly uneven personality. This is why, on his second album, Tyler is already mired in both a continuing backlash and the halfhearted backlash to the backlash, while his more talented counterparts (Frank Ocean, Earl, Domo Genesis) have already achieved explicit mainstream success or cult adulation. Its dead-end nature is especially apparent today, with rap fully integrated into the pop slipstream, subject to its fickle demands and tidal patterns of steady change. This sort of shallow iconoclasm, which pushes a surface level of innovation while holding firmly to conservative conventions, doesn’t allow much room for progress (think of the rapid splintering and disappearance of the similarly toned NWA as an example). The focal point of Odd Future’s rebellious métier, Tyler works within a familiar tradition of sublimated rage, oscillating wildly between ironic and genuine treatment of these emotions. There’s the prideful insistence on antisocial behavior, with angry fantasies related as actual exploits.

There’s the habit of handling emotional duress via confrontational swagger, lashing out at enemies real and imagined. There’s the crude sense of humor, used to relieve the built-up tension of so much dense, complex wordplay. At a time when the genre is consistently in flux, they stick to the fixed markers of its archetypal vocabulary, making music that challenges sonically while remaining otherwise traditional. Their methods may seem novel, and the tenor of their crude, adolescent intensity may be previously unmatched, but Tyler, the Creator and his gang of likeminded roustabouts in Odd Future are hip-hop classicists.

Tyler the creator wolf