Everybody has been talking about it these last days, Frank Ocean's coming out, and now Tyler the Creator is speaking out, saying, as expected, he had known about his friend’s sexuality for a long time. He tweeted the following shortly after:
‘My Big Brother Finally Fucking Did That. Proud Of That Nigga Cause I Know That Shit Is Difficult Or Whatever. Anyway. I'm A Toilet.’
And he wrote this through a social media website called Formspring:
‘hahaha yeah, ive know for a while, he told me a long time ago. it was just funny cause i was getting bashed as a homophobe or whatever and i kept saying dude how am i one? i have gay friends like what the fuck leave me alone haha. yeah thats my nigga tho, shit is hard for him but he did that.’
He is right, all this bashing doesn’t make sense, and what we had thought is true, he had known about his friend’s homosexuality for a long time and you know what? People take lyrics way too seriously! I remember watching an interview of Tyler and he was saying his songs were like movies, stories and after all not a big deal! Tyler was cleverly comparing his songs to Quentin Tarantino’s movies where, well, violence prevails…
I totally agree, people can accept to watch anything on the small and big screen, murders, rapes, bodies cut out in pieces, people accept to follow stories about psychopathic, homophobic or racist characters and when it is in a song, they have a problem?
This made me realize one thing, if movies are mostly images and rap songs mostly words, would that mean that words make a bigger impression than images on our collective imagination? I would have to believe so, otherwise Tyler would never have had a problem with his homophobic lyrics,… language is definitively the new frontier.