Tyler, The Creator

A Cockroach and a Cheap Camera

Eating a live cockroach in front of a cheap camera doesn't cost much. In 2011, Tyler Gregory Okonma did it in the music video for Yonkers: he threw up in front of the lens and hung a noose from the ceiling. That black-and-white clip racked up millions of views within weeks, with no record label in the middle.

Behind the teenage rowdiness was a meticulous control of framing. At sixteen, he founded the Odd Future collective and immediately realized that music alone wasn't enough to explain his obsessions. He recorded on mid-range SLR cameras, edited late at night, and signed his edits with the pseudonym Wolf Haley.

Nobody taught him how to frame a shot.

He learned by copying the gritty energy of Harmony Korine and the symmetry of Wes Anderson, while producing albums like Bastard in 2009 and Goblin in 2011 from a bedroom in Ladera Heights. The group's aesthetic was not a youthful whim but a calculated design meant to rattle the purists of commercial hip hop.

The Cake Replaces the Vomit

In 2017, he released Flower Boy, shelved the dark lyrics, and rebuilt his sound with jazz progressions and clean neo-soul chords. His videos dropped the street roughness to fill up with vintage cars, sunflower fields, and a tangerine color palette that baffled his early fans.

Two years later, he presented IGOR wearing an aquamarine suit, a bowl-cut blond wig, and dark sunglasses. The album earned him his first Grammy for Best Rap Album after competing against the major hitmaking machines of the American music industry.

For the concerts, he designed a staging where every step followed a strict theatrical score. Because the character no longer rapped into the microphone from a defensive pose. He acted.

And the critics had to swallow it.

In 2021, he released Call Me If You Get Lost, conceived as a travel diary shot on 16mm film. He hired cinematographer Luis Pérez to shoot with 416 ARRI cameras and 1960s Zeiss lenses, obsessed with capturing the grainy texture of classic European cinema.

New York Cinema and an Obsession with Technique

That fascination with cinematic storytelling eventually caught the attention of independent studios. In 2024, he shot his acting debut in New York in the film Marty Supreme, directed by Josh Safdie and co-starring Timothée Chalamet. For this project, he set aside his stage names and signed directly under his birth name, Tyler Okonma.

So while he was shooting scenes set in the underground ping-pong scene of the 1950s, he prepared the release of Chromakopia, published in late 2024. He designed military-inspired uniforms, olive-green latex masks, and a spare staging where every shot depended on sketches he drew by hand.

GOLF WANG and Golf le FLEUR*, his two trademarks, generate tens of millions of dollars selling handmade suitcases made in Great Britain and lotions in custom packaging. Yet their production routine remains firmly based in Los Angeles.

During post-production on his pieces, he rejects any automated digital color correction and personally supervises every cut at 24 frames per second.