Hey everyone, Anthony Fantano here, the internet's busiest music nerd. I hope you are doing well, and today I'm coming on to reiterate a take that I threw out randomly onto the internet recently. It has turned some heads and caused some discourse:

This feels sad and weird to say, but I do wholeheartedly believe this ["not sure if Tyler, The Creator would make it today..."]. I feel like if Tyler, The Creator, were getting started now, like, "Yonkers" music video dropping today, I don't think he would catch on. I think the current underground would just flush him down the toilet.

So I thought, what better excuse than to come on here and sort of like, flesh this thought out a little bit more. And it has to do with Tyler, the Creator, someone who undeniably over the past 10+ years has undergone a lot of personal and artistic growth, has found fandom among a pretty broad stroke of people, achieved achieved true mainstream success and is really starting to solidify a legacy that is going to be remembered in popular music for quite a long time, even if there is a very wide array of opinions that listeners seem to have on different eras of his music, which I think is a mark of him being a truly interesting and envelope-pushing artist, as he does tend to sort of reinvent himself with each new album cycle.

But as interesting and as inspiring as it is to see Tyler continue to see success and make his success in his own way, I can't help but feel like a massive portion of the underground, which he should absolutely be like a leader for. Like, if you're an underground artist, underground music fan, Tyler is absolutely a person who you should be looking up to, even if you're not crazy about his sound, because he came up in the industry in a way that was sort of cutting edge and unorthodox for its time.

Got a lot of pushback from the established rap blogs out there who didn't really see any merit to what he and Odd Future were doing early on, continued to define his own path and evolve on his own terms, and ended up creating an original platform style that fosters the kind of audience and level of independence I feel like most artists should be hungry to achieve.

But despite the fact that his success has very much like illustrated a pathway forward to, again, creative and personal independence, I can't help but notice that a great deal of the underground is being completely swallowed up by rage and anything that's been kind of spinning off of that trend.

But it's not so much the sound of this style or trend in music that I find annoying, because I mean, for sure, the distortion, the noisiness, the harshness, the experimentation of some of this production can be pretty cool. It's not that that bugs me as much as this really rigid adherence to a certain sort of nonchalant behavioral code where artists are expected to act like these completely detached aura farming lit 24/7 nihilists, where you get called out for making burger music when you come across like a normal person with stable emotions and you share them in your music like SLAYR.

Interviewer: What was the last thing that bothered you?

SLAYR: My TikTok comments.

What did the TikTok comments say?

SLAYR: 'Burger'

And it's this observation that's made me realize if Tyler, the Creator dropped "Yonkers," the music video, the single today in 2026, I feel like not only would that shit not take off, but the young audience that song was intended to appeal to would openly reject it for saying too much, for trying too hard, for not conforming to whatever prevailing trends are out there currently, and for being performative or some bullshit like that, as if performing isn't the job of a performing artist.

And look, as clued in as I am to most popular music trends, I'm not enough of a social anthropologist to be able to exactly pinpoint where the source of this antagonism toward emotion and expression and feeling and individuality in music— I don't know where it's coming from. But I gotta say, honestly, it's just about one of the worst trends we have seen so far this decade.

I mean, it's not so massive of a force that it's like overtaking all genres of music or really even one single genre. I voice concern mostly because I feel like it's consistently attached to a segment of the underground music scene.

And historically, at least for me, the underground has always been about being able to express yourself in ways that are not allowed in the mainstream, not allowed in more, you know, commercial music circles, more corporate music circles.

I'm just saying the underground is usually a place for alternative forms and expressions within art to go to thrive, to grow, a place where you can safely road test things that aren't allowed anywhere else. But now in 2026, it feels like we're entering a dynamic where the more expressive you are in your art, the more likely it is that people are going to see you as cringe.

2hollis: What's my- what's our message to the youth? Don't give a fuck, but give a fuck. It's hard to explain. Like, don't care what people think, but work hard. Try. Everyone wants to be so- so nonchalant and like effortless. And I think people need to try. It's try, go as hard as you fucking can, be unashamed, you know.

And while sure, I understand maybe those feelings might be driven by the fear of being perceived, that's been forced upon all of us because of the way the internet works now and the toxic, low-key surveillance state social media has ushered in. But rather than rejecting that feeling or finding a way around it, I think the arts community and music fans are sort of just accepting it and living with it and allowing it to mutate their music taste in some pretty horrendous ways.

Because look, I'm very much down for aggressive music, distorted music, rebellious music, angry music. But honestly, without an ethos or an awareness of what this trend is rebelling against in music or the world broadly, it just kind of seems like a direction or a change or a movement without a cause.

And look, it's one thing to make art for art's sake. There's nothing inherently wrong with that. But to police and frame as 'lame' the act of being expressive and sharing your feelings in art itself, that seems kind of like- what? If we're not trying to share human emotions, why are we making art in the first place?

I mean, I know why for a lot of these underground artists it seems like they're only doing what they're doing to look cool, but I don't know, in my eyes that's a pretty lame and short-sighted goal, not to mention makes you more performative than anybody who you're accusing of making burger music or whatever.

But yeah, I know this take might be kind of obvious at the end of the day because I know that certain things catch on during the times that they do because, you know, they sort of like answer a conscious or unconscious hunger that the audience has. So yeah, maybe Tyler, the Creator wouldn't make it in 2026. Maybe he wouldn't make it in 2036 — And you could say the same for a lot of different artists.

But the reason I brought this up is that I feel like the reason he wouldn't take off is because he would be too expressive, too creative, too willing to try something different. And for whatever reason, it seems like underground music, specifically underground rap right now, is demanding artists avoid that at all costs.

I don't know. That's my thought. Let me know yours in the comments. I'm sure you will.

Anthony Fantano, Tyler, the Creator. Forever.

Interviewer: Is there anything that you want to vent to me about?

SLAYR: Internet's mean as fuck. That's really it.