In fact, Odd Future has stupidly used the swastika in some distasteful merchandise before. Without the politics to make it a truly radical statement, something as vitriolic as a swastika was reduced to another purposeless, toxic way to seem edgy, like smoking cigarettes to piss off your parents. Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McClaren often used Nazi symbols in their Sex Pistols-era Seditionaries clothing, which they sold to London punks in their boutique, but it always felt a little empty-shock without substance. There is a heritage of punks (and Tyler is nothing if not a punk) appropriating oppressive symbols. How he’s selling it on his Tumblr might be convoluted, but I’m sold. This made the photo even more important to me, because it was me playing with the idea of taking the power out of something so stupid." Tyler is taking symbols that oppress him as a black man, and using them to empathize with gay men. The thing that tops it off is the homo erotic tone of the hand holding, which to some degree HAS to piss off the guys who takes this logo serious. and take a photo with a white guy in it and we have an amazing photo. In the blog post accompanying the photo, he writes : "Throw a little rainbow in the logo. Though I’ve never cared much for him and his music, partially for his past offensiveness, when I saw this shirt, my reaction was instant: I wanted it. It’s a juvenile spin, the type he usually makes brattily, but it’s genuine in a way he’s not been before. That’s the sole privilege of gay men and women who have had to endure its unruly wrath for far too long.īut then here he is today, posting a photo on Tumblr of him holding hands with another man, looking like a goon, wearing a twisted new piece of Odd Future merchandise that reimagines a white supremacist insignia emblazoned with the rainbow colors of a pride flag. Tyler does not get to decide where, when, and how that term gets used. He’s always passionately claimed he doesn’t dislike gay people, arguing instead that that term is "just a word," and that his overuse dilutes its hateful power. You have to work hard to use a word so much. With 15 tracks, that’s an average of 14.2 times per song. In 2011, the LA rapper and Odd Future figurehead used the word "faggot" a total of 213 times on his debut album Goblin.
Tyler, The Creator has long had to defend himself against charges of homophobia.