🌵I Got the Moves Like Jagger
The carpet moves. The carpeted floor begins to move as if on a treadmill beneath Tyler's feet in Stop Playing With Me, and suddenly we're not watching a music video anymore—we're witnessing the tectonic shift of an artist who once fed us ear worms wrapped in barbed wire, now serving us body movement on a silver platter that might be plastic. Or chrome. Does it matter?
"If you do, do yourself..." The sentence hangs in the air like smoke from a gas station coffee pot, incomplete and somehow more truthful for its fractured state. Tyler, The Creator has always been the master of the unfinished thought, the provocateur who leaves you guessing whether you've been blessed or cursed. In his self-directed video, Tyler pays homage to 80's hip hop donning vintage gear and performing inside a room with gigantic speakers, wearing a retro number with a new mustache and chunky glasses—perhaps, intentionally goofy.
The transformation is happening in real-time, frame by frame, like watching someone shed their skin on Instagram Live. From Goblin's shock therapy sessions to this week's, July 21, 2025, album drop that nobody saw coming, Tyler has been playing a long game that we're only now beginning to understand. DON'T TAP THE GLASS is a 10-track project Tyler says is "MADE FOR BODY MOVEMENT," basically, it's music to dance to. No alter egos, no skits, just Tyler making energetic, groove-heavy tracks.
But let's talk about the ghosts in the room—his peers, the ones who orbited the same collision course between art and commerce. As the leader of the Odd Future collective that once included Frank Ocean, Earl Sweatshirt, Domo Genesis, Casey Veggies, Syd, and Vince Staples, Tyler created a West Coast empire like a modern day Dr. Dre. Frank Ocean disappeared into the horizon of high art commercial success, becoming untouchable, ethereal—a pop icon selling his own line of jewelry, Homer. Vince Staples carved out his own lane of deadpan commentary, never quite crossing into full pop territory but dancing around its edges with the grace of a boxer dodging punches.
Tyler's journey feels different. More deliberate. More... dangerous?
The LeBron James cameo isn't accidental. Neither is Clipse's presence. These aren't shock value additions—they're chess pieces in a game where the board keeps shifting. When you're Tyler, The Creator, every collaboration is a statement, every mustache a manifesto. The question isn't whether he'll transition from shock artist to pop icon—the question is whether we'll recognize the transition when it's complete, or if we'll still be looking for the punchline while he's already moved three steps ahead.
The stranger at the rural gas station always gets to use the phone, doesn't he? The unexpected kindness of it, the way trust blooms in the most unlikely soil. Tyler's evolution feels similar—surprising in its warmth, disarming in its sincerity, yet somehow still carrying that undercurrent of what if this is all an elaborate joke?
The 34-year-old rapper shared a music video with cameo appearances from LeBron James, Maverick Carter, and Clipse, and there's something beautifully unhinged about the casualness of it all. No grand announcements, no rollout strategy that music industry consultants would recognize. Just Tyler, doing Tyler things, while the carpet moves beneath his feet and we try to keep up.
The dance floor beckons. The glass remains smudged. And somewhere in that space between shock and accessibility, Tyler, The Creator continues to redefine what it means to evolve without losing your essential weirdness.
Will they survive to dance another day?
With Tyler, survival has never been the question. It's always been about the quality of the dance.
