OFWGKTA (Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All) are barely legal (the members are between 16 and 21), the members go by the names of Tyler the Creator, Hodgy Beats, Earl Sweatshirt, Domo Genesis, Mike G, Frank Ocean, Left Brain, The Super 3, Syd tha Kyd, Jasper Loc, and Taco Bennett, and they have made their mixtapes and albums all available for free on their website.
In a few months, they have already managed to play outside of LA, at a packed Webster Hall in New York, and in a London venue which sold the tickets within 48 hours.
In LA, they played, or rather destroyed, the Echo a few weeks ago (I wasn’t there but I’ve read about it), and they are about to play again at the Roxy theater this coming Wednesday… everyone wants to write about them, be seeing at their shows, although they drop the f-bomb at each line and want to kill us all. But it would just be an ordinary thing for rappers, if these guys’ lyrics were not about abominable acts of murder, rape, and blasphemy:
‘I’m opening a church to sell coke and Led Zeppelin/To fuck Mary in her ass’
‘We go skate, rape sluts, and eat donuts from Randy’s’
‘Sent to earth to poke Catholics in ass with swords/and knock blood ashes into their caskets and laugh it off’
You get the picture…violent lyrics are nothing new (Eminem? Although I would be the wrong person to write about rap!), but these guys seem to go a little further with their fantasies about rape, sexual violence, homophobia, and misogyny. However, the imagery is so spectacular and surrealist that only Tipper Gore’s committee (does it still exist anyway?) would take them seriously.
Lyrics are describing pure evil actions and are adored by fans and critics. I am not saying that these kids are out there committing rape and murder, certainly not, but why are we fascinated with that kind of stuff? It’s certainly difficult to understand … Do we want secretly to commit all these crimes and rapes? Does our mind secretly harbor these awful and disgusting thoughts? Is it the thrill of danger and horror images running in our head when listening to this kind of stuff? After all, horror movies are adored, but this is a little bit different, in most horror movies the evil character loses and the good guy generally kills it. There is something different going on there, a perverse pleasure, a weird projection, a release of some non-admitted internal violence.
It’s understandable, we repressed these immoral actions all the time (except if we are psychopaths), it’s an incessant internal censorship to be able to live in a society, because we are moral and social animals, and we are wired that way. But the impulses are still there, and the chimpanzees in us would certainly like to beat up the cop who is giving us a ticket or to slaughter the guy who is stealing our girlfriend. I heard once a primatologist said that, if New York was populated by millions of chimpanzees instead of humans, it would be a constant blood bath.
By listening to OFWGKTA’s lyrics, people experience the socially forbidden response, but without acting on it,… in this may actually be a very healthy thing.