is your main thing the main thing?
on coca-cola vs. pepsi, Tyler the Creator, cancel culture, Dave Chappelle, confidence
You know, it seems rarer and rarer now for an artist to have actual swagger, to be a bit larger than life. Instead, everyone’s so small and relatable, playing the role of the good professional, not taking up too much space, protecting their brand, repeating the right opinions, following all the rules. I’m generalizing, but I suspect you recognize what I’m getting at.
It’s why I find an artist like the rapper and multihyphenate Tyler, the Creator so refreshing. He isn’t afraid to make his own way. Here he is on “RUNITUP,” a song from his 2021 record Call Me If You Get Lost:
I always had confidence, I ain't never been nervous, I ain't never had anxiety, I ain't never second-guessed myself
If I want it, I go get it
I'm always on go mode, I just go
I don't know what fear is
When they talk about, "That n****,” I'm him, I'm him, I'm that n***
Tyler’s a rare breed in that, he’s big and well-respected within music circles, selling platinum records and all that, but works relatively outside the mainstream. It wasn’t always like that. At first, with his rap collective Odd Future, he courted controversy, had protestors at his shows, was “canceled before canceled was with Twitter fingers,” as he raps on “Manifesto.” He was banned from the UK, Australia, and New Zealand because, to those governments, his lyrics were racist, homophobic, and had the power to incite violence (he’s since come out about his attraction to men, rapping in one song, “I’ve been kissing white boys since 2004,” opining for Cole Sprouse and Leo DiCaprio in another).
He was, in short, a troll, an anarchist, a teenage boy with a vulgar, offensive teenage boy sense of humor willing to say or do anything for attention. This was in the 2009-2011 range, when you could still get away with edgy satire like that. Cancel culture won’t allow that today. In fact, you still might find articles or posts resurfacing his old comments and lyrics, a fact that Tyler has pushed back against in interviews, asking “What is the end goal?” for cancel culture.
“Is the goal, you should change, you should be a better person? Because I’ve been a better person for the last nine years. That was 10 years ago. I’m not on that no more. But I think people say that to feel better about themselves. […]
I also think some people don’t care. It just gives people some shit to do on their lunch break, or sitting on the subway, just waiting. I think some people genuinely don’t care about the things they’re complaining about.”
It’s an interesting point. The best thing about the internet is it gives you access to people you’d never have known otherwise. But that’s also the worst thing about the internet, too, because the opposite is just as true. The internet gives people who’d never known you otherwise access to you.
It makes you reconsider what parts of you that you put out on the internet. Because whether we like it or not, if we’re on social media, we all have a public version of our selves now. And that public self, if we’re not careful, can run away from us, be misinterpreted and misconstrued into someone we don’t recognize.
This was a lesson Tyler learned the hard way when, in 2015, he ran into a fan.
“Some guy walks up and says, ‘Hey, you’re the guy from MTV’s Ridiculousness, that show’s hilarious.’ And I realized, Oh, I’m not known for my music. Oh, my antics overshadowed this skill I naturally have.
I love music too much and I put that first in my real life. When I realized I wasn’t seen as a musician or an artist or how I thought I was, I went, uh-uh, let’s hit the breaks real quick. ”
Tyler deleted his Vine, deleted all the funny videos off his Instagram, and decided he wouldn’t be funny in public for a year and a half. If he made any public appearances, he would only talk about music. It reminds me of that Steven Covey line: “The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.”
But that’s easier said than done. Because sometimes you don’t even know what your main thing is. Because there’s so many distractions, so many other desires leading you astray, so many people influencing you, trying to make their main thing your main thing. And as Tyler said, some of the loudest voices telling you what you should do, in reality, don’t actually care. Or as Steve Jobs once said, “People don't know what they want until you show it to them.”
It’s important to ask yourself why someone is telling you to like a certain thing, or do it a certain way, or voice a certain opinion. Because the incentive might not be as pure as you think. Coca-Cola and Pepsi are the same thing, Dave Chappelle once joked, but whichever one tasted the best was the one that was paying him the most at the time.
Ultimately, you have to know what you’re doing all this for, who is worth listening to, what you should be focusing on. Because if you don’t, and you’re not careful, the world will decide for you.