What does ofwgkta really stand for

Country music has listeners still eager to buy CDs, and indie rock has bands willing to think of themselves as online startups and supporters willing to go along ; hip-hop is stranded somewhere in between.

Fans gorge themselves on free online mixtapes, which are often more vibrant than the albums they ostensibly promote. At the same time, even established acts find themselves hard at work in the old industry, chasing terrestrial radio airplay and night-club spins in pursuit of a diminishing customer base. For the members of Odd Future, hip-hop looks less like a road to financial salvation and more like a playground, full of rusty old attractions and rickety new ones; its dilapidated condition only offers more opportunities for mischief.

One night, Tyler was discussing an emerging hip-hop star who had recently spent sixty thousand dollars on a chain. Odd Future was a social club before it was a hip-hop collective, and the members maintained their recreational approach even as they got more serious about music. They started putting together albums long before they had a clear idea how, exactly, to make this activity profitable.

After school and on weekends, they got together to make beats and record their raps, often at a place they call the trap. Taco and Syd the Kyd live with their parents in the elegant house the garage belongs to. Over a selection of famous and obscure hip-hop beats borrowed—or, if you like, stolen—from established acts, the members introduce themselves.

Earl Sweatshirt begins one track by sneaking some autobiography into his wordplay:. Fans looking to defuse lyrics like these have sometimes pointed out that the group includes one lesbian, Syd the Kyd. Neither does the word nigger. I got over that long ago. Although all the members of Odd Future are African-American, their music, especially the raps of Tyler, the Creator and Earl Sweatshirt, sometimes recalls that of the Beastie Boys and Eminem, white rappers who used exaggerated truculence, early in their careers, to prove that they belonged.

They won acceptance from black listeners and adoration from white ones. Odd Future, too, seems to attract a largely white audience, which is by no means unusual or irremediable but which remains a sensitive subject.

Tyler once answered a question on this topic with a mixture of pride and resignation. Tyler is more than six feet tall, with a deep, resonant voice, but he moves with the sprightliness of a little kid, pausing for the occasional coughing fit brought on by asthma. He favors bright-colored Vans, slim-fitting shorts, and white tube socks, which he pulls up almost to his knees.

He hates being bored, and he has developed two strategies for keeping boredom at bay: either he entertains the people around him, thereby alleviating his misery, or he torments them, thereby sharing it.

On a recent afternoon, he and the others were summoned to a local park to be photographed by the Los Angeles Times , and, once the shoot was over, Tyler found himself perilously underoccupied. Maybe I am! An older white man shuffled past with his family, dragging a bag on wheels. The man stopped, turned, and stared. A friend arrived with a car and a video camera; the group was gathering material for a proposed show on Adult Swim, on the Cartoon Network.

One idea was to have Tyler drive while Jasper, on his skateboard, held on to the passenger-side window and got pulled along. Tyler started slowly, but then turned onto a side street and accelerated, and so did Jasper—who then swiftly decelerated in a pile of trash bags. Tyler pulled over and got out of the car. He spied a man in basketball shorts and a sweatshirt. The man looked down, realized this was a prank, and looked up at Tyler, registering the face and the famous tube socks.

For a brief, rare moment, Tyler was speechless. As a boy, Tyler was distractible but precocious. He got a copy of Reason, a music-production program, when he was twelve, and started teaching himself the piano when he was thirteen. Tyler was recently signed by XL Records , which is incredible, because they're an obscure rap group plucked from said obscurity by legions of music critics — Tyler's first mixtape, the self-released Bastard , ended up on many year-end lists.

And yet, they routinely go after all critics, even those who adore them. Most of their music is available for free at their blog. But really, what the fk is the big deal about Odd Future? They make their own beats: no samples. They are young and prodigal. They are anarchists — smart, and catchy ones. Who the fk is talking about Odd Future? The Roots' drummer and ringleader Questlove supposedly helped get them booked for Fallon after hearing about them from Mos Def, who was in the house at both of their two shows in New York City.

Everyone in rap is excited about them right now. As the group coalesced in the late s, they realized something that no one else at that time did: disparate musical styles and identity politics could and would all exist within the same dialogue. Each member represented a distinct aesthetic and experience that both challenged shallow societal representations of blackness and strengthened their collective force.

There was Tyler and his baritone growl, the visionary who saw the world through tie-dye pastels and brash, shapeshifting music that rejected couth in its raw expression. Later, there was the lyrical virtuoso Earl Sweatshirt, with his propensity for melding syllables into stream-of-thought confessionals. Back then, artists like Kid Cudi and Drake were also actively laying the groundwork for what popular rap would ultimately become. There was something fundamentally off about the Odd Future way of making music, how for so many it was repulsive and magnetic all at once.

A trail of thinkpieces and hand-wringing followed their irreverent destruction of respectability and conventionalism. For all of their prescience and ambition, the mentality that allowed Tyler and his cohorts their unruly creativity was also ill-informed from the start.

An icky sense of elitism and essentialism showed up time and time again when Tyler explained his motivations. Has rapped and produced on nearly every OF release. One half of EarlWolf with Earl. Earl Sweatshirt - 17 year old rapper who is falsely portrayed to be Tyler's younger brother.

He's been MIA; according to Complex he's been sent away to a reform camp in Samoa by his mother as she disapproved of his antics with the group.

Domo Genesis - Rapper. A lesbian, and the only female, her house is where the group records their music. Older sister of fellow group member Taco.