Willie, Tyler, and The Promise of the Real

Recently, my friend Mary and I agreed to become the new editor and associate editor of the IASPM journal – the International Association of the Study of Popular Music – and practically our first move in our new role was to become the only two people on earth to have seen shows by Tyler, the Creator and Willie Nelson in the same 24 hour period.  At 9:30 pm, just as Willie was leaving the stage of Frost Amphitheater in Palo Alto, we noted to one another that Tyler was just about to take the stage in the nearby town of Fresno. At that moment, it felt like the two of us had our finger on the pulse not just of the Bay Area, but of the entire world of popular music.

Willie and Lukas Nelson

Of course ‘the world of popular music’ is a large and variegated place. But if there is a spectrum, then Tyler and Willie stand on the exact furthest ends of it. On our left, we have a 28 year old rap star who’s rise to fame rests on the following key points: member of a talented and forward-thinking rap collective whose music eschews normal musical pathways and is disseminated on platforms like soundcloud and YouTube; owner of a trendy clothing brand called Golf, a conflicted relationship to his own homosexuality, and a guy who assumes a bizarre persona by wearing a blond wig as a nod to Andy Warhol. Or maybe Sia. Or maybe Donald Trump. On our right, we have an 86-year old country star with a vast catalog of songs centered on male dominance and heteronormative love whose career has spanned the entire media history of the 20^th century. And who, incidentally, may also be wearing a wig – or a hairpiece, in the form of two long hippie braids.



 But maybe there is more in common than the wigs. In my course on race and ethnicity I sometimes teach a unit on ‘why country music sounds white.’ The argument is that country music isn’t naturally a white idiom, but that it calls out to white audiences because both its musical tropes (old timey, acoustic instruments, drawl, twang and 4/4 time) and its lyrical ones (patriotism, Christianity, alcohol, dogs, trucks, trains, and death) deify the values of the past. That is, they romanticize a past where being conventional white and male is natural, powerful, and right. People are often sad in country songs, but only because things were better ‘back then.’

By contrast, rap music sees the past as a place of pain and devastation: rappers tend to write more about the future as a place where the songwriter will achieve success, revenge, or happiness – and they often do that by depicting themselves as standing outside of society, as a lawbreaker. Rap music also sonically transforms old instruments and makes them sound new: technology is its ally, not its downfall. In that sense, the two genres are opposites, but they also have commonalities; in many ways they are in some ways two sides of the same coin. As Joshua Clover, writing about Lil Nas X’s astonishingly big hit “Old Town Road” in Commune magazine recently, put it:



Country and hip-hop are the last two indigenously American genres standing. No cultural tradition is purely indigenous, and elements of each can be traced back to Africa, to Scotland, to the Caribbean, and so on, but the claim is clear enough. The syntheses happened in the United States, and both genres in different ways signify “America.” Not only do they retain their vitality, they have for some time existed in parallel, best enemies buoyed and constrained by authenticity, selling in similar volume and, most importantly, retaining the kind of committed audiences that have allowed them to weather the digital storms and market restructurings—not unaffected, not unchanged, but more or less intact.



Nelson features prominently in the recent 8 episode documentary by Ken Burns entitled “Country Music,” which traces the history of the genre from the turn of the century onward, from its roots in  hillbilly and folk music and its prominence on radio stations in the 30s and 40s, to its heyday on television, on records, and in Nashville and beyond. As the documentary makes clear, Willie Nelson’s oeuvre is predicated on authenticity and musicality, and at Frost both these aspects of his work were completely evident. His voice sounded great and his band was the apex of pristine musicality. Because of his age his set was, inevitably, a little on the short side, augmented by a lengthy set from his son’s band, The Promise of the Real. Everything you need to know about that band is embedded in its name, which is akin the President’s wretched promise to build a wall on the Mexican border, or Andrew Yang’s to give everyone a thousand bucks a month. It’s a promise, not a commitment, and it’s especially weird coming from the mouth of the son of someone who is, without a doubt, “The Real.”

Tyler the Creator

By contrast, Tyler, the Creator doesn’t even promise. He is deliberately, maybe even ideologically, anti-authenticity. Instead of the ‘real’, he depicts himself as a chimera, a trickster, brand, and a persona. Tyler’s music isn’t played on any radio station, but he is an incredible success: in San Francisco, he sold out two nights at the 9000 seat Bill Graham Civic; prior to the show they had set up merch stands in Civic Center Plaza and were doing a brisk business in deliberately hideous $60 Golf t shirts and replica blond wigs.  Musicianship is not a big feature of his performance, though he did play piano at one point. His show consisted of him alone on stage singing, and sometimes, not even singing, along to recordings. At both shows, Willie’s and Tyler’s, the audience sang along to all the music. But at Nelson’s show, the audience sang on top of his voice, while at Tyler’s show, the audience’s singing was often the entire vocal track, replacing him as singer. In this way, the artist and the audience became co-creators – and co-consumers. And while I think this is partly the point of Tyler, the Creator, and I understand that it is how contemporary popular music works, I wasn’t that into it. I did like a few songs, like “Earfquake.” But nothing really stood out to me. The next day I asked one of my students what he loves about Tyler so much and all he could state was that he’d seen him six times, the first time at Coachella.

This isn’t meant as a dis of my student, or of Tyler. It just struck me that its harder to write, or think, about music today than it was in mine. I’d have had a hard time reviewing that show, beyond saying the names of the songs (which, unlike in my day, I can easily find out on Songkick). That’s probably why there isn’t really a job like the one I used to do now – no one reviews live shows anymore, and maybe no one should. If you want to know what happened at Tyler, The Creator’s show – or at Willie Nelson’s – you can go look it up on YouTube. As to the value of seeing both these artists on essentially the same day, all it did was remind me that the musical universe is wide and welcoming place.