Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All’s (hereafter Odd Future) last stop on their three stop American tour was at Slim’s in San Francisco. The show was completely sold out days before, a line around the block testifying to their status as buzz band, perhaps buoyed by the indelible performance of their two most well-known members (Tyler the Creator and HodgyBeats) on the Jimmy Fallon show a week prior. By the time I arrived, the mixture of hipster bandwagon jumpers (I don’t mean this as a pejorative, I had only heard of them two weeks prior, myself) and hip-hop true believers was actively waiting. There was a heightened sense of anticipation surrounding the show that went beyond people shouting Odd Future’s dada/cultic catchphrases. Odd Future is in the strange position of having a reputation surrounding their live shows without having much history, and this lent itself to the tension outside the venue – nobody quite knew what to expect, exactly.
This tension was tamped down slightly when Syd the Kid (Odd Future’s DJ and token female) started her opening DJ set. Here were recognizable and conventional touchstones – Kanye, Waka Flocka Flame, even Gwen Stefani. But still, even as she wordlessly hyped the crowd, there was a bit of impatience with the entire ceremony of having an “opening act”. We knew what we were here for, and it wasn’t Soulja Boy. The first hint of Odd Future was an unrecognizable voice on an off-stage mic shouting, first chanting and freestyling over a track that Syd was playing, then someone that recognizably was Tyler the Creator yelling insults at the crowd, who responded with cheers. After a brief pause following the insults, Syd dropped the beat for “Sandwitches”, which was promptly cut off by an angry Tyler snarling profanely at the sound man to turn it up. An unfazed soundman adjusted some the levels and gave Syd the thumbs up.
The beat started up again, much louder. And it was like a typhoon hit the room. Tyler and Hodgy started rapping the first verse off-stage, then swirled on to the stage, ski-masks and all. The crush of bodies in the audience turned into a frenzied, roiling mosh pit, as it would remain for the rest of the night. Tyler promptly tore off the mask and took his first stage dive, leading the crowd in the chant of “Wolf Gang” that constitutes the song’s chorus while crowd-surfing on his back, hopping back on stage to climb onto a 6-foot speaker on the side of the stage and rap from atop it. ”Holy crap”, I remember thinking, as Tyler flew around the stage, “how are they going to top this?” It already felt like the climax of the show, and the first song wasn’t even over yet. The answer, it turns out, is that you don’t try to go higher, but step sideways. The song ended, and Tyler left the stage, leaving MellowHype (the duo comprised of Hodgy Beats and a producer, Left Brain) to do a set of their slightly (and I do mean slightly) more subdued material. The energy didn’t exactly leave the room, but all of a sudden it felt more like a normal hip hop show again, albeit with a couple dozen more than the usual number of stage dives, and a crowd more interested in surging and moshing than waving to the beat.
I don’t want to oversell it, but from where I was standing, the crowd was frenzied. I destroyed a pair of pants trying to keep my balance as the crowd surged back and forth, ripping the seam halfway up my leg. A couple of people had to be led to the back after they nearly collapsed from the heat and crush of people in front, and I had to physically rescue a huge white guy who had fallen over. The crowd, while it was usually good about trying not to hurt people, hadn’t noticed him fall, since two members of Odd Future had done stage dives right next to him at the same time he fell over.
There are something like 10 MCs and producers in Odd Future, and they all got their turn in the spotlight, but Tyler the Creator is a force of nature. He might not be the best lyricist of the bunch, but he has a magnetic charisma unmatched by anyone else in the group. At first I thought the show was more energized when he was on stage because the crowd was more familiar with his material, but I realized that that wasn’t it. Just his presence on stage took the mood from calm to dangerous, whether he had a mic in his hand or not. His onstage banter was all over the place; lamenting the absence of Earl Sweatshirt (who is either in prison, at boarding school, or on vacation); berating the “old white people at the back” with profanities for standing still; proclaiming his love of moshpits. There was a moment near the middle of the show when someone at the front of the stage said that Tyler had accidentally punched him in the eye during one of his stage dives. “I punched you in the eye?,” Tyler responded with a little bit of I’ll-give-you-something-to-cry-about menace. He paused, then smiled broadly. “Swag,” he said, and dapped up the kids hand. Right now, it’s him that elevates Odd Future to more than just an innovative troupe of disturbed, precocious teenagers.
The music itself? I mean, there are lots of other places where you can read about the mix of violence, humor, nihilism, and submerged pain that constitutes their lyrics, and the eclectic, sometimes harsh DIY beats that they rap over. Hip hop concerts are generally not (Soul Junk aside), where the music gets reinterpreted, and that was the case here, too. The music was the same as their records, except much louder, much more energized, and much less intelligible. It’s true that their sound on record is completely orthogonal to the current hip hop landscape, but it’s at the live show itself that you feel that disconnect in fullness, the punk (yes, punk) ethos that their music embodies. Questlove compared their energy to Bad Brains circa 1979, and that’s not that far off of a comparison.
If the music holds up, and there’s not a whole lot of reason to think that it won’t, given the surplus of talent in Odd Future, I think the primary challenge for them (other than severe head trauma to Hodgy Beats – that guy’s stage dives make you worried for his safety. He doesn’t even put his hands out, practically daring the crowd to drop him) will be maintaining balance in the group. For as much as they remind some people of Wu-Tang early in their career, I think the more apt comparison is to the UK grime collective Roll Deep right before Dizzee released Boy in Da Corner on XL: a large crew of talented MCs, with one larger-than-life personality that overwhelmed the rest of them. It wasn’t tenable, and Dizzee left Roll Deep before his sophomore album. Tyler overshadows the rest of the crew, maybe not with his talent, but with his personality, and that’s at least part of the reason for his one album signing with the very same XL. The kids in this group (all of the members are between 17 and 20) are all happy now, caught up in the glow of their unexpected fame, but I don’t think they’re going to be contented with being backseat to Tyler forever. They need Earl Sweatshirt back, not only for his lyrical talent, but to balance out the group a little bit.
But for now, they’re good. After the last song, as one of the members gathered up his stuff, he picked up a mic and said “F*ck Odd Future”, grinned at the crowd, then left the stage as they started chanting “Wolf Gang”. Tyler, from a mic off-stage, said “Keep saying that. Never stop saying that.” Then the head for Giant Steps dropped, and I was off into the night, a baseball cap lighter.
