Two Insane Days on Tour With Tyler, the Creator

If any of this is causing Tyler stress, he surely doesn’t show it. Five minutes after the tour bus prank, we’re cruising through the streets of New Orleans in a white sprinter van. Here are a few things Tyler shouts from the back seat, while scrolling through his iPhone: 

• “I want a fucking lizard, but I don’t want the stupid fucking cage that it needs.”
• “Niggas be making weak ass clothes.”
• “That Pinkberry looks nice as fuck.”
• “The last New Orleans show was garbage.”
• “I feel like they’re not as progressive with the architecture out here.”
• “That motherfucking tutu is hard.”

At 24, Tyler’s already been on the scene for over five years. He’s earned millions of dollars — “People make it seem like having money is a bad thing,” he says. “Who doesn’t wanna be fucking rich and wealthy to buy stuff?” — and he now counts Pharrell Williams, Kanye West, Jay Z and Seth Rogen among his friends and fans. He’s started an ultra-successful line of clothing and a mobile app for “All things Tyler.” All of which might have supplanted his hell-child image with a more refined entrepreneurial one, but, in person, he doesn’t appear so intent on changing his ways. To be around Tyler, the Creator is to be subjected to a constant stream of lewd absurdity.

The sprinter squeezes through the streets of the French Quarter. I tell Tyler that it’s my first time in New Orleans. 

“My parents are from here,” he says.

“Really?”

“No, I don’t know anybody from here.”

The guys decide to eat at the Royal House Oyster Bar, where Frank Sinatra used to go when it was called Tortorici’s. As the driver parks the van, Drake’s “Hotline Bling” comes on the radio, and Tyler purposely fucks up the lyrics: “You used to call me on my. My. My. Fuck! What did you call me on?! Fuck! I always forget the lyrics.”

We start walking. Tyler recalls buying a painting from one of the art galleries around this section of the French Quarter. “I fucked the owner,” he says. We pass a skinny white kid wearing Elvis Costello-looking frames and Tyler yells in his face, “Hey, sick glasses!” A small white dog is barking above us on one of those Bourbon Street balconies as we pass — every time it does, Tyler yells back, “Nigger!” A jewelry store grabs his attention next; he’s at the window, eyes glowing: “That turquoise is crazy.”

Everything with Tyler appears to happen on a whim. He has a hell of a schedule with lots of obligations and places to be, but when you’re around him it’s clear that he just does whatever the fuck he wants, whenever he wants. “Time flies when you’re having fun and doing heroin,” he says at one point. Only Tyler is completely sober, and — even though he jokes about doing drugs almost as much as he jokes about (not) being gay — he always has been. Over the next two days, I’ll see him pretend to fuck a beer bottle, encourage drug dabblers to “stop being a bitch” and “shoot heroin up,” and, no less than twice, scream, “The molly’s kicking in,” while having a fake seizure on the floor. He’s the type of guy who picks his nose in public without a care in the world.